The Dream Thieves

Adam stood up. It felt good to have identified the problem. That had always been the hardest part. With an engine, with school, with life. Solutions were easy, once you knew what was in your way.

Cabeswater murmured urgently. The voices tickled inside him and crackled in the corners of his eyes.

Wait, he thought. He wished he had the cards. Something to focus his thoughts on what Cabeswater was trying to say. I won’t be able to understand you. Wait until I can understand you.

As he looked back down the hill, he saw a woman approaching. He shielded his eyes with his hand. At first he thought she was one of Cabeswater’s manifestations. Certainly she seemed whimsical and imaginary from this distance — a great cumulonimbus of hair, a gray frock, boots up her entire leg.

But then he saw that she had a shadow and form and mass, and that she was a little out of breath.

Persephone climbed up to meet him and then stood with her hands on her hips. She turned in a slow circle, looking at the view, blowing out her breath.

“Why are you here?” he asked her. Was she here to bring him back? To tell him he was wrong to be so sure?

She grinned at him, a strangely impish, child-like expression. He thought of what a cruel mockery that mirror-version of her had been, the terrible child-creature from his ritual before. Nothing like this airy, whisper of a person in front of him now. Unzipping her butterfly handbag, she retrieved a black silk bag from inside. It was the sort of fabric that you wanted to touch, smooth and shimmery and floaty. It seemed to be the only thing inside the handbag.

“You left, Adam, before I could give you these,” she said, offering the smaller silk bag.

Adam accepted it, feeling its weight. Whatever was inside was vaguely warm, as if it, like the hill, were alive. “What is it?”

After he asked, he thought suddenly about how she had taken care to say his name just before. It could have been nothing. But it felt as if she were reminding him of what it was.

Adam. Adam Parrish.

He slid the contents of the bag into his other hand. A word leapt out at him.

Magician.

Persephone said, “My tarot cards.”

hey Lynch I didn’t leave that car for it to just sit while you blow III

The Gray Man checked out of Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast and placed his suitcase just inside the door of Maura’s bedroom. He didn’t unpack it. It was not that

long until the Fourth. There was no point.

Calla said, “Give me some poetry, and I’ll make you a drink.” The Gray Man said, “ ‘Our hearts must grow resolute, our

courage more valiant, our spirits must be great, though our strength grows less.’ ”

Then he did it in the original Old English.

Calla made him a drink.

Then Maura made something with butter and Calla made something with bacon and Blue steamed broccoli in self-defense. In the rest of the house, Jimi got ready for her night shift and Orla answered the ever-ringing psychic hotline. The Gray Man got underfoot trying to be helpful. He understood that this was an ordinary night at 300 Fox Way, all of this noise and commotion and disorder. It was a senseless sort of dance, artful and confused. Blue and Maura had their own orbit; Maura and Calla another. He watched Maura’s bare feet circle on the kitchen floor.

It was the opposite of everything he had cultivated for the past five years.

How he wanted to stay.

This isn’t a life for what you are, he told himself.

But for tonight, he would pretend.

At dinner, Calla said, “So, what’s next?” She was only eating the foods with bacon in them.

Blue, who was only eating broccoli, answered, “I guess we have to find a way to make Joseph Kavinsky stop dreaming.”

“Well,” Maura asked. “What does he want?”

Blue shrugged from behind her mountain of broccoli. “What does a drug addict want? Nothing.”

Maura frowned over her plate of butter. “Sometimes everything.”

“Either way,” Blue replied, “I can’t see how we can offer that.”

The Gray Man politely interjected, “I could talk to him this evening for you.”

Blue stabbed a piece of broccoli. “Sounds great.”

Maura gave her a look. “What she means to say is, no thanks.”

“No,” Blue said, brows beetled, “I meant to say, and can you make him feel worthless while you do?”

“Blue Sargent!” Maura looked shocked. “I didn’t raise you to be violent!”

Calla, who’d inhaled some bacon while laughing, clutched the table until she stopped choking.

“No,” Blue said dangerously. “But sometimes bad things happen to good children.”

The Gray Man was amused. “The offer stands until I go.”

The phone rang. Upstairs, they heard the sound of Orla scrambling desperately for it. With a pleasant smile, Maura snatched the downstairs extension and listened for a moment.

“What an excellent idea. It will be harder to trace,” Maura told the phone. To the table, she said, “Gansey has a Mitsubishi that Mr. Gray can take instead of his rental. Oh, he says it was actually Ronan’s idea.”

The gesture warmed the Gray Man considerably. The reality of his escape was far more difficult than he’d admitted to any of them. There was a car to worry about, money for food, money for gas. He had left a dirty pot in the sink at his home back in Massachusetts, and he would think about it forever.

It would help if he didn’t have to steal the Champagne Disappointment. He was gifted at car theft, but he longed for simplicity.

To the phone, Maura said: “No — no, Adam’s not here. He’s with Persephone, I believe. I’m sure he’s all right. Would you like to talk to Blue? No —?”

Blue’s head ducked to her plate. She stabbed another piece of broccoli.

Maura hung up the phone. She looked narrowly at Blue. “Did you two fight again?”

Blue muttered, “Yep. Definitely.”

“I can have a talk with him as well,” the Gray Man offered.

“I’m good,” she replied. “But thanks. My mother didn’t raise me to be violent.”

“Neither,” observed the Gray Man, “did mine.”

He ate his broccoli and butter and bacon and Maura ate her butter and Calla ate her bacon.

It was another frenzied dance to clean up after dinner and fight for showers and television and who got which chair. Maura gently took the Gray Man’s hand and led him to the backyard instead. Under the black, spreading branches of the beech tree, they kissed until the mosquitos became relentless and the rain began to fall.

Later, as they lay in her bed, his phone buzzed a call, and this time it went to voicemail. Somehow, he always knew it would end this way.

“Hey, Dean,” said his brother. His voice was slow, easy, patient. The Allen brothers were alike, that way. “Henrietta is a pretty little place, isn’t it?”

58

Hurry.”

Persephone and Adam didn’t speak much through that night, or as the pugilistic sun rose the next morning, and when they did, it was usually that word: hurry. They had already driven to a dozen other locations to repair the ley line, some as far as two hours away, and now they pushed their way back into Henrietta.

Now, Adam knelt beside a diseased rose in another backyard. His already grubby hands pressed against the dirt, digging to find the stone he knew was hidden somewhere beneath. Persephone, standing watch, glanced at the rambler on the other side of the yard.

“Hurry,” she said once more. Fourth of July was already hot and unforgiving. A bank of clouds moved slowly behind the mountains, and already Adam knew how the day would go: The heat would build and build, until it snapped in another cacophonous summer thunderstorm.

Lightning.

Adam’s fingers found the stone. It was the same at every fray in the line: a stone or a body of water that confused and diffused the ley line’s direction. Sometimes Adam had only to turn a stone to feel the ley line immediately snap into place, clean as a light switch. Other times, though, he had to experiment by moving more stones into the area, or removing a stone entirely, or digging a trench to redirect a stream. Sometimes neither he nor Persephone could understand what they needed to do, and then they would draw out one or two of the tarot cards. Persephone helped him see what the cards were trying to say. Three of wands: build a bridge across the stream with these three stones. Seven of swords: Just dig out the biggest of the stones and put it in the tricolored car.

Using the tarot cards was like when he had begun learning Latin. He danced ever closer to that moment when he would understand the sentences without having to translate each word.

He was exhausted and awake, euphoric and anxious.

Hurry.

What was it that made these stones special? He didn’t know. Not yet. Somehow, they were like the rocks at Stonehenge and Castlerigg. Something about them conducted the ley line’s force and dragged the energy out of line.

“Adam,” Persephone said again. There was no sign of a car, but she frowned at the road. Her fingers were as dirty as his; her delicate gray frock was stained. She looked like a doll dug from a landfill. “Hurry.”

This stone was larger than he expected. Twelve inches across, maybe, and who knew how deep. There was no way to get to it without digging up the rose. Hurriedly, he snatched a spade lying beside him. He spiked the dirt, twisted out the deformed rose, tossed it aside. His palms sweated.

“Sorry,” Persephone suggested.

“Pardon?”

She murmured, “You should say sorry when you kill something.”

It took him a moment to realize she meant the rose. “It was dying anyway.”

“Dying and dead are different words.”

Shamed, Adam muttered an apology before sticking the tip of the spade beneath the stone. It came free. Persephone turned a questioning look to him.

“We take this one,” he said immediately. She nodded. It went in the backseat with the others.

They had only just headed back down the street when another car pulled into the driveway they’d just abandoned.

Close.

Multiple stones were stacked in the tri-colored car now, but this latest one pressed into Adam’s consciousness more than the others. It would be useful, with the lightning, he thought. For . . . something. For concentrating the ley line into Cabeswater. For . . . making a gate.

Hurry.

“Why now?” he asked her. “Why are all these parts frayed?”

She didn’t look up from her task, which was laying cards on the dashboard. The smudgy, inked art looked like thoughts instead of images. “It’s not just fraying now. It’s only that it’s more obvious with the greater current running through it. Like a wire. In the past, priestesses would’ve taken care of the line. Maintained it. Just like we’re doing now.”

“Like Stonehenge,” he said.

“That’s a very large and cliché example, yes,” she answered softly. She glanced up at the sky. The clouds at the horizon had gotten just a little closer since he’d last looked; they were still white, but they were beginning to pile on top of one another.

“I wonder,” he said, more to himself than to her, “what it would be like if all the ley lines were repaired.”