The Dream Thieves

He just leaned his cheek and the edge of his mouth against her knuckles and then set her hand back in her lap.

“I know,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

Her skin burned with the memory of his mouth. The thrashing bird of her heart shivered and shivered again. “Thanks for remembering.”

He looked back over the valley. “Oh, Jane.”

“Oh, Jane, what?”

“He didn’t want me to, did you know? He told me not to try to get you to come to the table that night at Nino’s. I had to talk him into it. And then I made such an idiot of myself—” He turned back to her. “What are you thinking?”

She just looked at him. That I went out with the wrong boy. That I destroyed Adam tonight for no reason at all. That I am not sensible at all — “I thought you were an asshole.”

Gallantly, he said, “Thank God for past tense.” Then: “I can’t — we can’t do this to him.”

It was jagged inside her. “I’m not a thing. To have.”

“No, Jesus. Of course you’re not. But you know what I mean.”

She did. And he was right. They couldn’t do this to him. She shouldn’t do it to herself, anyway. But how it made a disaster of her chest and her mouth and her head.

“I wish you could be kissed, Jane,” he said. “Because I would beg just one off you. Under all this.” He flailed an arm toward the stars. “And then we’d never say anything about it again.”

That could’ve been the end of it.

I want something more.

She said, “We can pretend. Just once. And then we’ll never say anything about it again.”

What a strange, shifting person he was. The Gansey who turned to her now was a world away from the lofty boy she’d first met. Without any hesitation, she stretched her arms around his neck. Who was this Blue? She felt bigger than her body. High as the stars. He leaned toward her — her heart spun again — and pressed his cheek against hers. His lips didn’t touch her skin, but she felt his breath, hot and uneven, on her face. His fingers splayed on either side of her spine. Her lips were so close to his jaw that she felt his hint of stubble at the end of them. It was mint and memories and the past and the future and she felt as if she’d done this before and already she longed to do it again.

Oh, help, she thought. Help, help, help.

He pulled away. He said, “And now we never speak of it again.”

52

That night, after Gansey had gone to meet Blue, Ronan retrieved one of Kavinsky’s green pills from his stillunwashed pair of jeans and returned to bed. Propped up in the corner, he stretched out his hand to Chainsaw, but she ignored him. She had stolen a cheese cracker and now was very busily stacking things on top of it to make sure Ronan would never take it back. Although she kept glancing back at his outstretched hand, she pretended not to see it as she added a bottle cap, an envelope, and a sock to the pile hiding the cracker.

“Chainsaw,” he said. Not sharply, but like he meant it. Recognizing his tone, she soared to the bed. She didn’t generally enjoy petting, but she turned her head left and right as Ronan softly traced the small feathers on either side of her beak. How much energy had it taken from the ley line to create her, he wondered? Was it more to take out a person? A car?

Ronan’s phone buzzed. He tilted it to read the incoming text: your mom calls me after we spend the day together Ronan let the phone fall back to the bedspread. Ordinarily, seeing Kavinsky’s name light up his phone gave him a strange sense of urgency, but not tonight. Not after spending so many hours with him. Not after dreaming the Camaro. He needed to process all of this first.

ask me what my first dream was

Chainsaw pecked irritably at the buzzing phone. She’d learned a lot from Ronan. He rolled the green pill in his hand. He wouldn’t take anything out of his dreams tonight. Not knowing what they were doing to the ley line. But it didn’t mean he couldn’t still choose what to dream of.

my favorite forgery is Prokopenko

Ronan put the pill back in his pocket. He felt warm and sleepy and just — fine. For once, he felt fine. Sleep didn’t feel like a weapon tucked inside his brain. He knew he could choose to dream of the Barns now, if he tried, but he didn’t want to dream of something that existed in this world.

I’m going to eat you alive man

Ronan closed his eyes. He thought: My father. My father. My father. And when he opened his eyes again, the old trees roamed

upward all around him. The sky was black and star-full overhead. Everything smelled of hickory smoke and boxwood, grass seed and lemon cleaner.

And there was his father, sitting in the charcoal BMW he had dreamt all those years ago. He was an image of Ronan, and also of Declan, and also of Matthew. A handsome devil with one eye the color of a promise and the other the color of a secret. When he saw Ronan, he rolled down the window.

“Ronan,” he said.

It sounded like he meant to say Finally.

“Dad,” Ronan said.

He was going to say I missed you. But he had been missing

Niall Lynch for as long as he knew him.

A grin cracked over his father’s face. He had the widest smile in the world, and he’d given it to his youngest son. “You figured it out,” he said. He held a finger to his lips. “Remember?”

Music wafted out the open window of the BMW that had been Niall Lynch’s but was now Ronan’s. A soaring bit of tune played by the uilleann pipes, dissipating into the trees.

“I know,” Ronan replied. “Tell me what you meant in the will.”

His father said, “T’Libre vero-e ber nivo libre n’acrea.”

This Will stands as fact unless a newer document is created.

“It’s a loophole,” his father said. “A loophole for thieves.”

“Is that a lie?” Ronan asked.

Because Niall Lynch was the biggest liar of them all, and he’d stuffed all of that into his eldest son. There was not much difference between a lie and a secret.

“I never lie to you.”

His father started the BMW and flashed his slow smile at Ronan. What a grin he had, what ferocious eyes, what a creature he was. He had dreamt himself an entire life and death.

Ronan said, “I want to go back.”

“Then take it,” said his father. “You know how now.”

And Ronan did. Because Niall Lynch was a forest fire, a rising sea, a car crash, a closing curtain, a blistering symphony, a catalyst with planets inside him.

And he had given all of that to his middle son.

Niall Lynch reached his hand out. He clasped Ronan’s in his own. The engine was revving; even while holding Ronan’s hand, his foot was already on the gas pedal, on the way to the next place.

“Ronan,” he said.

And it sounded like he meant to say Wake up After the house had gone quiet, Blue got into bed and pulled the blanket over her face. Sleep was nowhere. Her mind was full of Adam’s dull expression, Ronan’s invented Camaro, and Gansey’s breath on her cheek.

Her mind took the memory of mint and spun it into a related memory of him, one that Gansey didn’t have yet: the first time she had ever seen him. Not at Nino’s when he asked her out on Adam’s behalf. But that night in the churchyard when all of the spirits of the future dead walked past. One year— that was the longest that any of those spirits had. They would all be dead before the next St. Mark’s Eve.

She had seen her first spirit: a boy in an Aglionby sweater, the shoulders of it spattered darkly with rain.

“What’s your name?”

“Gansey.”

She couldn’t make it untrue.

Downstairs, Calla’s voice suddenly swelled angrily. “Well, I will break the damn thing myself if I find you using it again.”

“Tyrant!” Maura shot back.

Persephone’s voice murmured amiably, too low for eavesdropping.

Blue closed her eyes, tight. She saw Gansey’s spirit. One hand braced in the dirt. She felt his breath. His hands pressed into her back.

Sleep didn’t come.

A few amorphous minutes later, Maura knocked the pads of her fingers on Blue’s open door. “Sleeping?”

“Always,” Blue replied.

Her mother climbed into Blue’s narrow bed. She jerked at the pillow until Blue allowed her a few inches of it. Then she lay down behind Blue, mother and daughter like spoons in a drawer. Blue closed her eyes again, inhaling the soft clove scent of her mother and the fading mint of Gansey.

After a moment, Maura asked, “Are you crying?”

“Only a little.”

“Why?”

“Generalized sadness.”

“Are you sad? Did something bad happen?”

“Not yet.”

“Ah, Blue.” Her mother wrapped her arms around her and breathed into the hair at the base of Blue’s neck. Blue thought about what Gansey had said, about being wealthy in love. And she thought about Adam, still collapsed on their sofa downstairs. If he had no one to wrap their arms around him when he was sad, could he be forgiven for letting his anger lead him?

Blue asked, “Are you crying?”

“Only a little,” her mother said, and inhaled snottily and unbecomingly.

“Why?”

“Generalized sadness.”

“Are you sad? Did something bad happen?”

“Not yet. A long time ago.”

“Those are the opposite,” Blue said.

Maura sniffed again. “Not really.”

Blue wiped her eyes with her pillowcase. “Tears don’t become us.”

Her mother wiped her eyes on the shoulder of Blue’s T-shirt. “You’re right. What becomes us?”

“Action.”

Maura laughed softly under her breath.

How terrible it would be, Blue thought, her mind on Adam again, to not have a mother who loved you?

“Yes,” she agreed. “How wise you are, Blue.”

On the other side of Henrietta, the Gray Man answered his phone. It was Greenmantle.

Without any particular preamble, he said, “Dean Allen.” The Gray Man, phone in one hand, book in the other, didn’t immediately respond. He set his tattered edition of Anglo-Saxon riddles facedown on the side table. The television prattled in the background; one spy met another on a bridge. They were exchanging hostages. They’d been told to come alone. They hadn’t come alone.

It was taking an unexpectedly long period of time for the Gray Man to register the meaning of Greenmantle’s words. Then, once that had sunk in, it took him even longer to understand why Greenmantle was saying them.

“That’s right,” Greenmantle said. “The mystery’s gone. It wasn’t that hard to figure out who you were. Turns out AngloSaxon poetry is a very small field. Even at the undergrad level. And you know how well I do with undergrads.”

The Gray Man hadn’t been Dean Allen for a very long time. It was harder than one might expect to abandon an identity, but the Gray Man was more patient and devoted than most. Usually, one traded one identity for another, but the Gray Man wanted to be no one. Nowhere.

He touched the weathered spine of the riddle book. ic eom wrætlic wiht on gewin sceapen