The Dream Thieves

Between the twisted roots of the front yard, Noah’s body jerked and stilled, finally dead. Again.

Gently, she asked, “Noah?”

He was on the ground and then, just like that, he was standing beside her. It was like a dream, where the middle part was cut out, the getting from point A to point B.

It was another of his creepy things.

“Blue!” he said, and patted her damp hair.

She hugged him tightly; he was chilly against her damp clothing. She was always so worried he wouldn’t snap out of it at the end.

“Why do you do that?” she demanded.

Noah had reverted to his normal, safe self. The only evidence of his true nature was the ever-present smudge on his cheek where the bone had been smashed in. Otherwise he was once again slouched, mild, and eternally dressed in his Aglionby uniform.

He looked vaguely bewildered and pleased to have a girl clinging to him. “That?”

“What you did. Just now.”

He shrugged, formless and amiable. “I wasn’t here.”

But you were, Noah, she thought. But whatever part of Noah that still existed to pour thoughts and memories into this form mercifully disappeared for the eleven minutes of his death. She wasn’t sure if his amnesia over the whole thing made it more or less creepy.

“Ah, Noah.”

He draped an arm over her shoulders, too cold and weird himself to notice that she was also damp and cold. They wandered to the door like that, a pretzel of dead boy and not-psychic girl.

Of course, he wouldn’t come in. Blue suspected he couldn’t. Ghosts and psychics competed for the same power source, and in an energy showdown between Noah and Calla, there was no doubt in Blue’s mind who would come out the victor. She would have asked Noah to confirm this, but he was notoriously disinterested in the details of his afterlife. (Once, Gansey had tersely asked, “Don’t you care how it is that you’re still here?” and Noah had answered with remarkable acumen, “Do you care how your kidneys work?”)

“You aren’t going to D.C., are you?” Noah asked with some anxiety.

“Nope.” She’d meant to just say it with no inflection whatsoever, but in truth, she felt curiously bereft at the idea of Gansey and Adam both leaving town. She felt, actually, exactly like Noah sounded.

Daringly, Noah offered, “I’ll let you into Monmouth.”

Blue blushed immediately. One of her most hidden and persistent fantasies was an impossible one: living in Monmouth. She’d never really be one of the group, she thought, as long as she was living here at 300 Fox Way. She’d never really be one of them as long as she wasn’t an Aglionby student. Which meant she’d never really be one of them as long as she was a girl. The unfairness of it, the wanting, kept her up some nights. She couldn’t believe Noah had guessed her desire so accurately. To cover her embarrassment, she huffed, “And I’d hang out all day with you and Ronan?”

Gleefully, Noah said, “There’s a pool table now! I’m the worst at pool ever! It’s wonderful.” His arm tightened around her shoulders. “D’oh. Incoming.”

A man headed up the sidewalk toward them. He was carefully put together and overwhelmingly . . . gray. At the same time that Blue appraised this Gray Man, she got the idea that she was also being appraised.

At the end of the moment, they both eyed each other with a sort of mutual decision to not underestimate the other.

“Hello,” he said cordially. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

First of all, the way he phrased it meant that he could see Noah, which not everyone could. Second of all, he was polite in a way that was unlike anything Blue had encountered before. Gansey was polite in a way that squashed the other party smaller. Adam was polite to reassure. And this man was polite in a keen, questioning sort of way. He was polite like tentacles were polite, testing the surface carefully, checking to see how it reacted to his presence.

He was, Blue decided suddenly, very clever. Nothing to be trifled with.

She gestured to her soaked clothing. “This is performance art. We’re reenacting ‘The Little Mermaid.’ Not the Disney version.”

This was her own little tentacle test.

The Gray Man smiled agreeably. “Is he the prince? Do you stab him or do you turn into foam at the end?”

“Foam, of course,” said Blue, enormously pleased.

“I always thought she should have stabbed him,” he mused. “I’m looking for Maura.”

“Ah.” Now it all made sense. This was Mr. Gray. She’d heard his name whispered between Maura, Calla, and Persephone over the past few days. Especially between Calla and Persephone. “You’re the hit man.”

Mr. Gray had the good grace to look efficiently startled. “Oh. And you’re the daughter. Blue.”

“The one and only.” Blue fixed a penetrating gaze on him. “So, do you have a favorite weapon?”

Without missing a beat, he replied, “Opportunity.”

Now she raised an eyebrow. “Okay. Come on. Noah, I’ll be back out in a sec.”

She led the Gray Man inside. As always, new visitors made her over-aware of the house’s unorthodox appearance. It was two houses knitted together, and neither structure had been a palace to begin with. Narrow hallways leaned eagerly toward each other. A stray toilet gurgled constantly. The wood floors were as buckled as the sidewalk out front, as if roots threatened to come between the boards. Some of the walls were painted in vivid purples and blues, and some of them maintained wallpaper from decades before. Faded black-and-white photographs hung beside Klimt prints and old metal scissors. The entire decor was a victim of too much thrift store shopping and too many strong personalities.

Oddly enough, the Gray Man— a serene spot of neutral color in the middle of the riot — didn’t look out of place. Blue watched him watching his surroundings as they made their way into the bowels of the house. He didn’t seem like the sort of person one could sneak up on.

Again, she thought, Don’t underestimate him.

“Oh!” croaked Jimi. She squeezed her ample mass past the Gray Man. “I’ll get Maura!”

As Blue maneuvered him toward the kitchen, she asked, “What, precisely, is your intention with my mother?”

“That seems very frank,” Mr. Gray said.

She stepped over two small girls (she wasn’t certain who they belonged to) playing with tanks in the middle of the hall and snuck past a sort of possible second cousin carrying two lit candles. The Gray Man lifted his arms above his head to avoid being ignited by the second cousin, who clucked at him.

“Life’s short.”

“And getting shorter every day.”

“So you see my point.”

“I never disputed it.”

Then they were in the kitchen, with all its mugs and halfpackaged tea and boxes of essential oils waiting to be mailed and decapitated flowers waiting to be boiled.

Blue pointed to a chair beneath the fake Tiffany lamp. “Sit.”

“I’d rather stand.”

She made a neat rack of teeth at the Gray Man. “Sit.”

The Gray Man sat. He glanced over his shoulder, back down the hall, then back to her. He had those bright, active eyes that Dobermans and blue jays had.

“No one’s going to murder you here.” She handed him a glass of water. “That’s not poisoned.”

“Thanks.” He set it down but didn’t drink it. “My only intentions right now are to ask her to dinner.”

Leaning her butt on the counter, Blue crossed her arms and studied him. She was thinking about her biological father, Artemus. The truth was that Blue had never met him and in fact knew very little about him — little more than his name, Artemus. She felt strangely protective of him, though. She didn’t like to think of him reappearing and finding a usurper in his place. But then again, it had been sixteen years. The likelihood of him coming back was a very narrow one.

And it was only dinner.

“You aren’t staying here, are you?” Blue asked. She meant Henrietta, not the house.

She should’ve clarified, but he seemed to catch her meaning, because he replied, “I don’t stay anywhere. Not for long.”

“That doesn’t seem very pleasant.”

In the background, the phone rang. Not her problem. No one was calling this house for a non-psychic.

His keen expression didn’t flag. “Got to keep moving.”

Blue considered this wisdom before replying, “The planet spins at over a thousand miles an hour all the time. Actually, it’s going around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, even if it wasn’t spinning. So you can move plenty fast without going anywhere.”

Mr. Gray’s mouth quirked. “That’s a very philosophical loophole.” After a pause, he said, “Þing sceal gehegan / frod wiþ frodne. Biþ hyra ferð gelic.”

It sounded like German, but from hearing Calla’s whispers about the Gray Man, she knew it was Old English.

“A dead language?” she asked, with interest. She seemed to be hearing a lot of them lately. “What’s it mean?”

“‘Meetings are held, wise with the wise. Because their spirits are alike.’ Or minds. The word ferð has the sense of mind or spirit or soul. It’s one of the Anglo-Saxon Maxims. Wisdom poetry.”

Blue wasn’t certain that she and this Gray Man thought exactly alike, but she didn’t think they were that different, either. She could hear the pragmatic beat of his heart, and she appreciated it.

“Look, she doesn’t like pork,” she said. “Take her someplace they use lots of butter. And don’t ever say the word chuckle around her. She hates it.”

The Gray Man drank his water. He flicked his eyes to the hall doorway, and a moment later, Maura appeared in it, phone in one hand.

“Hi, daughter,” she said warily. For a millisecond, her expression was sharp as she analyzed whether or not Blue was in any danger from this strange man sitting at her kitchen table. She took in the glass of water in front of the Gray Man and Blue’s casually folded arms. Only then did she relax. Blue, for her part, enjoyed the millisecond of her mother looking dangerous. “What can I do for you, Mr. Gray?”

What a strange thing this was that they all knew that Mr. Gray was certainly not Mr. Gray, and yet they all went along with it. This playacting should have rankled Blue’s sensible side, but instead, it struck her as a reasonable solution. He didn’t want to say who he was, and they needed to call him something.

The Gray Man said, “Dinner.”

“If you mean me cooking it for you, no,” Maura said, “If we’re going out, maybe. Blue, this phone’s for you. It’s Gansey.”

Blue noticed that the Gray Man was abruptly not interested in who was on the phone. Which was interesting because he had been so interested in absolutely everything else before.

Which Blue took to mean that, really, he was very interested in who might be on the phone, only he didn’t want them to know he was interested.

Which was interesting.