The Dream Thieves

Declan said nothing. The Gray Man gave him some time to consider his reply. Head wounds tended to make thoughts slower.

When Declan remained quiet, he dragged the muzzle down to Declan’s thigh. He pressed hard enough that the boy gasped. “Here, you’d die in five minutes. Of course, I don’t need to shoot you for that. The point of your umbrella over there would do it just as well. You’d be gone in five minutes and wishing for it in three.”

Declan closed his eyes. One of them, anyway. The left eye was already swollen most of the way shut.

“I don’t know,” he said eventually. His voice sounded full of sleep. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Lies are for your politicians,” the Gray Man said, without vehemence. He just wanted Declan to know that he knew about his life, his internship. He wanted him to know that he’d done his research. “I know where your brothers are right now. I know where your mother lives. I know the name of your girlfriend. Are we clear?”

“I don’t know where it is.” Declan hesitated. “That’s the truth. I don’t know where it is. I just know it.”

“Here is the plan.” The Gray Man stood up. “You’re going to find that thing for me, and when you do, you’re going to give it to me. And then I will be gone.”

“How do I find you to give it to you?”

“I don’t think you understand. I am your shadow. I’m the spit you swallow. I’m the cough that keeps you up at night.”

Declan asked, “Did you kill my father?”

“Niall Lynch.” The Gray Man tried the words out in his mouth. In his opinion, Niall Lynch was a pretty lousy father, getting himself killed and then allowing his sons to live in a place where they propped the security doors open. The world, he felt, was full of bad fathers. “He asked me that question, too.”

Declan Lynch exhaled unevenly: half a breath, and then the other half. Now, the Gray Man could see, he was finally afraid.

“Okay,” Declan said. “I’ll find it. Then you’ll leave us alone. All of you.”

The Gray Man set the pistol back in its drawer and pushed it closed. He checked his watch. He had twenty minutes to pick up his rental car. He might upgrade to a midsize. He hated compact cars nearly as much as he hated public transportation. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Declan said again.

The Gray Man withdrew from the room, shutting the door partway. It wouldn’t quite close right; he had messed up one of the hinges when he’d entered. He was sure there was an endowment somewhere that would cover the damages.

He paused, watching through the crack of the door.

There was still more to learn from Declan Lynch today.

For several minutes, nothing happened. Declan lay there bleeding and crooked. Then the fingers of his right hand crabbed across the ground to where his cell phone had fallen. He didn’t immediately dial 9-1-1, though. With agonizing slowness — his shoulder was almost certainly dislocated — he punched in another number. Immediately, a phone rang on the opposite bed. It was, the Gray Man knew already, the bed that belonged to Declan’s youngest brother, Matthew. The ringtone was an Iglu & Hartly song that the Gray Man knew but couldn’t condone. The Gray Man already knew where Matthew Lynch was: floating in a boat on the river with some local boys. Like his older brother, never content to be alone.

Declan let his youngest brother’s phone ring for longer than it needed to, his eyes closed. Finally, he pressed end and dialed another number. It still wasn’t 9-1-1. Whoever it was didn’t pick up. And whoever it was made Declan’s already strained expression even tighter. The Gray Man could hear the tinny sound of the phone ringing and ringing, then a brief voicemail that he couldn’t catch.

Declan Lynch closed his eyes and breathed, “Ronan, where the hell are you?”

3

The problem is exposure,” Gansey told the phone, halfshouting to be heard over the engine. “If Glendower really could be found just walking along the ley line, I don’t see how he wouldn’t have already been found in the past few hundred years.”

They were headed back to Henrietta in the Pig, Gansey’s furiously orange-red ancient Camaro. Gansey drove, because when it was the Camaro, he always drove. And the conversation was about Glendower, because when you were with Gansey, the conversation was almost always about Glendower.

In the backseat, Adam’s head was tipped back in a way that gave equal attention to the phone conversation and his fatigue. In the middle, Blue leaned forward to better eavesdrop as she picked grass seed off her crochet leggings. Noah was on her other side, although one could never be sure he’d stay corporeal the farther they got from the ley line. It was a tight fit, even tighter in this heat, with the air-conditioning straining, escaping through every crevice in the crevice-filled vehicle. The Camaro’s air-conditioning had only two settings: on and broken.

To the phone, Gansey said, “That’s the only thing.” Ronan leaned on the cracked black vinyl of the passengerside door and chewed on the leather bands on his wrist. They tasted like gasoline, a flavor that struck Ronan as both sexy and summery.

For him, it was only sometimes about Glendower. Gansey needed to find Glendower because he wanted proof of the impossible. Ronan already knew the impossible existed. His father had been impossible. He was impossible. Mostly, Ronan wanted to find Glendower because Gansey wanted to find Glendower. Only sometimes did he think about what would happen if they actually discovered him. He thought it might be a lot like dying. When Ronan had been smaller and more forgiving of miracles, he’d considered the moment of death with rhapsodic delight. His mother had told him that when you looked into the eyes of God at the pearly gates, all the questions you ever had were answered.

Ronan had a lot of questions.

Waking Glendower might be like that. Fewer angels attending, and maybe a heavier Welsh accent. Slightly less judgment.

“No, I understand that.” Gansey was using his Mr. Gansey professorial voice, the one that exuded certainty and commanded rats and small children to get up, get up, follow me! It had worked on Ronan, anyway. “But if we assume Glendower was brought over between 1412 and 1420, and if we assume his tomb was left untended, natural soil accumulation would have hidden him. Starkman suggests that medieval layers of occupation might be under a sediment accumulation of five to seventeen feet. . . . Well, I know I’m not on a flood plain. But Starkman was working under the assumption that. . . right, sure. What do you think about GPR?”

Blue looked at Adam. He didn’t lift his head as he translated in a low voice, “Ground penetrating radar.”

The person on the other end of the phone was Roger Malory, a stunningly old British professor Gansey had worked with back in Wales. Like Gansey, he had studied the ley lines for years. Unlike Gansey, he was not using them as a means to find an ancient king. Rather, he seemed to study them for a weekend diversion when there were no parades to attend. Ronan hadn’t met him in person and didn’t care to. The elderly made Ronan anxious.

“Fluxgrate gradiometry?” Gansey suggested. “We’ve already taken a plane up a few times. I just don’t know if we’ll see much more until winter when the leaves are gone.”

Ronan shifted restlessly. The successful demonstration of the plane had left him hyper-alive. He felt like burning something to the ground. He pressed his hand directly over the air-conditioning vent to prevent heat exhaustion. “You’re driving like an old woman.”

Gansey waved a hand, the universal symbol for shut up. Beside the interstate, four black cows lifted their heads to watch the Camaro go by.

If I was driving . . . Ronan thought about that set of Camaro keys he had dreamt into existence, shoved in a drawer in his room. He let the possibilities unwind slowly in his mind. He checked his phone. Fourteen missed calls. He dropped it back into the door pouch.

“What about a proton magnetometer?” Gansey asked Malory. Then he added crossly, “I know that’s for underwater detection. I would want it for underwater detection.”

It was water that had ended their work today. Gansey had decided that the next step in their search was to establish Cabeswater’s boundaries. They’d only ever entered the forest from its eastern side and never made it to any of the other edges. This time, they’d approached the forest from well north of their previous entry points, devices trained to the ground to alert them to when they found the northern electromagnetic boundary of the forest. After a several-hour walk, the group had instead come to a lake.

Gansey had stopped dead in his tracks. It wasn’t that the lake had been uncrossable: It only covered a few acres and the path around lacked treachery. And it wasn’t that the lake had stunned him with its beauty. In fact, it was quite unlovely as far as lakes went: an unnaturally square pool sunk into a drowned field. Cattle or sheep had worn a mud path along one edge.

The thing that stopped Gansey cold was the obvious fact that the lake was man-made. The possibility that parts of the ley line might be flooded should have occurred to him before. But it hadn’t. And for some reason, although it was not impossible to believe that Glendower was still somehow alive after hundreds of years, it was impossible to believe he was able to pull off this feat beneath tons of water.

Gansey had declared, “We have to find a way to look under it.”

Adam had replied, “Oh, Gansey, come on. The odds —”

“We’re looking under it.”

Ronan’s plane had crashed into the water and floated, unreachable. They’d walked the long way back to to the car. Gansey had called Malory.

As if, Ronan thought, a crusty old man three thousand miles away will have any bright ideas.

Gansey hung up the phone.

“Well?” Adam asked.

Gansey met Adam’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Adam sighed.

Ronan thought they could probably just go around the lake. But that would mean plunging into Cabeswater headlong. And although the ancient forest seemed like the mostly likely location for Glendower, the sizzling volatility of the newly woken ley line had rendered it a little unpredictable. Even Ronan, who had little care for whether or not he shuffled off this mortal coil, had to admit that the prospect of being trampled by beasts or accidentally getting stuck in a forty-year time loop was daunting.

The entire thing was Adam’s fault — he’d been the one to wake the ley line, though Gansey preferred to pretend it had been a group decision. Whatever bargain Adam had struck in order to accomplish it seemed to have rendered him a little unpredictable as well.

Ronan, a sinner himself, wasn’t as struck by the transgression as he was by Gansey’s insistence they continue to pretend Adam was a saint.

Gansey was not a liar. This untruth didn’t look good on him.

Gansey’s phone chirruped. He read the message before letting it drop next to the gearshift with a strangled cry. Abruptly melancholy, he lolled his head dismally against the seat. Adam gestured for Ronan to pick up the phone, but Ronan despised phones above almost every other object in the world.