The Dream Thieves

Ronan echoed, “Ley line surging. Right. Yeah, I’ll bet that’s it.”

All the whimsy of Dollar City was ruined. As Gansey led the way out, Noah said to Ronan, “I know why you’re mad.”

Ronan sneered at him, but his pulse heaved. “Tell me then, prophet.”

Noah said, “It’s not my job to tell other people’s secrets.”

10

I was thinking you could come with me,” Gansey said carefully, two hours later. He pressed the phone to his ear with one shoulder as he unrolled a massive scroll of paper across

the floor of Monmouth Manufacturing. The numerous low lamps through the room made an array of search lights across the paper. “To the party at my mom’s. There might be an internship in there, if you’re good at it.”

On the other end of the phone, Adam didn’t immediately reply. It was hard to say if he was thinking about it or being irritated about the suggestion.

Gansey kept unrolling the paper. It was a high-resolution print of the ley line as seen from a casually interested satellite. It had cost a fortune to get the images spliced and then printed in color, but it would all be worth it if he spotted some oddity. If nothing else, they could use it to track their exploration. Also, it was pretty.

From Ronan’s room, he heard Noah’s laugh. He and Ronan were throwing various objects from the second-story window to the parking lot below. There was a terrific crash.

Ronan’s voice rose, exasperated. “Not that one, Noah.”

“I’d have to see if I could get off work,” Adam replied. “I think I can. Do you think I should?”

Relieved, Gansey said, “Oh, yes.” He dragged his desk chair onto the corner of the print. It kept trying to roll back up on itself. He put a copy of Trioedd Ynys Prydein on the other corner. “Have you heard from Blue?” Adam asked.

“Tonight? She has work, doesn’t she?” Roll, roll, roll. He nudged it with his foot to keep it straight. It was surprisingly satisfying to see acres and acres of forest and mountains and rivers unrolling across his floorboards. If he were a god, he thought, this would be precisely how he’d create his new world. Unrolling it like carpet.

“Yeah. I just . . . has she ever said anything to you about me?”

“Like what?”

A long silence. “About kissing, I guess.”

Gansey paused in his rolling. As a point of fact, Blue had confessed a lot about kissing. Namely, that she’d been told her entire life that she’d kill her true love if she kissed him. It was strange to remember that moment. He’d doubted her, he recalled. He wouldn’t have now. Blue was a fanciful but sensible thing, like a platypus, or one of those sandwiches that had been cut into circles for a fancy tea party.

She’d also asked Gansey not to tell Adam about her confession.

“Kissing?” he repeated evasively. “What’s going on?”

Another crash from Ronan’s room, followed by diabolical laughter. Gansey wondered if he should stop them before vehicles with strobe lights did.

“I dunno. She doesn’t want to,” Adam said. “I don’t blame her, I guess. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Have you asked her why she doesn’t want to?” Gansey asked, though he didn’t want to hear the answer. He was abruptly tired of the conversation.

“She said she was very young.”

“She probably is.” Gansey had no idea how old Blue was. He knew she’d just finished eleventh grade. Maybe she was sixteen. Maybe she was eighteen. Maybe she was twenty-two and just very short and remedial.

“I dunno, Gansey. Does that sound like a real thing? You’ve dated way more than me.”

“I’m not dating now.”

“Except for Glendower.”

Gansey couldn’t argue that point. “Look, Adam, I don’t think it’s about you. I think she likes you fine.”

Adam clearly didn’t like this answer, though, because he didn’t reply. It gave Gansey enough time to remember the moment he’d first approached her at Nino’s on Adam’s behalf. How disastrous it had been. Since then, he’d considered a dozen different ways he could’ve done it better.

Which was foolish. It had all worked out, hadn’t it? She was with Adam now. Whether or not Gansey had made a first-class prat of himself the moment they met didn’t change anything.

“No way, man!” Noah shouted, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. His words were most of the way to a laugh already. “No way —”

Gansey kicked the rolled print hard enough that it teetered crookedly out to its end, yards away, out of the circles of light. Standing, he walked to the windows on the eastern wall of the factory. Leaning an elbow on the frame, he pressed his forehead against the glass, gaze on the great, black spread of Henrietta below.

Once, he had dreamt that he found Glendower. It wasn’t the actual finding, but the day after. He wouldn’t forget the sensation of the dream. It hadn’t been joy, but instead, the absence of pain. He couldn’t forget that lightness. The freedom.

“I don’t want things to get ugly,” Adam said finally.

“Are they ugly?”

“No. I guess not. But somehow they always seem to get that way.”

Gansey watched tiny car lights diminish as they left Henrietta, reminding him of his miniature version of the town. An early, illicit firework sprayed up in the foreground. “Well, she’s not really like a girl. I mean, sure she’s a girl. But it’s not like when I was dating someone. It’s Blue. You could just ask her. We see her every day. Do you want me to talk to her?”

This was something he definitely, 100 percent felt certain in his guts that he had no interest in doing.

“I’m really bad at talking, Gansey,” Adam said earnestly. “And you’re really good at it. Maybe — maybe if it just comes up natural?”

Gansey’s shoulders collapsed; his breath fogged the glass and vanished. “Of course.”

“Thanks.” Adam paused. “I just want something to be simple.”

So do I, Adam. So do I.

Ronan’s bedroom door burst open. Hanging on the door frame, Ronan leaned out to peer past Gansey. He was doing that thing where he looked like both the dangerous Ronan he was now and the cheerier Ronan he had been when Gansey had first met him. “Is Noah out here?”

“Hold on,” Gansey told Adam. Then, to Ronan: “Why would he be?”

“No reason. Just no reason.” Ronan slammed his door.

Gansey asked Adam, “Sorry. You still have that suit for the party?”

Adam’s response was buried in the sound of the second-story door falling open. Noah slouched in. In a wounded tone, he said, “He threw me out the window!”

Ronan’s voice sang out from behind his closed door. “You’re already dead!”

“What’s happening over there?” Adam asked.

Gansey eyed Noah. He didn’t look any worse for wear. “I have no idea. You should come over.”

“Not tonight,” replied Adam.

I’m losing him, Gansey thought. I’m losing him to Cabeswater. He had thought that by staying away from the forest, he’d keep the old Adam — put off the consequences of whatever had happened that night when everything started to go awry. But maybe it just didn’t matter. Cabeswater would take him regardless.

Gansey said, “Well. Just make sure you have a red tie.”

11

That night, Ronan dreamt of trees.

It was a massive old forest, oaks and sycamores pushing up through the cold mountain soil. Leaves skittered in the breeze. Ronan could feel the size of the mountain under his feet. The oldness of it. Far below there was a heartbeat that wrapped around the world, slower and stronger and more inexorable than Ronan’s own.

He had been here before, lots of times. He’d grown up with this recurring dream forest. Its roots were tangled in his veins.

The air moved around him, and in it, and he heard his name.

Ronan Lynch Ronan Lynch Ronan Lynch

There was no one there but Ronan, the trees, and the things the trees dreamt of.

He danced on the knife’s edge between awareness and sleep. When he dreamt like this, he was a king. The world was his to bend. His to burn.

Ronan Lynch, Greywaren, tu es Greywaren.

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. The word Greywaren made his skin prickle.

“Girl?” he said.

And there she was, peering cautiously from behind a tree. When Ronan had first dreamt of her, she’d had long, honeyblond hair, but after a few years it changed to a close-cropped pixie cut, mostly hidden by a white skull cap. Although he had aged, she had not. For some reason she reminded Ronan of the old black-and-white photos of laborers in New York City. She had the same sort of forlorn, orphan look. Her presence made it easier to pull things from his dreams.

He reached a hand toward her, but she didn’t immediately emerge. She peered around fearfully. Ronan couldn’t fault her. There were terrifying things in his head.

“Come on.” He didn’t yet know what he wanted to take from this dream, but he knew that he was so alive and aware in it that it would be easy. But Orphan Girl remained out of reach, her fingers clinging to the bark.

“Ronan, manus vestras!” she said. Ronan, your hands!

His skin shivered and crawled, and he realized it was crawling with hornets, the ones that had killed Gansey all those years ago. There weren’t many this time, only a few hundred. Sometimes he dreamt cars full of them, houses full of them, worlds full of them. Sometimes these hornets killed Ronan, too, in his dreams.

But not tonight. Not when he was the most poisonous thing in these trees. Not when his sleep was clay in his fingers.

They aren’t hornets, he thought.

And they weren’t. When he lifted his hands, his fingers were coated with crimson ladybugs, each as vivid as a blood drop. They whirled into the air with their acrid summer scent. Every wing was a buzzing voice in a simple language.

Orphan Girl, ever a coward, emerged only after they were gone. She and Ronan moved from one part of the forest to the next. She hummed a refrain of a pop song over and over again as the trees murmured overhead.

Ronan Lynch, loquere pro nobis.

Speak for us.

Suddenly, he faced a striated rock nearly as tall as he was. Thorns and berries grew at its base. It was familiar in a way that was too solid to be a dream, and Ronan felt a ripple of uncertainty. Was this a dream he was in now, or was it a memory? Was this really happening?

“You’re sleeping,” the girl reminded him in English.

He clung to her words, a king again. Facing the rock, he knew what he was meant to do — what he had already done. He knew it would hurt.

The girl turned her narrow face away as Ronan seized the thorns and the berries. Every thorn prick was a hornet sting, threatening to wake him. He crushed them until his fingers were dark with juice and blood, dark as the ink on his back. He slowly traced words on the rock:

Arbores loqui latine . The trees speak Latin.

“You’ve done this before,” she said.