The Dream Thieves

But those words of Declan’s needled Ronan: She’s nothing without dad.

It was like he knew. Ronan wanted badly to know how much Declan knew, but it wasn’t like he could ask him.

“Declan started hating me first,” Ronan said. “In case you were wondering. So that wasn’t me.”

Matthew blew out a tuna-scented breath with the sanguine, pleasant air of either a nun or a pothead. “He was just upset Dad liked you the best. I didn’t care. Everybody has favorite things. Mom liked me best anyway.”

Article 2a

Further Bequests

I give my entire interest in the real property which was my residence at the time of my death (“the Barns”), together with any insurance on such property, to my middle son.

They both quietly ate their sandwiches. Ronan thought they were probably both considering how this left Declan as no one’s favorite.

If I was your favorite, he asked his dead father, why did you leave me a home I could never return to?

Carefully — this was difficult, because Ronan never did anything carefully — he asked, “Does Declan ever talk about dreams?”

He had to repeat the question. Both Matthew and Chainsaw had gotten distracted by a circling pair of monarch butterflies.

“Like, his?” Matthew asked. He shrugged elaborately. “I don’t think he dreams. He takes sleeping pills, did you know?”

Ronan didn’t know. “What kind?”

“I dunno. I looked at the bottle, though. Doc Mac gave them to him.”

“Doc the fuck who?”

“The Aglionby doctor?”

Ronan hissed. “He’s not a doctor, man. He’s a nurse practitioner or something. I don’t think he’s legal to give out drugs. Why does Declan take sleeping pills?”

Matthew stuffed the remaining quarter of his sandwich in his mouth. “Says you’re giving him an ulcer.”

“Ulcers are not sleeping problems. They are when acid eats a fucking hole through your stomach.”

“Says you and dad were both dreamers,” Matthew said, “and you’re going to make us lose everything.”

Ronan sat very still. He was so still so quickly that Chainsaw froze as well, her head tilted toward the youngest Lynch brother, purloined tuna sandwich forgotten.

Declan knew about their father. Declan knew about their mother. Declan knew about him.

What did it change? Nothing, maybe.

“He put a gun under the seat of his car,” Matthew said. “I saw it when my phone fell down between the seats.”

Ronan realized that Matthew had stopped chewing and moving and was instead just curved on the bench of the picnic table, his liquid eyes uncertain on his older brother’s.

“Don’t say burglars,” Matthew said finally.

“I wasn’t going to,” Ronan replied. “You know I don’t lie.”

Matthew nodded, fast. He was biting his lip. His eyes were unselfconsciously damp.

“Look,” Ronan said, and then, again, “Look. I think I know how to fix Mom. She won’t be able to stay at the Barns and — I mean, we can’t go there anyway — I think I know how to fix her. So at least we’ll have her.”

Niall Lynch was, at the time of so executing said Will, of sound mind, memory, and understanding and not under any restraint or in any respect incompetent to make a will. This Will stands as fact unless a newer document is created.

Signed this day: T’Libre vero-e ber nivo libre n’acrea.

This was probably why he’d called Matthew. Probably he’d meant to promise this impossible hope from the very beginning. Probably he needed to say it out loud so it would stop chewing a fucking hole through his stomach.

His younger brother looked wary. “Really?”

The decision galvanized Ronan. “I promise.”

23

It took the Gray Man several days to realize he had lost his wallet. He would have noticed it sooner if he hadn’t been overcome by gray days — days where morning seemed bled of color and getting up unimportant. The Gray Man often didn’t eat during them; he certainly didn’t keep track of time. He was at once sleeping and awake, both of them the same, dreamless, listless. And then one morning he would open his eyes and find the sky had become blue again.

He had several gray days in the basement of Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast, and after he’d roused himself at dawn and shakily eaten something, he reached into the back pocket of his pants and found it empty. His fake ID and useless credit cards — the Gray Man paid for everything in cash — all gone. It must be at 300 Fox Way.

He’d have to try to swing back there later. He checked his phone for messages from Greenmantle, let his eyes skip unseeingly over his brother’s missed call from days before, and finally consulted his jotted, coded notes to himself.

He glanced out the window. The sky was an unreal shade of blue. He always felt so alive that first day. Humming a bit, the Gray Man pocketed his keys. Next stop: Monmouth Manufacturing.

Gansey hadn’t been doing well with Cabeswater’s disappearance. He’d tried to come to grips with it. This was just another setback, and he knew he needed to treat it like every other setback: make a new plan, find another lead, throw all the resources in a new direction. But it didn’t feel like any other setback.

He had spent forty-eight hours more or less awake and restless and then, on the third day, he had bought a side-scan sonar device, two window air conditioners, a leather sofa, and a pool table.

“Now do you feel better?” Adam had asked drily.

Gansey had replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Hey, man,” Ronan said, “I like the pool table.”

The entire situation made Blue apoplectic.

“There are children starving in the streets of Chicago,” she said, her hair bristling with indignation. “Three species go extinct every hour because there’s no funding to protect them. You are still wearing those incredibly stupid boat shoes, and of all the things that you have bought, you still haven’t replaced them!”

Gansey, bewildered, observed his feet. The movement of his toes was barely visible through the tops of his Top-Siders. Really, in light of recent events, these shoes were the only things that were right in the world. “I like these shoes.”

“Sometimes, I hate you,” Blue said. “And Orla, of all people!”

This was because Gansey had also rented a boat, a trailer, and a truck to pull it with, and then asked Blue’s older cousin Orla to accompany them on their latest trip. The rental truck required a driver over twenty-one, and the mission, according to Gansey, required a psychic. Orla fit both purposes and was more than willing. She had arrived at Monmouth dressed for work: bell-bottoms, platform sandals, and an orange bikini top. There were acres of bare skin between the bell-bottoms and the bikini top. Her bare stomach was so clearly an invitation for admiration that Gansey could hear the dismissive voice of his father in his ear. Girls these days. But Gansey had seen photos of girls in his father’s days, and they didn’t look that different to him.

He exchanged a glance with Adam, because it had to be done, and of course Blue intercepted it. Her eyes narrowed. She wore two shredded tank tops and a pair of bleached cargo pants. In some parallel universe, there was a Gansey who could tell Blue that he found the ten inches of her bare calves far more tantalizing than the thirteen cubic feet of bare skin Orla sported. But in this universe, that was Adam’s job.

He was in a terrible mood.

Somewhere across Henrietta, something crackled explosively. It was either a transistor falling prey to the electric whims of the ley line or Joseph Kavinsky having premature fun with one of his infamous Fourth of July explosives. Either way, it was a good day to get out of town.

“We should get moving,” Gansey ordered. “It’s only going to get hotter.”

Just a few dozen yards away, the Gray Man sat in the Champagne Monster on Monmouth Avenue, paging through a history book and listening to Muswell Hillbillies while the air-conditioning played across his skin. Really, he should’ve been reading up on Welsh history— his cursory research on the Lynch brothers revealed that one of the boys they ran with was obsessed with it — but instead he indulged himself by trying his hand at a new translation of “Bede’s Death Song.” It was like an archaic crossword puzzle. When the text said Fore ðæm nedfere nænig wiorðe, would it be truer to the original intent of the writer to translate it as “Before the fated journey there” or “Facing the path to Death”? Pleasurable trials!

The Gray Man looked up as a boy emerged from Monmouth Manufacturing. The overgrown lot was already a mess of teens and rental vehicles and boats; they were clearly getting ready to go somewhere. The boy who had just exited was the square, showy one who looked like he was about to fall into Senate — Richard Gansey. The third. That meant that somewhere there were at least two more Richard Ganseys. He didn’t notice the Gray Man’s rental car parallel parked in the shadows. Nor did he notice the white Mitsubishi parked just down the road. The Gray Man wasn’t the only one waiting for the Monmouth Manufacturing building to be vacated.

A fellow academic had once asked the Gray Man: “Why Anglo-Saxon history?” At the time it had struck the Gray Man as a foolish and unanswerable question. The things that drew him to that time period were surely unconscious and manyheaded, diffused through his blood from a lifetime of influences. One might as easily ask him why he preferred to wear gray, why he disliked gravy of all sorts, why he loved the seventies, why he was so fascinated by brothers when he couldn’t seem to succeed at being one himself. He’d told the academic that guns had made history boring, which he knew was a lie even as he said it, and then he’d extricated himself from the conversation. Of course he thought of the true answer later, but it was too late then.

It was this: Alfred the Great. Alfred became king during one of armpits of English history. There was no England, really, not back then. Just small kingdoms with bad teeth and abbreviated tempers. Life was, as the old saying went, nasty, brutish, short. When the Vikings came tearing onto the island, the kingdoms didn’t stand a chance. But Alfred stepped in to unite them. He made them a brotherhood, pushed out the Vikings. He’d promoted literacy and the translation of important books. Encouraged the poets and the artists and writers. He’d ushered in a renaissance before the Italians had ever considered the concept.

He was one man, but he’d changed Anglo-Saxon England forever. He imposed order and honor, and under that crusheddown grass of principle, the flower of poetry and civility had burst through.

What a hero , the Gray Man thought. Another Arthur.

His attention snapped up as Ronan Lynch stepped out of the old factory. He was clearly related to Declan: same nose, same dark eyebrows, same phenomenal teeth. But there was a carefully cultivated sense of danger to this Lynch brother. This was not a rattlesnake hidden in the grass, but a deadly coral snake striped with warning colors. Everything about him was a warning: If this snake bit you, you had no one to blame but yourself.