The Dream Thieves

It was like hearing the night horrors coming in his dreams. The inevitability of it.

Gansey, very softly, said, “Please.”

Maura sighed.

“Brothers,” said the Gray Man. He did not mean Declan or Matthew. At once the power went out of him. “I don’t care for birds.”

Then, after a moment, “I’m not a kidnapper.”

Maura shot a rather meaningful look at Calla, who pretended not to see it.

“Are you sure your brother will be able to find you?” Gansey asked.

“I’m certain I won’t be able to go home again,” the Gray Man said. “I don’t have many things there, but my books. . . . I would have to stay on the move for quite a while. It took me years to lose him before. And even if I leave, it won’t stop the others. They’re tracking the energy abnormalities, above and beyond what runs through Henrietta, and right now, they point right at him.” He looked at Ronan.

Gansey, who had looked aghast at the idea of the Gray Man having to abandon his books, frowned even deeper.

“Could you dream a Greywaren?” Blue asked Ronan.

“I’m not giving this to anyone else,” Ronan growled. He knew he should be kinder; they were trying to help him, after all. “It’s killing the ley line as it is. You want to see Noah again? I’m stopping.”

But Kavinsky’s not. It would be like standing next to a giant bull’s-eye.

“You could lie,” Calla suggested. “Give them something and tell them it’s the Greywaren and let them think they aren’t clever enough to figure out how to work it.”

“My employer,” said the Gray Man, “is not an understanding man. If he ever discovered or suspected a ruse, it would be very ugly for all of us.”

“What would they do to me?” Ronan asked. To Kavinsky? “If you turned me in?”

“No,” Gansey said, as if replying to an entirely different question.

“No,” the Gray Man agreed.

“Don’t say no,” Ronan insisted. “Fucking tell me. I didn’t say I’d do it. I just want to know.”

The Gray Man took his suitcase to the table, opened it, and laid the gun inside on top of the neatly folded slacks. He closed it. “He is not interested in people. He is interested in things. He will find the thing that makes you work, and he will remove it. He will put it in a glass box with a label and when his guests have had enough wine, he will take them down to where you are and show that thing that was inside you to them. And then they will admire the other things in the other cases beside you.”

When Ronan didn’t flinch — the Gray Man couldn’t know that Ronan would rather do most anything than flinch — he continued, “It’s possible he would make an exception for you. But it would only be that he’d put all of you in the glass box. He is a curator. He will do what he needs to do for his collection.”

Ronan still didn’t flinch.

The Gray Man said, “He told me to kill your father as messily as I could and leave the body where your older brother would find it. So that he would confess to where the Greywaren was.”

For one moment, Ronan didn’t move. It took him that long to realize that the Gray Man was saying he had killed Niall Lynch. Ronan’s mind went perfectly blank. Then he did what had to be done: He hurled himself at the Gray Man. Chainsaw blasted into the air.

“Ronan!” howled approximately three voices at once.

The Gray Man let out a small oof with the ferocity of the hit. Three or four punches landed on his person. It was difficult to tell if it was through skill on Ronan’s part or permissiveness on the Gray Man’s. Then the Gray Man gently threw Ronan across the breakfast table. Teen boys and suitcases sprayed across the linoleum on the other side.

“Mr. — Gray!” shouted Maura, forgetting his fake name in the heat of the moment.

Chainsaw cannonballed toward the Gray Man’s face. As he ducked his eyes against her, Ronan slammed into the Gray Man’s stomach. He somehow managed to include several swear words in the blow. The Gray Man, searching for footing, smacked the back of his head against the doorjamb behind him.

“You must be joking!” This was Calla. “You! Pretty one!” She forgot Gansey’s real name in the heat of the moment. “Stop him!”

“I think this is justified,” Gansey replied.

The Gray Man had Ronan in an indifferent headlock. “I understand,” he told Ronan. “But it wasn’t personal.”

“It. Was. To. Me.”

Ronan slammed one fist into one of the Gray Man’s kneecaps and the other tidily into his crotch. The Gray Man dropped him. The floor rose up to tap Ronan’s temple quite abruptly.

There was a pause, filled only with the sound of two people gasping for air.

Voice muffled by the tile pressed against his cheek, Ronan said, “No matter how much you do for me, I’ll never forgive you.”

The Gray Man, buckled over, braced himself on the doorjamb. He panted, “They never do.”

Ronan heaved himself up. Blue handed him Chainsaw. The Gray Man stood up. Maura handed him his jacket.

The Gray Man wiped a palm on his slacks. He eyed Chainsaw, and then he said, “On the Fourth, unless I think of a better idea, I will call my employer and tell him that I have the Greywaren.”

They all looked at him.

“And then,” the Gray Man said, “I’ll tell him I’m keeping it for myself and he can’t have it.”

There was a long, long pause.

“And then what?” Maura asked.

The Gray Man looked at her. “I run.”

55

Adam drove the tri-colored car as close as he could get to the field where Cabeswater used to be, and when he could drive it no farther, he parked it in the grass and began to walk. Before, when he’d been with the others, they’d used the GPS and the EMF reader to find Cabeswater. He didn’t need that now. He was the detector. If he focused, he could feel the line far below him. It sputtered and flickered, deprived and uneven. Holding his hands out, palms down, he walked slowly through the tall grass, following the trembling energy. Grasshoppers catapulted out of his way. He watched his feet for snakes. Overhead, the smoldering sky gave way to storm clouds on the western horizon. He wasn’t worried about the rain, but lightning — lightning.

Actually, lightning might be useful. He made a note to remember that, later.

He glanced up at the tree line to his right. They hadn’t yet begun to flip their leaves. He had hours before the storm, anyway. He ran his fingers through the stalks.

It had been so long since he had felt like this — like he could devote his thoughts to something other than when he might get to sleep. Like his mind was huge and whirring and hungry. Like anything was possible, if he only threw himself into it hard enough. This had been how he felt before he decided to go to Aglionby.

World, I’m coming.

He wished he had thought to bring a set of tarot cards from 300 Fox Way. Something that Cabeswater could use to more easily communicate with him. Maybe later he could return for them. Now — it seemed more urgent to return to this place where the ley line was the strongest.

I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.

This was the bargain he had made. And in return, he could feel Cabeswater in him. Cabeswater couldn’t offer him eyes or hands. But it was something else. Something he wanted to name life or soul or knowledge.

It was an old sort of power.

Adam walked out and out beneath the growing purple thunderheads. Something in him said ahhh and ahhh and ahhh again, relieved over and over that he was himself again, himself and something more, that he was alone and didn’t have to worry about hurting or wanting anyone else.

He walked to the tiny stream that used to lead into Cabeswater and now led only to more field. Kneeling, he hovered his hands over the trickle of water. There was no one to see him, but he smiled anyway, bigger and bigger. Because the first time they’d been at this stream, Gansey had been holding an EMF reader over the water and watching the flashing red lights. He’d been so excited by those lights — they’d found something, the machine told them they’d found something!

And now Adam felt it in his hands. He felt it in his spine. He could see it mapped in his brain. The ley line traveled beneath him, waves of energy, but it detoured here, snagged and conducted through the water, traveling upward to the surface. It was only a small stream, only a small crack in the bedrock, so this was only a small leak.

Thunder rumbled, reminding Adam of time’s passage. He straightened and followed the stream upward through the rising field. The ley line strengthened inside him, tripping his heart, but he kept going. Cabeswater was not here now, but his memory of walking through it the first time was nearly as clear as experiencing it again. Here was where they’d had to climb between two rocks to follow the stream. Here was where the trees had begun to grow larger in diameter, big knuckles of roots bursting from the forest floor. Here the moss furred the trunks.

And here was the pool and the dreaming tree. The first place Cabeswater had changed itself for Gansey, and the first place magic had truly revealed itself to all of them.

He hesitated. His vision in the dreaming tree pressed into his mind. Gansey on the ground, dying. Ronan, furious with grief, spitting at Adam, “Are you happy now, Adam? This is what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

That wasn’t going to happen now. He’d changed his future. He’d chosen a different way.

Thunder guttered and popped distantly. With a deep breath to steel himself, Adam waded through the grass to where the dreaming tree had been— would be — was still? No vision overcame him, but he felt the surge of the ley line beneath his feet.

Yes, this was where he needed to be. Crouching, he parted the grass and pressed his palms to the soil. It was hot, like a living body. He closed his eyes.

He felt the course of the ley line stretching out on either side of him. Hundreds of miles one way, hundreds of miles the other. There were distant starbursts where the line intersected with other lines, and for a moment, he was dazzled by them. By the possibility of endless wonders. Glendower was miracle enough, but if there was a miracle on each line that he felt, it was enough miracles for a lifetime, if only you had the patience to look.

Oh, Gansey, he thought suddenly. Because Gansey had the patience to look. And because things wanted Gansey to find them. He should have been here, now.

No. It wouldn’t work like this if he was here. You have to be alone for this.

Adam pulled his mind away from Gansey and from those intersections, focusing instead on only the ley line beneath him. He raced along it, following the peaks and valleys of energy. Here it spurted up through an underground river. Escaped through an earthquake-shocked bedrock. Burst up through a well. Exploded through a transformer.

No wonder it was so drained by the dreaming. It was a frayed wire, energy leaking at a hundred different points.

“I feel it,” he whispered.

The wind hissed through the grass around him. He opened his eyes.

If he could repair those points, like electrician’s tape on a wire, he might be able to make it strong enough to bring Cabeswater back.