The Dream Thieves

“I’ve been looking for something,” the Gray Man said. “I know.”

“I thought it was a box.”

“I know.”

“It’s not, is it?”

Maura shook her head. She stepped back to let him in.

“Drink?”

The Gray Man didn’t immediately step inside. “Is it a person?”

She held his gaze. She repeated, “Drink?”

With a sigh, he followed her in. She led him down the main hallway to the kitchen, where she (badly) made him a drink and then let him onto the back patio. Calla and Persephone were already positioned in chairs arranged where the shaggy lawn gave way to new puddles and old bricks. They looked ethereal and pleased in the long golden afternoon sunshine that had emerged after the storm. Persephone’s hair was a white cloud. Calla’s was three different colors of purple.

“Mr. Gray,” Calla said, expansive and scathing. She assassinated a mosquito on her calf and then eyed the glass in Maura’s hand. “I can tell already that drink’s shit.”

Maura looked at it sadly. “How can you tell?”

“Because you made it.”

Straightening the daisy chain on her head, Maura patted the remaining chair and sat on the bricks beside it. The Gray Man sagged into it.

“Oh, dear,” Persephone said, observing this bonelessness of the Gray Man. “So you found out, did you?”

By way of response, he drained his glass. The readings had taken him to a clearing with one hundred white Mitsubishi Evolutions and two drunk boys manifesting their dreams. He had watched them for hours. Each minute, each impossible dream, each overheard snatch of conversation had hammered in the truth.

“What happens now?” Maura asked.

The Gray Man said, “I’m a hit man, not a kidnapper.”

Maura frowned. “But you think your employer might be.”

The Gray Man was not sure what he thought Greenmantle might be. He knew that Greenmantle didn’t like to lose, and he knew that he had been obsessed with the Greywaren for at least five years. He also knew he himself had probably bludgeoned the last Greywaren to death with a tire iron. Although the Gray Man had killed quite a few people, he had never destroyed any of the artifacts he’d been sent to collect.

This was all more complicated than he’d expected.

“It’s definitely those two boys, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question, though. The Gray Man tried to imagine bringing one of them back to Greenmantle. He was unaccustomed to transporting live victims for any distance. It struck him as oddly distasteful, a different animal from outright killing.

“Two?” Calla echoed. She and Persephone looked at each other.

“Well,” Persephone said in her small voice. She used a cocktail umbrella to rescue a gnat in her drink. “That makes more sense.”

“It’s not a thing,” Maura said. “That’s what’s important. It’s not a thing any more than . . . conjunctivitis is a thing.”

Rubbing her eye, Persephone murmured, “That’s a strangely unpleasant metaphor, Maura.”

“It’s nothing you can take back,” Maura clarified. She added pointedly, “And we know at least one of the boys. We’d be very angry if you took him. I’d be very angry with you.”

“He’s not a very kind man,” the Gray Man said. It hadn’t gotten in the way of their relationship before; kindness had, until then, been largely lost on the Gray Man.

“So you couldn’t explain what nice boys they are?” Persephone asked.

Calla growled, “They are not nice boys. Well, at least one of them isn’t.”

The Gray Man said, “I don’t expect it would make a difference to him anyway.”

With a deep sigh, he leaned his head far back and closed his eyes, as defenseless as he’d ever been. The afternoon sun lit his face and neck and muscled biceps and also lit Maura looking at them.

They all took a drink, except for the Gray Man, who had already finished his. He didn’t want to kidnap a boy, he didn’t want to anger Maura, he wanted . . . he just wanted. Cicadas sang madly from the trees. It was so impossibly summer.

He wanted to stay.

“Well,” Calla said, checking her watch and standing. “I don’t envy you. I’ve got my boxing. Must run. Ta. Ta. Maura, don’t get murdered.”

Maura waved the switchblade.

Persephone, standing as well, said, “I’d give that to Blue, if I were you. I’m going to go work on my thing. My stuff. My PhD. You know.”

The Gray Man opened his eyes and now Persephone stopped in front of him, her hands folded around her empty glass. She looked very small and delicate and not-really-there in comparison to his knotted presence. She removed one hand from her glass to gently pat his knee. “I know you’ll do the right thing, Mr. Gray.”

She and Calla slid the door shut behind themselves. Maura scooted her butt a few inches closer and leaned against his leg. It struck the Gray Man as a very trusting gesture, putting her back to a hit man. His previously lifeless heart flopped hopefully. He carefully rearranged the daisy chain in her hair, and then he took out his phone.

Greenmantle answered at once. “Give me good news.”

The Gray Man said, “It’s not here.”

There was a long pause. “Sorry, the connection is bad. Say it again?”

The Gray Man didn’t like repeating himself unnecessarily. He said, “All of the readings are because of an old fault line that runs along these mountains. They’re pointing you to a place, not a thing.”

Another pause, uglier in quality than the first. Greenmantle said, “So, who got to you? Was it one of Laumonier’s? What did he say he’d pay you? You know what — goddamn, this is not the day you want to mess with me. Today of all days.”

The Gray Man said, “I’m not angling for more money.” “So you’re keeping it for yourself? I feel like that should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.” Usually it took Greenmantle a few minutes to work himself up to a frenzy, but it was clear the Gray Man had interrupted one already in progress. “All these years I’ve trusted you, you creepy, sick bastard, and now —”

“I don’t have it,” the Gray Man interrupted. “I’m not cheating you.”

Beside him, Maura ducked her head and shook it a little. Even without knowing Greenmantle, she’d already guessed what the Gray Man knew: This wasn’t going to work.

“Have I ever lied to you?” Greenmantle demanded. “No! I haven’t lied to anybody, and yet, today, everybody is just insistent on — you know, why didn’t you just wait four months and tell me you couldn’t find it? Why didn’t you make a better lie?”

The Gray Man said, “I prefer the truth. The energy anomalies follow the course of the fault and escape through the established bedrock in certain areas. I’ve photographed some of the abnormalities in plant growth these energy leakages have caused. The power company has been battling surges connected to the leakages for quite some time. And activity has only intensified because of an earthquake that happened earlier this year. There’s full documentation of that available on online newspapers. I can walk you through it when I return the electronics.”

He stopped. He waited.

There was a brief moment where he thought: He will believe me.

Greenmantle hung up on him.

The Gray Man and Maura sat quietly and looked at the large, spreading beech tree that took up most of the backyard. A mourning dove called from it, persistent and dolorous. The Gray Man’s hand hung down and Maura stroked it.

“This is the ten of swords,” he guessed.

Maura kissed the back of his hand. “You’re going to have to be brave.”

The Gray Man said, “I’m always brave.”

She said, “Braver than that.”

47

Gansey had only a few seconds of warning before the Camaro hit him.

He was sitting at a stoplight near Monmouth Manufacturing when he heard the familiar, anemic sound of the Pig’s horn honking. Possibly he had imagined it. As he blinked out the windows and the rearview mirror, the Suburban shook slightly.

Something had pushed it from behind.

The Pig’s horn quacked again. Rolling down the window, Gansey craned his head out to see behind the Suburban.

He heard Ronan’s hysterical laugh before he managed to glimpse the Pig. And then the engine revved up and Ronan nudged the Camaro into the Suburban’s rear bumper again.

It was about the sort of homecoming he should have expected after the disastrous weekend.

“HEY, OLD MAN!”

“Ronan!” shouted Gansey. He had no other words. Wrecked. The quarter panel he could see looked fine; he didn’t want to see the rest. He wanted to preserve the idea of the Camaro, whole and entire, for a few moments longer.

“Pull over!” Ronan howled back. There was still rather a lot of a laugh to his voice. “Mennonites! Now!”

“I don’t want to see it!” Gansey shouted back. The light turned green above him. He didn’t move.

“Oh, you really do!”

He really didn’t, but he still did as Ronan asked, pulling through the light and making the next right into Henrietta Farm and Garden (and Home), a complex of shops largely staffed by Mennonites. It was a fine one-stop destination for vegetables, antiques, doghouses, Western wear, military surplus, Civil War bullets, chili dogs, and custom chandeliers. He was aware of eyes from the outdoor vegetable stands as he parked the Suburban as far away from the buildings as possible. As he climbed out, the Pig thundered into the spot next to him.

And there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.

Gansey pressed a finger to his temple, struggling to reconcile the texts from earlier with what he was seeing. It was possible Kavinsky had just been jerking his chain.

But still, here was Ronan, climbing from the driver’s seat, which was impossible. The keys remained in Gansey’s bag.

Ronan leapt from the car.

And this, too, was bewildering. Because he was grinning. Euphoric. It wasn’t that Gansey hadn’t seen Ronan happy since Niall Lynch died. It was just that there had always been something cruel and conditional about it.

Not this Ronan.

He seized Gansey’s arm. “Look at it, man! Look at it!”

Gansey was looking. He was staring, first at the Camaro and then at Ronan. Then back again. He kept rinsing and repeating and nothing made any more sense. He stepped slowly around the car, looking for a hammered-out dent or a scratch. “What’s going on? I thought it was wrecked —”

“It was,” Ronan said. “I totally was.” He released Gansey’s arm, but only to punch it. “I’m sorry, man. It was a shitty thing for me to do.”

Gansey’s eyes were wide. He hadn’t thought he would live long enough to hear Ronan apologize for anything. He realized, belatedly, that Ronan was still talking. “What? What did you say?”

“I said,” Ronan said, and now he grabbed Gansey’s shoulders, both of them, and shook them theatrically, “I said I dreamt this car. I did this! That’s from my head. It’s exactly the same, man. I did it. I know how my dad got everything he wanted and I know how to control my dreams and I know what’s wrong with Cabeswater.”