The Dream Thieves

Gansey covered both his eyes with his hands. He thought his brain was going to melt.

Ronan, however, was in no mood for introspection, his or anyone else’s. He ripped Gansey’s hands from his face. “Sit in it! Tell me it’s any different!”

He pushed Gansey down into the driver’s seat and draped Gansey’s lifeless arms over the steering wheel. He considered the image before him as if analyzing a museum piece. Then he reached in over the steering wheel and snatched a pair of sunglasses that were sitting on the dash.

White, plastic, lenses dark as hell. Joseph Kavinsky’s — or maybe a copy. Who was to say what was real anymore?

Ronan put the white sunglasses onto Gansey’s face and regarded him once more. His face went somber for half a second, and then it dissolved into an absolutely wonderful and fearless laugh. The old Ronan Lynch’s laugh. No, it was better than that one, because this new one had just a hint of darkness beneath it. This Ronan knew there was crap in the world, but he was laughing anyway.

Gansey couldn’t help laughing along, rather more breathless. Somehow he had gone from such a terrible place to such a joyful one. He wasn’t sure that the feeling would be so profound if he hadn’t braced every bone in his body for an argument with Ronan. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, tell me.”

Ronan told him.

“Kavinsky?”

Ronan explained.

Gansey rested his cheek against the hot steering wheel. That, too, was comforting. He should have never gone without this car. He was never getting out of it again.

Joseph Kavinsky. Unbelievable.

“And what’s wrong with Cabeswater?”

Ronan shielded his eyes. “Me. Well, Kavinsky, actually. We’re taking all the energy from the line when we dream.”

“Solution?”

“Stop Kavinsky.”

They eyed each other.

“I don’t suppose,” Gansey said slowly, “that we could just ask him nicely.”

“Hey, Churchill tried to negotiate with Hitler.”

Gansey frowned. “Did he?”

“Probably.”

Letting out a huge breath, Gansey closed his eyes and let the steering wheel cook his face. This was home: Henrietta, the Pig, Ronan. Nearly. His thoughts darted toward Adam, toward Blue, and rabbited away.

“How was your party, man?” Ronan asked, kicking Gansey’s knee through the open door. “How’d Parrish do?”

Gansey opened his eyes. “Oh, he brought down the house.”

48

At about the same time that Gansey was donning a pair of white sunglasses, Blue biked two neighborhoods over from her house. She carried the Camaro wheel, the shield boss, and a small pink switchblade.

She was decidedly uncomfortable with the switchblade.

Although she very much liked the idea of it — Blue Sargent, desperado; Blue Sargent, superhero; Blue Sargent, badass — she suspected that the only thing she would cut the first time she opened it was herself. But Maura had insisted.

“Switchblades are illegal,” Blue protested.

“So’s crime,” Maura replied.

Crime was all the papers — yes, papers, plural, because against all reason, Henrietta had two of them — could talk about. All over town, increasingly fearful citizens reported break-ins. The accounts were conflicting, however — some said they had seen a single man, others two men, and still others said gangs of five or six. “That means none of them are true,” Blue said scathingly.

She was skeptical of mainstream journalism.

“Or all of them,” Maura replied.

“Did your hit-man boyfriend tell you that?”

Maura said, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

By the time Blue parked her bike outside the rambler where Calla took boxing lessons, she was feeling sticky and unappealing. The shaded lawn had no effect at all as she trudged across it to the door and rang the bell with her elbow.

“Hello, lady,” said Mike, the enormous man who taught

Calla. He was as wide as Blue was tall — which, in all fairness, was not very wide. “Is that off a Corvette?”

Blue readjusted the pitted wheel beneath her arm. “Camaro.” “What year?”

“Uh, 1973.”

“Ooh. Big block? 350?”

“Sure?”

“Nice, lady! Where’s the rest of it?”

“Out having a grand old time without me. Is Calla still here?”

Mike opened the door wider to admit Blue. “She’s just cooling down in the basement.”

Blue found Calla lying on the worn gray carpet in the basement, a generous and out-of-breath mountain of psychic. There were an astonishing number of punching bags hanging and stacked. Blue placed the Camaro wheel on Calla’s heaving stomach.

“Do your magic trick,” she ordered.

“How rude!” But Calla reached up to fold her hands over the top of the pocked metal. Her eyes were closed, so she couldn’t know what it was, but she said, “He’s not alone when he leaves the car behind.”

There was something chilling about the phrase. Leaves behind.

It could have just meant “parked the car.” But it didn’t sound like that when Calla said it. It sounded like a synonym for abandon.

And it seemed like it would take something pretty momentous to make Gansey abandon the Pig.

“When does it happen?”

“It already has,” Calla replied. Her eyes opened and fixed on Blue. “And it hasn’t yet. Time’s circular, chicken. We use the same parts of it over and over. Some of us more than others.” “Wouldn’t we remember that?”

“I said time was circular,” Calla replied. “I didn’t say memo ries were.”

“You’re being creepy,” Blue said. “Maybe you mean to be, but in case you’re just being accidentally creepy, I thought I’d let you know.”

“You’re the one dealing with creepy things. Running with people who use time more than once.”

Blue thought about how Gansey had cheated death on the ley line, and how he seemed to be old and young at the same time.

“Gansey?”

“Glendower! Hand me that other thing you’ve got there.” Blue traded the wheel for the shield boss. Calla held it for a long while. Then she sat up and reached for Blue’s hand. She began to hum a little as she ran her fingers over the ravens on the boss. It was an archaic, haunted sort of tune, and it made Blue clasp her free arm around herself.

“They were dragging him at this point,” Calla said. “The horses had died. The men were very weak. It wouldn’t stop raining. They meant to bury this with him, but it was too heavy.

They left it behind.”

Left it behind.

The echo felt deliberate. Gansey would not abandon the Camaro unless he was under duress; Glendower’s men wouldn’t abandon his shield without similar distress.

“But it is Glendower’s? Is he close?” Blue felt a little kick to her heart.

“Close and far is like already happened and not happened yet,” Calla replied.

Blue tired of the enigmatic psychic talk. She insisted, “But they had no horses. So it’s only as far as they could go on foot.” “People,” Calla said, “can walk a long way if they have to.” She got up and returned the shield boss to Blue. She smelled like she’d been boxing. She sighed very noisily.

“Calla?” Blue asked suddenly. “Are you one of those people who reuses time? You and Mom and Persephone?”

By way of answer, Calla answered, “Have you ever felt like there is something different about you? Like there is something more?”

Blue’s heart jumped inside her again. “Yes! ”

Calla removed the keys to the Fox Way car from her pocket.

“Good. Everyone should feel that way. Here. Take these. You’re driving home. You need the practice.”

Blue could get nothing more out of her. They bade Mike farewell (Don’t drive that wheel too fast, now!), put Blue’s bike in the trunk, and drove rather slowly home. As Blue attempted to park in front of the house without hitting a small, three-colored car already parked on the curb, Calla clucked.

“Well,” she remarked. “Trouble looks good today.” This was because Adam Parrish was waiting on their front step.

49

Adam sat awkwardly on the edge of Blue’s bed. It felt strange to have so easily gained access to a girl’s bedroom. If you knew Blue at all, the room was unsurprising— canvas silhouettes of trees stuck to the walls, leaves hanging in chains from the ceiling fan, a bird with a talk bubble reading WORMS FOR ALL painted above a shelf cluttered with buttons and about nine different pairs of scissors. Against the wall, Blue self-consciously taped up the drooping branch on one of the trees.

No time, no time.

He squeezed his eyes shut for just a second. He waited for her to stop messing over the trees so they could talk. She kept fiddling. He felt his pulse simmering inside him.

He stood up. He couldn’t sit any longer.

Blue stopped abruptly. She leaned on her hands against the wall, expression watchful.

Adam had intended to begin the conversation with a persuasive statement on why Gansey’s conservative approach to the quest was wrong, but that wasn’t what he said. Instead, he said, “I want to know why you won’t kiss me, and I don’t want a lie this time.”

There was silence. A rotating fan in the corner moved over both of them. The tips of the branches fluttered. The leaves spiraled.

Blue demanded, “That’s what you came here for?”

She was mad. Adam was glad of it. It was worse to be the only person angry.

When he didn’t answer, she kept going, voice ever angrier, “That’s the first conversation you want to have after coming back from D.C.?”

“What does it matter where I came from?”

“Because if I was Ronan or Noah, we’d be talking about — about how the party went. We’d be talking about where you disappeared to and what you wanted to do about that and I don’t know, real, things. Not whether or not you got to kiss me!”

Adam thought it was the most irrelevant response ever, and she still hadn’t answered his question. “Ronan and Noah aren’t my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend!” Blue repeated, and he felt a disconnected thrill to hear her say the word. “How about friend-friend?”

“I thought we were friend-friends.”

“Are we? Friends talk. You go walking to the Pentagon and I find out from Gansey! Your dad’s a jerk and I find out from Gansey! Noah knows everything. Ronan knows everything.”

“They don’t know everything. They know what they were there for. Gansey knows because he was there.”

“Yeah, and why wasn’t I?”

“Why would you be?”

“Because you’d invited me,” Blue said.

The world tilted. He blinked; it straightened. “But there wasn’t any reason for you to be there.”

“Right, sure. Because there’s no girls in politics! I have no interest. Voting? What? I forgot my apron. I think I ought to be in the kitchen right now, actually. My rolling pin —”