The Dream Thieves

This inspired Ronan. Setting Chainsaw down on a table made of cinder blocks, he opened the old feed bin beside it. Even though it was empty, he suspected it would still be occupied. Sure enough, when he stuck his head inside, he discovered a sharp, living smell beneath the warm odor of grain.

Ronan ordered, “Light.”

Flicking to his phone’s flashlight function, Gansey illuminated the bin’s interior.

“Hurry up,” he said. “This cooks my phone.”

Reaching all the way to the crumpled old feed bag in the bottom, Ronan found the mouse nest. He carefully pulled one of the young mice free. It was downy and weightless, so small that the warmth of its body barely registered. Though the mouse was old enough to be completely mobile, it remained calm in his cupped palm. He ran a finger gently along its spine.

“Why is it so tame?” Blue asked. “Is it sleeping, too?”

He tipped his hand just enough for her to see its alert, trustful eyes, but not enough for Chainsaw to glimpse it — she’d think it was food. He and Matthew used to find the mouse nests in the feed rooms and in the fields near the troughs. They would sit cross-legged for hours in the grass, letting the mice run back and forth across their hands. The young ones were never afraid.

“It’s awake,” he said. Lifting his hand, he pressed the tiny body to his cheek so that he could feel the flutter of its rapid heartbeat against his skin. Blue was staring at him, so he offered it to her. “You can feel its heart that way.”

She looked suspicious. “Are you for real? Are you messing with me?”

“How do you figure?”

“You’re a bastard, and this doesn’t seem like a typical bastard activity.”

He smiled thinly. “Don’t get used to it.”

Grudgingly, she accepted the tiny mouse and held it to her cheek. A surprised smile crept across her mouth. With a tiny, happy sigh, she offered it to Adam. He didn’t seem eager, but at her insistence, he pressed the little body against his cheek. His mouth quirked. After a second, he passed the mouse on to Gansey. Gansey was the only one who smiled at it before he lifted it to his face. And it was his smile that buried Ronan; it reminded him of Matthew’s easy expression when they’d first discovered the mice, back when they’d been the Lynch family.

“Astonishingly charming,” Gansey reported. He tipped it into Ronan’s hands.

Ronan held the mouse over the top of the bin. “Anyone want seconds before I put it back? Because it’ll be dead in a year. Lifespan’s shit for field mice.”

“Nice, Ronan,” said Adam, turning to go.

Blue’s face had gone to lemons. “That didn’t last long.”

Gansey didn’t add anything. His eyes merely lingered on Ronan, mouth rueful; he knew Ronan too well to be offended. Ronan felt he was being analyzed, and maybe he wanted to be. “Let’s go bury this thing,” he said.

Back at the BMW, Gansey was decent enough to not look smug when Blue slapped her hand over her mouth and Adam sucked in his breath at the first sight of the bird man. Ronan and Gansey had stuffed it into a speaker box as best they could, but enough of the corpse poked out of both ends to abuse the imagination. Several hours of deadness had not improved its appearance in any way.

“What is it?” Adam asked.

Ronan touched one of the ragged claws hooked around the edge of the box. It was terrible, chilling. He was afraid of it in a dull, primeval, permanent way that came from being killed by them again and again in his head. “They come when I’m having a nightmare. Like, it draws them. They hate me. In the dreams, they’re called night horrors. Or . . . niri viclis.”

Adam frowned. “Is that Latin?”

Perplexed, Ronan considered. “I . . . don’t think so.” Blue looked sharply to him, and immediately Ronan remembered when she’d accused him of knowing the other language on the puzzle box. It was possible she was right.

Between the four of them, they carried the speaker-box coffin to the tree line. As the rain drizzled on, they took turns digging in the storm-damp soil. Ronan glanced up every few seconds to check on Chainsaw. She didn’t care for anything large and black, including herself, and so she kept her distance from the corpse, even after it was in the hole. But she adored Ronan above all things, so she loitered in the middle distance, poking the ground for invisible insects.

By the time they had tamped the last pile of dirt over the hole, they were soaked with rain and sweat. There was something warming, Ronan thought, about all of them burying a body on his behalf. He would’ve preferred it to stay in his dreams, but if it had to slip out, this was better than the last out-of-control nightmare.

With a gentle oath, Gansey jammed the tip of the shovel into the ground and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He stuffed a mint leaf into his mouth. “I have blisters. Nino’s? ”

Blue protested wordlessly.

Gansey looked to Adam.

“I’m fine with anything,” Adam replied, his Henrietta accent

snaking out, betraying his fatigue. It wasn’t quite his usual tiredness. It was something deeper. It wasn’t at all impossible for Ronan to imagine that bargain nesting in Adam’s bones.

Gansey looked at Ronan.

Ronan rubbed a studious thumb beneath one of the leather straps, wiping away the grime and sweat. He wondered when he’d ever be back. Softly, just for Gansey, he asked, “Can I go and see Mom?”

20

Inside the farmhouse, everything was in black and white. The air was stained permanently with the pleasant odor of Ronan’s childhood: hickory smoke and boxwood, grass seed and lemon cleaner.

“I remember,” Gansey said thoughtfully to Ronan, “when

you used to smell like this.”

Gansey clucked at his bedraggled reflection in the darkframed mirror hanging in the front hallway. Chainsaw eyed herself briefly before hiding on the other side of Ronan’s neck; Adam did the same, but without the hiding in Ronan’s neck bit.

Even Blue looked less fanciful than usual, the lighting rendering her lampshade dress and spiky hair as a melancholy Pierrot. “It feels the same as when you guys lived here,” Gansey said finally. “It seems like it should be different.”

“Did you come here a lot?” Blue asked.

He exchanged a glance with Ronan. “Often enough.” He didn’t say what Ronan was thinking, which was that Gansey was far more of a brother to Ronan than Declan had ever been.

Voice faded, Adam asked, “Could we get some water?” Ronan led them to the kitchen. It was a farmhouse kitchen, no frills, worn smooth by use. Nothing had ever been repaired or updated until it had stopped working, and so the room was an amalgam of decades and styles: plain white cabinets decorated with a combination of old glass knobs and brass handles, counters that were half new butcher-block and half dingy laminate, appliances a mixture of snowy white and polished stainless steel.

With Blue and Adam there, Ronan saw the Barns with fresh eyes. This was not the pretentious, beautiful old money of Gansey’s family. This house was shabby rich, betraying its wealth not with culture or airs but because no comfort was wanting: mismatched antiques and copper pots, real hand-painted art on the walls and real hand-knotted rugs on the floors. Where Gansey’s ancestral home was a no-touch museum of elegant, remote things, the Barns was a warren of pool tables and quilts, video game cords and shoddily expensive leather couches. Ronan loved it so much. He nearly couldn’t bear it. He wanted to destroy something.

Instead, he said, “Remember how I told you that Dad—that my father was like me?” He pointed to the toaster. It was an ordinary stainless-steel toaster, room for two slices of toast. Gansey raised an eyebrow. “That? Is a toaster.”

“Dream toaster.”

Adam laughed soundlessly.

“How can you tell?” asked Gansey.

Ronan slid the toaster out from the wall. There was no wall plug, no battery panel. Yet when he pressed down on the lever, the filaments inside began to glow. For how many years had he used this toaster before he’d realized that it was impossible? “What’s it run on, then?” Adam asked.

“Dream energy,” Ronan said. Chainsaw hopped untidily from Ronan’s shoulder to the counter and had to be smacked away from the appliance. “Cleanest there is.”

Adam’s dusty eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. He replied, “Politicians wouldn’t be pleased. No offense to your mother, Gansey.”

“None taken,” Gansey said cordially.

“Oh, and that,” Ronan said, pointing at the calendar on the front of the fridge.

Blue paged through it. No one had been here to change over the month, but it didn’t matter. Every page was the same — twelve pages of April, every photo displaying three black birds sitting on a fence. There had been a time when Ronan had thought it was merely a gag gift. Now he could readily recognize the artifact of a frustration dream. Blue peered at the birds, her nose nearly touching the image. “Are these vultures or crows?” At the same time that Ronan said, “Crows,” Adam said, “Vultures.”

“What else is here?” Gansey asked. He was using his deeply curious voice and his deeply curious face, the ones he normally reserved for all things Glendower. “Dream things, I mean?” “Damned if I know,” Ronan replied. “Never made a study.” Gansey said, “Then let’s make a study.”

The four of them pushed out from the fridge, pulling open cabinets and shifting through items on the countertop. “Phone doesn’t plug into the wall,” Adam noted, turning an old-fashioned rotary dial phone upside down to look at it. “But there’s still a dial tone.”

In the age of cell phones, Ronan found this discovery profoundly disinteresting. He had just found a pencil that was really a pen; even though an exploratory scratch of a fingernail on the side of lead revealed that it was a leaded pencil, the tip released a perfect line of blue ink when dragged across the note pad beside the pencil can.

“Microwave’s not plugged in, either,” Adam said.

“Here’s a spoon with two ends,” Gansey added.

A high-pitched whine filled the kitchen; Blue had discovered that when the seat was rotated on one of the high stools, it emitted a wail that sounded a little like “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” played several times faster than it had ever been meant to be played. She gave it a few spins to see if it made it all the way through the tune. It didn’t. The product of another frustration dream.

“God damn it,” said Gansey, dropping a knife onto the counter. He shook his hand out. “It’s red hot.” Only it wasn’t. The blade was ordinary stainless steel, its heat only evident by the faint scent of the counter finish melting beneath it. He tapped the handle a few times to verify that it was the entire knife that was hot, not just the blade, and then used a dish towel to replace it in the knife block.

Ronan had stopped searching in earnest and was merely opening and slamming drawers for the pleasure of hearing them crash. He wasn’t sure what was worse: leaving or the anticipation of leaving.