The Dream Thieves (11 page)

T
hat night, Ronan dreamt of trees.

It was a massive old forest, oaks and sycamores pushing up through the cold mountain soil. Leaves skittered in the breeze. Ronan could feel the size of the mountain under his feet. The oldness of it. Far below there was a heartbeat that wrapped around the world, slower and stronger and more inexorable than Ronan’s own.

He had been here before, lots of times. He’d grown up with this recurring dream forest. Its roots were tangled in his veins.

The air moved around him, and in it, he heard his name.

Ronan Lynch Ronan Lynch Ronan Lynch

There was no one there but Ronan, the trees, and the things the trees dreamt of.

He danced on the knife’s edge between awareness and sleep. When he dreamt like this, he was a king. The world was his to bend. His to burn.

Ronan Lynch, Greywaren, tu es Greywaren.

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. The word
Greywaren
made his skin prickle.

“Girl?” he said.

And there she was, peering cautiously from behind a tree. When Ronan had first dreamt of her, she’d had long honey-blond hair, but after a few years it changed to a close-cropped pixie cut, mostly hidden by a white skullcap. Although he had aged, she had not. For some reason she reminded Ronan of the old black-and-white photos of laborers in New York City. She had the same sort of forlorn, orphan look. Her presence made it easier to pull things from his dreams.

He reached a hand toward her, but she didn’t immediately emerge. She peered around fearfully. Ronan couldn’t fault her. There were terrifying things in his head.

“Come on.” He didn’t yet know what he wanted to take from this dream, but he knew that he was so alive and aware in it that it would be easy. But Orphan Girl remained out of reach, her fingers clinging to the bark.

“Ronan, manus vestras!”
she said.
Ronan, your hands!

His skin shivered and crawled, and he realized it was crawling with hornets, the ones that had killed Gansey all those years ago. There weren’t many this time, only a few hundred. Sometimes he dreamt cars full of them, houses full of them, worlds full of them. Sometimes these hornets killed Ronan, too, in his dreams.

But not tonight. Not when he was the most poisonous thing in these trees. Not when his sleep was clay in his fingers.

They aren’t hornets
, he thought.

And they weren’t. When he lifted his hands, his fingers were coated with crimson ladybugs, each as vivid as a blood drop. They whirled into the air with their acrid summer scent. Every wing was a buzzing voice in a simple language.

Orphan Girl, ever a coward, emerged only after they were gone. She and Ronan moved from one part of the forest to the next. She hummed a refrain of a pop song over and over again as the trees murmured overhead.

Ronan Lynch, loquere pro nobis.

Speak for us.

Suddenly, he faced a striated rock nearly as tall as he was. Thorns and berries grew at its base. It was familiar in a way that was too solid to be a dream, and Ronan felt a ripple of uncertainty. Was this a dream he was in now, or was it a memory? Was this really happening?

“You’re sleeping,” the girl reminded him in English.

He clung to her words, a king again. Facing the rock, he knew what he was meant to do — what he had
already
done. He knew it would hurt.

The girl turned her narrow face away as Ronan seized the thorns and the berries. Every thorn prick was a hornet sting, threatening to wake him. He crushed them until his fingers were dark with juice and blood, dark as the ink on his back. He slowly traced words on the rock:

Arbores loqui latine
. The trees speak Latin.

“You’ve done this before,” she said.

Time was a circle, a rut, a worn tape Ronan never tired of playing.

The voices whispered to him:
Gratias tibi ago.
Thank you.

The girl said, “Don’t forget the glasses!”

Ronan followed her gaze. Between the flowers and broken vines and fallen leaves was a gleaming white object. When he plucked it free, Kavinsky’s sunglasses looked back at him, eyeless. He ran his thumb over the smooth surface of the plastic, fogged his breath over the tinted lenses. He did it until he could feel even the etched circle of the tiny screw in the earpiece. Dream to memory to reality.

He lifted his eyes to the girl. She looked afraid. She always looked afraid, these days. The world was a scary place.

She said: “Take me with you.”

He woke up.

That night, the Gray Man dreamt of being stabbed.

At first he felt each individual wound. Particularly that first one. He was unbroken and entire, and then that wholeness was stolen by that thief, the knife. So that piercing was the worst. A half inch above his left collarbone, pinning him to the ground for half a breath.

Then, again, but closer to the knob of his shoulder, glancing off his collarbone. And then two inches below his belly button. The word
gut
was a verb and a noun. Another cut and another cut. Slippery.

Then the Gray Man was the assailant. The hilt of the knife was ridged and permanent in his hand. He’d been stabbing this piece of meat for a lifetime. He’d been born when it started and he’d die when he was done. It was the bite that kept him alive: the moment the blade parted a new inch of skin. The resistance and then nothing. Catch and release.

Then the Gray Man was the knife. He was a blade in the air, gasping, and then he was a weapon inside, holding his breath. He was voracious, chewing, never satisfied. Hunger was a species, and he was the best of that kind.

The Gray Man opened his eyes.

He looked at the clock.

He rolled over and went back to sleep.

That night, Adam didn’t dream.

Curled on the mattress, he covered his face with his summer-hot arm. Sometimes, if he blocked his mouth and nose, just this side of suffocation, sleep would overthrow him.

But both regret and the memory of the brief apparition kept slumber at bay. The wrongness, the deadness, of the woman still hung in the air of the room. Or maybe inside him.
What did I do?

He was awake enough to think of home —
It’s not home, it was never home, those people didn’t exist, and if they did, they were nothing to you —
and to think of Blue’s face when he lost his temper. He was awake enough to recall precisely the smell of the forest as he sacrificed himself. He was awake enough to wonder if he’d been making bad decisions for his entire life. If he’d been a bad decision, himself, even before he was born.

He wished summer was over. At least when he was at Aglionby he could turn over his papers to see the grades, concrete proof of his success at
something.

He was awake enough to think of the invitation from Gansey.
There might be an internship in there
. Adam knew it was a favor. Did that make it wrong? He’d said no for so long that he didn’t know when to say yes.

And maybe
, a tiny, watchful part of his mind said,
maybe it will be for nothing anyway. When they smell the Henrietta dirt beneath your fingernails.

He hated the careful way Gansey had asked him about it. Tiptoeing, just like Adam had learned to tiptoe around his father. He needed a reset button. Just push the reset button on Adam Parrish and start him again.

He didn’t sleep, and when he did, he didn’t dream.

T
he following morning, Blue was perusing school summer reading when her aunt Jimi brought a plate full of smoldering plant matter through her bedroom. Jimi, Orla’s mother, was as tall as Orla, but several times wider. She had all of Orla’s grace, too, which was to say that she knocked her hips into every piece of furniture in Blue’s room. Every time she did, she said things like “mother lover!” and “fasten it
all
.” They sounded worse than real swear words.

Blue lifted her bleary eyes from the page, her nostrils smarting from the smoke. “What are you doing?”

“Smudging,” Jimi answered. She held the plate in front of the canvas trees Blue had stuck to her walls and blew on the bound herbs to direct the smoke at the art. “That terrible woman left so much bad energy.”

The terrible woman was Neeve, Blue’s half aunt, who had disappeared earlier that year after practicing black magic in their attic. And smudging was the practice of using the smoke of sympathetic herbs to clear negative energy. Personally, Blue had always thought there must be better ways to get on a plant’s good side than by setting it on fire.

Now Jimi waved the lavender and sage in Blue’s face. “Sacred smoke, cleanse the soul of this young woman before me and give her some common sense.”

“Hey!”
Blue protested, sitting up. “I think I’m very sensible, thanks! There isn’t mugwort in that, is there? Because I have things to do!”

Jimi said mugwort improved her clairvoyance. She didn’t seem to mind its temporarily mind-altering affects. Sullenly, sounding just like Orla, she said, “No, your mother wouldn’t let me.”

Blue silently thanked her mother. Gansey and Adam were supposed to be coming over, and the last thing she wanted was to be responsible for getting them mildly high. Although, she thought with more than a little discomfort, Adam might be improved by something that took the edge off. She wondered if he was ever going to say sorry.

“In that case,” she said, “would you do my closet, too?”

Jimi frowned. “Was Neeve ever in there?”

“With Neeve,” Blue replied, “you never know.”

“I’ll say an extra little prayer in there.”

The little prayer turned out to be a little longer than Blue had expected, and she fled the smoke after a few minutes. In the hallway, she discovered Jimi had already opened the attic door in preparation for smudging Neeve’s old quarters. It felt like an invitation.

With a glance down the hall, she stepped into the stairwell and climbed. Immediately, the air warmed and began to stink. The grubby smell of asafetida, one of the charms Neeve had used, still permeated the space, and the attic’s summer heat did nothing to improve upon it.

At the top of the stairs, she hesitated. Most of Neeve’s things were still up here, but they’d been heaped and boxed on the throw-covered mattress for later removal. All of the masks and symbols had been removed from the slanted, unfinished walls, and the candles had been carefully packed taper-side down in a plastic bin. But Neeve’s mirrors were undisturbed — two full-length mirrors pointed directly at each other. And there was a deep black bowl sitting on the floor beside them. Neeve’s scrying bowl.

The base was slicked with the memory of recent liquid, even though Neeve hadn’t been in this room for nearly a month. Blue wasn’t sure who else would use it. She knew that Maura, Persephone, and Calla generally frowned upon the ritual. The technique was theoretically simple: The scryer looked into a mirror or dark bowl full of liquid, drew her mind into a space outside itself, and saw the future or another location in the reflection.

In practice, Maura had told Blue that it was unpredictable and dangerous.