The Dream Thieves (16 page)

Adam didn’t quite catch all of Ronan’s growled reply, but he heard at least two of the swear words.

Blue, unimpressed, reached for Gansey’s phone. “Is there a place we can walk to?”

She and Gansey ducked their heads together to examine the screen and mutter about map options. The image of her dark hair and his dusty hair touching seared something inside Adam, but it was just one more sting in a sea of jellyfish.

Ronan returned, leaning in the passenger window. Blue turned the phone to him. “Maybe we could walk to this place.”

“The Deering General Store?” Ronan said, voice scathing. “Look at it. That’s not a place to get a battery. That’s a place to lose your wallet. Or your virginity.”

“Do you have a better idea?” she demanded. “Maybe we can hurl some stuff into the underbrush! Or hit something! That solves everything! Maybe we can be really manly and break things!”

Though she was turned to Ronan, Adam knew these words were meant for him. He laid his face on the back of the driver’s headrest and simmered in shame and indignation. He thought about the way the car had stammered before it died. Using up the last of the battery before it couldn’t go on. Then he thought about how Noah had disappeared in Dollar City while he was talking to Gansey on the phone. And now Cabeswater was gone. Using up the last of the charge.

But that didn’t make sense. He’d activated the ley line. It kept blowing out transformers in town because it was so strong. There shouldn’t be a
lack
of energy.

“I’m calling Declan,” Gansey said. “And telling him to bring a battery.”

Ronan told Gansey what he thought of this plan, very precisely, with a lot of compound words that even Adam hadn’t heard before. Gansey nodded, but he also dialed Declan’s number.

Afterward, he turned to Ronan, who leaned his cheek hard enough against the top of the window to make a dent in his skin. “Sorry. Everyone else I know’s out of town. You don’t have to talk to him. I’ll do it.”

Ronan punched the top of the Camaro and turned his back to it.

Gansey rounded on Adam, clutching his own headrest and looking behind him. “Why is it gone?”

Adam blinked at his sudden nearness. “I don’t know.”

Releasing the headrest, Gansey turned to Blue. “Why? Is it science, or is it magic?”

Adam made a dismissive sound.

“No,” Blue said, “I know what you mean. Did it go, or was it taken?”

“Maybe it’s invisible,” Gansey suggested.

Adam wasn’t sure he believed in true invisibility. He’d tried it and it never seemed to protect him. He asked Noah, “Are you still there when we can’t see you?”

Noah just blinked at him from the dimness of the backseat, his eyes liquid and faraway. He was, Adam noted, nearly disappeared already. He was more the feeling of Noah than actually Noah.

Ronan had been listening, because he spun and leaned in the window. “At the store, when he disappeared, he didn’t just become invisible. He
went away
. If you’re saying Cabeswater’s like Noah, it’s not invisible. It’s gone somewhere.”

There was a breath’s silence. This was where Gansey, if he were Ronan, would swear. Where if he were Adam, he’d close his eyes. If he were Blue, he’d snap in exasperation.

But Gansey merely rubbed a thumb over his lip and then drew himself up. He was instantly cool and elegant, all true emotions placed in an undisclosed location. He drew out his journal, jotted a note in the margin, and caged it with terse brackets. When he closed the pages, whatever anxiety he had over Cabeswater was closed in with the rest of his thoughts on Glendower.

Some time later, after Noah had discreetly disappeared, Declan’s Volvo glided up, as quiet as the Pig was loud. Ronan said, “Move up, move up” to Blue until she scooted the passenger seat far enough for him to clamber behind it into the backseat. He hurriedly sprawled back in the seat, throwing one jean-covered leg over the top of Adam’s and laying his head in a posture of thoughtless abandon. By the time Declan arrived at the driver’s side window, Ronan looked as if he had been asleep for days.

“Lucky I was able to get away,” Declan said. He peered into the car, eyes passing over Blue and snagging on Ronan in the backseat. His gaze followed his brother’s leg to where it rested on top of Adam’s, and his expression tightened.

“Thanks, D,” Gansey said easily. With no effort, he pushed open the door, forcing Declan back without seeming to. He moved the conversation to the region of the front fender. It became a battle of genial smiles and deliberate hand gestures.

Blue watched disdainfully from the passenger seat as Adam watched sharply from the backseat. And as he sat there, observing the set of Declan’s shoulders and the way his eyes looked, he realized something startling.

Declan was afraid.

Probably it wasn’t apparent to Gansey, who was fairly oblivious, nor to Blue, who didn’t know what Declan looked like ordinarily. And Ronan’s feelings about his older brother were like blood in the water; he wouldn’t be able to see through the bilious clouds.

But to Adam, who’d spent a fair amount of his life afraid — not only afraid, but trying to hide it — it was obvious.

The question was what Declan Lynch had to be afraid of.

“Who gave your brother that shiner, Ronan?” he asked.

Without opening his eyes, Ronan replied, “Same person who fucked his nose over.”

“And who was that?”

Ronan laughed, just once, a
ha!
“Burglars.”

The problem with getting the facts about Declan from Ronan was that Ronan always assumed that his brother was lying.

Of course, usually he was.

Suddenly, the driver’s side door was ripped open. The sound and shock of it were so violent that Ronan forgot to look asleep and Adam and Blue both stared. Declan leaned in.

“I know you want to do the opposite of everything I say,” he snapped, “but you need to keep your head down. Do you remember when I told you to keep it down, months ago? Have you forgotten?”

Ronan’s voice was slow, petulant. His eyes, though, half-hidden in the dim, warm light of the Camaro’s interior — they were terrible. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“Well, it feels like you have,” Declan said. “People are watching. And if you slip up, you screw things up for all of us. So don’t slip up. And I
know
you’ve been on the streets again. When you lose your license, I —”

“Declan.” Gansey’s voice cut through, deep and responsible. He placed a hand on Declan’s shoulder, gently tugging him back. “We’re cool here.” When this didn’t have the desired effect, Gansey added, “I know you don’t want to make a scene in front of …”

Both boys looked at Blue.

Blue’s lips parted with indignation, but Gansey’s words worked magic. Declan retreated instantly.

A moment later, Gansey returned to the Pig. “Sorry, Jane,” he said. Now his voice sounded weary, nothing like the broad persuasion he’d just exercised on Declan. He lifted the battery into view. “Adam, you want to do this thing?”

He said it like it was an ordinary day, like they’d come back from an ordinary trip, like nothing was wrong. The Lynch brothers had fought, but that was merely evidence that they were both still breathing. The Pig had died, but it was always either dying or rising again.

But in everything Gansey didn’t say, in every feeling he didn’t paint on his face, he was shouting:

It’s gone.

T
he mask was his father’s.

Even in his dreams, Ronan could not go back to the Barns, but here was something from the Barns coming to him. In reality, the mask hung on his parents’ dining room wall, well out of reach of curious hands. But in his dream, it hung at eye-level on the wall of Adam’s shabby apartment. It was carved of smooth, dark wood and looked like a cheap tourist souvenir. The eyeholes were round and surprised, the mouth parted in an easy smile big enough for lots of teeth.

“This is cheating,” Orphan Girl said in Latin.

She hadn’t been there before, but she was now. Her presence reminded Ronan all at once that he was dreaming. This moment, the one when he realized he’d already created everything here with his own mind, that was when he could take something back with him. It was his. He could do whatever he wanted to with it.

“Cheating,” she insisted again. “Dreaming a dream thing.”

She meant the mask, of course. It was surely from his father’s mind.

“It’s my dream,” Ronan told her. “Here. I brought you some chicken.”

And he had. He handed her a box of fried chicken, which she fell on voraciously.

“I think I’m a psychopomp,” she said, with her mouth full.

“I don’t even know that that means.”

The ragged girl stuffed an entire chicken wing in her mouth, bones and all. “I think it means I’m a raven. That makes you a raven boy.”

This irritated Ronan for some reason, so he took the rest of the chicken from her and placed it on a piece of furniture that vanished as soon as he turned away.

“Cabeswater’s gone,” he told her.

“Far away isn’t the same thing as gone.” This was Adam. He stood at Ronan’s shoulder. He wore his Aglionby uniform, but his fingers were black with oil. He pressed his greasy hands to the mask. He didn’t ask permission, but Ronan didn’t stop him. After the briefest of pauses, Adam took the mask from the wall and held it up to his eyes.

Shrieking a terrified warning, Orphan Girl dove behind Ronan.

But Adam was already becoming something else. The mask was gone, or it had become Adam’s face, or Adam was carved from wood. Every tooth behind the smile was hungry; Adam’s elegant jaw was starving. His eyes were desperate and incensed. A long, fat vein stood out in his neck.

“Occidet eum!”
begged Orphan Girl, clinging to Ronan’s leg.

It was becoming a nightmare. Ronan could hear the night horrors coming, in love with his blood and his sadness. Their wings flapped in time with his heartbeat. He wasn’t in control enough to drive them away.

Because Adam was the horror now. The teeth were something else, Adam was something else, he was a
creature
, close enough to touch. To think about it was to become immobilized with the horror of watching Adam be consumed from the inside out. Ronan couldn’t even tell where the mask was now; there was only Adam, the monster, a toothful king.

The girl sobbed out,
“Ronan, imploro te!”

Ronan took Adam’s arm and said his name.

But Adam lunged. Tooth upon tooth upon tooth. Even as he went for Ronan, one of his hands still tugged at the now-invisible mask, trying to free himself. There was none of his face left.

Adam seized Ronan’s neck, fingers hooked in his skin.

Ronan could not kill him, no matter how much Orphan Girl begged. It was
Adam.

The mouth gaped, door to bloody ruin.

Niall Lynch had taught Ronan to box, and he had once told his son:
Clear your mind of whimsy.

Ronan cleared his mind of whimsy.

He seized the mask. The only way he could find the edge was to snatch Adam’s hand where it still doggedly clawed at the slender mask. Bracing himself for the effort, Ronan wrenched. But the mask came away as easily as a petal from a flower. It was only for Adam that it had been a prison.

Adam staggered back.

In Ronan’s hand, the mask was as thin as a sheet of paper, still warm from Adam’s gasped breaths. Orphan Girl buried her face in his side, her body shaking with sobs. Her tiny voice was muffled:
“Tollerere me a hic, tollerere me a hic …”

Take me away from here, take me away from here.

In the background, Ronan’s night horrors drew closer. Close enough to smell.

Adam was making peculiar, dreadful sounds. When Ronan lifted his eyes, he saw that the mask had been all that was left of Adam’s face. When he’d pulled it from Adam, he’d revealed muscle and bone, teeth and eyeball. Adam’s pulse pumped a globule of blood from every place a muscle met another muscle.

Adam slumped against the wall, life leaking from him.

Ronan gripped the mask, his limbs awash with adrenaline. “I’ll put it back on.”

Please work.