The Dream Thieves

“Beware of anyone promising you help now,” Persephone said. “Inside yourself, it’s only you who can help you.”

They began.

At first he was aware only of the candles. The thin, high flicker of the true candles, and the twisted, circuitous burning of the candles in the mirrored glass. Then, a drop of water seemed to plunge from the darkness above him. It should have splashed on the glass, but instead it pierced the surface easily.

It landed in a tumbler of water. One of the chunky, cheap ones that used to fill his mother’s cabinets. This one was in Adam’s hand. Just as he was about to drink, he caught a flash of movement. He had no time to brace himself before light — sound —

His father hit him.

“Wait —!” Adam said, explaining, always about to explain, as he struck the faded counter of their kitchen.

It should have been done by now, the punch, but he seemed to be trapped inside it. He was the boy, the blow, the counter, the flaring anger that drove it all.

This lived in him. This punch, the first time his father had ever hit him, was always being thrown somewhere in his head.

Cabeswater, Adam thought.

He was released from the punch. As the tumbler crashed on the floor, too sturdy to smash, the drop of water slid out and began to fall again. This time it plummeted into a still, mirrored pool surrounded by trees. Blackness crept between the trees, lush and dark and living.

Adam had been here before.

Cabeswater.

Was he really here, or was it a dream? Did it make a difference to Cabeswater?

This place — he smelled the damp earth beneath fallen branches, heard the sound of insects working themselves under rotting bark, felt the same breeze touch his hair that breathed on the leaves overhead.

In the night water at Adam’s feet, red fish circled. They mouthed the ripples where the droplet had broken the surface. The movement drew his eye to the dreaming tree on the opposite shore. It looked just as it had before: a massive old oak with a rotted cavern inside it, big enough to admit a person. Months ago, Adam had stood inside the tree and had a terrible vision of the future. Gansey, dying because of him.

Adam heard a groan. It was the woman he’d seen in his apartment, the very first spirit. She wore a pale, old-fashioned dress.

“Do you know what Cabeswater wants?” he asked.

Leaning against the rugged bark of the dreaming tree, the woman pressed the back of her hand against her forehead in distress. “Auli! Greywaren furis al. Lovi ne . . .”

It wasn’t Latin. Adam said, “I don’t understand.”

Beside her, suddenly, was the man with the bowler hat, the one Adam had glimpsed at the Gansey mansion. The man begged, “E me! Greywaren furis al.”

“I’m sorry,” Adam said.

Another spirit appeared, hand outstretched to him. And another. And another. All of the flashes he had seen, a dozen figures. Incomprehensible.

A small voice at his elbow said, “I will translate for you.”

He turned to see a small girl in a black frock. She was not unlike a miniature Persephone: mountainous white hair spun like cotton candy, narrow face, black eyes. She took his hand. Hers was very cold, and a little damp.

He shivered warily. “Will you translate truthfully?”

Her tiny fingers were tight on his. He had not seen her before, he was certain. Of all of the flashes and visions he’d had since making the sacrifice, she’d not been one of them. She was so like Persephone, but twisted.

“No,” he said. “I can only help myself.”

She tipped her head back, angry. “You’re already dead in here.” Before he could pull away, she clawed her other hand down his wrist. Three sharp lines of blood welled up. He could taste it, like she had torn his tongue instead.

It was like a bad dream.

No. If this was like a dream, if Cabeswater was like a dream, it meant it was all in his control, if he chose it. Adam shook himself free. He wasn’t going to give his mind away.

“Cabeswater,” he said out loud. “Tell me what you need.”

He reached into the pool. It was cold and insubstantial, like sliding his hand against sheets. Carefully, he scooped out the the single drop of water he’d followed into the vision. It tipped back and forth in his palm, rolling along his life line.

He hesitated. On the other side of this moment, he knew, there was something that would separate him from the others forever. How much, he didn’t know. But he would have been somewhere they hadn’t. He would be something they weren’t.

But he already was.

And then he was in the drop of water. No longer did Cabeswater need to reach out to him through apparitions. He didn’t need the clumsy flickers in his vision. No desperate pleas for his attention.

He was Cabeswater, and he was the dreaming tree, and he was every oak with roots digging through rocks, looking for energy and hope. He felt the suck and pulse of the ley line through him — what a crass, mundane term for it, ley line, now that he’d felt it. He could remember every other name for it now, and they all seemed more fitting. Fairy roads. Spirit paths. Song lines. The old tracks. Dragon lines. Dream paths.

The corpse roads.

The energy flickered and sputtered through him, less like electricity and more like remembering a secret. It was strong, allencompassing, and then fading, waiting. Sometimes he was nothing but it, and sometimes, it was nearly forgotten.

And beneath it all, he felt the oldness of Cabeswater. The strangeness. There was something true and inhuman at its core. It had been there so many centuries before him, and it would exist for centuries after. In the relative scheme of things, Adam Parrish was irrelevant. He was such a small thing, just a whorl in the fingerprint of a massive being —

I didn’t agree to give my thoughts away.

He would be Cabeswater’s hands and Cabeswater’s eyes, but he wouldn’t be Cabeswater.

He would be Adam Parrish.

He sat back.

He was in the reading room. A drop of water sat on top of the framed photograph. Across from him, Persephone dabbed three bloody scratches on her wrist; her sleeve had been ripped through.

Everything in the room looked different to Adam. He just wasn’t sure how. It was like — like he’d adjusted the aspect on his television, from wide screen to normal.

He didn’t know how he’d thought before that Persephone’s eyes were black. Every color combined to make black.

“They won’t understand,” Persephone said. She laid her deck of tarot cards on the table in front of him. “They didn’t when I came back.”

“Am I different?” he asked.

“You were different before,” Persephone replied. “But now they won’t be able to stop noticing.”

Adam touched the tarot cards. It seemed a very long time ago that he’d looked at the deck on the table. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

“Knock on them,” she whispered. “Three times. They like that. Then shuffle them. And then hold them to your heart.”

He softly rapped his knuckles on the deck, shuffled the cards, and then grasped the oversized deck. When he held it to his chest, the cards felt warm, like a living creature. They hadn’t felt like that before.

“Now ask them a question.”

Adam closed his eyes.

What now?

“Put down four of them,” Persephone said. “No, three. Three. Past, present, future. Face up.”

Carefully, Adam laid three cards on the table. The art in Persephone’s deck was dark, smudgy, barely visible in this dim light. The figures on them seemed to move. He read the words at the bottom of each:

The Tower. The Hanged Man. Nine of swords.

Persephone pursed her lips.

Adam’s eyes drifted from the first card, where men fell from a burning tower, to the second, where a man hung upside down from a tree. And then to the last, where a man wept into his hands. That third card, that utter despair. He couldn’t take his gaze from it.

Adam said, “It looks like he’s woken from a nightmare.”

It looks, he thought, like I will, if the vision from the dreaming tree comes true.

When Adam lifted his eyes to Persephone, he was certain she was seeing the same things he was seeing. He could tell from the flattening of her lips, the remorse in her eyes. The room stretched out around them, black and limitless. A cave or an old forest or a flat, mirror-black lake. The future kept being a something Adam was thrown into: a quest, a sacrifice, the dead face of a best friend.

“No,” Adam said softly.

Persephone echoed, “No?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Maybe this is the future. But it’s not the end.”

Persephone said, “Are you sure?”

There was a note to her voice that hadn’t been there before. Adam thought about it. He thought about the warm feeling to the deck of cards, and how he’d asked that question what now and they had given him this terrible answer. He thought about how he could still hear the sound of Persephone’s voice echoing all around him, although it should have disappeared into the close walls of this reading room. He thought about how he had been Cabeswater and felt the corpse road snaking through him.

He said, “I am. I’m — I’m pulling another card.”

He hesitated, waiting for her to tell him it wasn’t allowed. But she just waited. Adam cut the deck, laid his hand on each stack. He took the card that felt warmer.

Flipping it, he placed the card beside the nine of swords.

A robed figure stood before a coin, a goblet, a sword, a wand — all of the symbols of all the tarot suits. An infinity symbol floated above his head; one arm was lifted in a posture of power. Yes, thought Adam. Understanding prickled and then evaded him.

He read the words at the bottom of the card.

The Magician.

Persephone let out a long, long breath and began to laugh. It was a relieved laugh that sounded as if she’d been running.

“Adam,” she said, “finish your pie.”

51

Blue had indeed cut herself.

After Adam had gone into the reading room, she’d experimentally opened the switchblade and it had obligingly attacked her. It was just a scratch, really. It barely warranted a Band-Aid, but she put one on anyway.

She did not feel like Blue Sargent, superhero, or Blue Sargent, desperado, or Blue Sargent, badass.

Maybe she shouldn’t have told the truth.

Even though it had been hours since the fight, her heart still felt jittery. Like it wasn’t attached to anything and every time it beat, it rattled around in her chest cavity. She kept replaying their words. She shouldn’t have lost her temper; she should have told him at the very beginning; she should have —

Anything but how it happened.

Why couldn’t I have fallen in love with him?

He was sleeping now, thrown across the couch, lips parted in unselfconscious exhaustion. Persephone had informed Blue that she expected him to sleep for sixteen to eighteen hours after the ritual, and that he might experience light nausea or vomiting once he woke. Maura, Persephone, and Calla sat at the kitchen table, heads together, debating. Every so often, Blue heard snatches of conversation: should have done it sooner and but he needed to accept it!