The Dream Thieves (2 page)

At the moment, that particular boy, Richard Campbell Gansey III, looked pretty unkillable. In the humid wind at the top of the wide green hill, an ardently yellow polo shirt flapped against his chest and a pair of khaki shorts slapped his gloriously tanned legs. Boys like him didn’t die; they got bronzed and installed outside public libraries. He held a hand toward Blue as she climbed the hill from the car, a gesture that looked less like encouragement and more like he was directing air traffic.

“
Jane.
You’ve got to see this!” His voice was full of the honey-baked accent of old Virginia money.

As Blue staggered up the hill, telescope on her shoulder, she mentally tested the danger level:
Am I in love with him yet?

Gansey galloped down the hill to snatch the telescope from her.

“This isn’t that heavy,” he told her, and strode back the way he’d come.

She did not think she was in love with him. She hadn’t been in love before, but she was still pretty sure she’d be able to tell. Earlier in the year, she
had
had a vision of kissing him, and she could still picture
that
quite easily. But the sensible part of Blue, which was usually the only part of her, thought that had more to do with Richard Campbell Gansey III having a nice mouth than with any blossoming romance.

Anyway, if fate thought it could tell her who to fall for, fate had another thing coming.

Gansey added, “I would’ve thought you had more muscles. Don’t feminists have big muscles?”

Decidedly not in love with him.

“Smiling when you say that doesn’t make it funny,” Blue said.

As the latest step in his quest to find the Welsh king Owen Glendower, Gansey had been requesting hiking permission from local landowners. Each lot crossed the Henrietta ley line — an invisible, perfectly straight energy line that connected spiritually significant places — and circled Cabeswater, a mystical forest that straddled it. Gansey was certain that Glendower was hidden somewhere within Cabeswater, sleeping away the centuries. Whoever woke the king was supposed to be granted a favor — something that had been on Blue’s mind recently. It seemed to her that Gansey was the only one who really
needed
it. Not that Gansey knew he was supposed to be dead in a few months. And not that she was about to tell him.

If we find Glendower soon
, Blue thought,
surely we can save Gansey.

The steep climb brought them to a vast, grassy crest that arched above the forested foothills. Far, far below was Henrietta, Virginia. The town was flanked by pastures dotted with farmhouses and cattle, as small and tidy as a model railroad layout. Everything but the soaring blue mountain range was green and shimmery with the summer heat.

But the boys were not looking at the scenery. They stood in a close circle: Adam Parrish, gaunt and fair; Noah Czerny, smudgy and slouching; and Ronan Lynch, ferocious and dark. On Ronan’s tattooed shoulder perched his pet raven, Chainsaw. Although her grip was careful, there were finely drawn lines from her claws on either side of the strap of his black muscle T. They all eyed something Ronan held in his hands. Gansey cavalierly tossed the telescope into the buoyant field grass and joined them.

Adam allowed Blue into their circle as well, his eyes meeting hers for a moment. As always, his features intrigued Blue. They were not quite conventionally handsome, but they were
interesting
. He had the typical Henrietta prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, but his version of them was more delicate. It made him seem a little alien. A little impenetrable.

I’m picking this one, Fate
, she thought ferociously.
Not Richard Gansey III. You can’t tell me what to do.

Adam’s hand glided over her bare elbow. The touch was a whisper in a language she didn’t speak very well.

“Open it up,” he ordered Ronan. His voice was dubious.

“Doubting Thomas,” Ronan sneered, but without much vitriol. The tiny model plane in his hand spanned the same breadth as his fingers. It was formed of pure white, featureless plastic, almost ludicrously lacking in detail: a plane-shaped thing. He opened the battery hatch on the bottom. It was empty.

“Well, it’s impossible, then,” Adam said. He picked off a grasshopper that had hurled itself onto his collar. Everyone in the group watched him do it. Since he’d performed a strange ritual bargain the month before, they’d been scrutinizing all of his movements. If Adam noticed this extra attention, he didn’t indicate it. “It won’t fly if it has no battery and no engine.”

Now Blue knew what this thing was. Ronan Lynch, keeper of secrets, fighter of men, devil of a boy, had told them all that he could take objects out of his dreams. Example A: Chainsaw. Gansey had been excited; he was the sort of boy who didn’t necessarily believe everything, but wanted to. But Adam, who had only gotten this far in life by questioning every truth presented to him, had wanted proof.

“‘It won’t fly if it has no battery and no engine,’” Ronan mimicked in a higher-pitched version of Adam’s faint Henrietta drawl. “Noah: the controller.”

Noah scuffled in the clumpy grass for the radio controller. Like the plane, it was white and shiny, all the edges rounded. His hands looked solid around it. Though he had been dead for quite a while and by all rights should appear more ghostly, he was always rather living-looking when standing on the ley line.

“What’s supposed to go inside the plane, if not a battery?” Gansey asked.

Ronan said, “I don’t know. In the dream it was little missiles, but I guess they didn’t come with.”

Blue snarled a few seed heads off the tall grass. “Here.”

“Good thinking, maggot.” Ronan stuffed them into the hatch. He reached for the controller, but Adam intercepted it and shook it by his ear.

“This doesn’t even weigh anything,” he said, dropping the controller into Blue’s palm.

It
was
very light, Blue thought. It had five tiny white buttons: four arranged in a cross shape, and one off by itself. To Blue, that fifth button was like Adam. Still working toward the same purpose as the other four. But no longer quite as close as the others.

“It will work,” Ronan said, taking the controller and handing the plane to Noah. “It worked in the dream, so it’ll work now. Hold it up.”

Still slouching, Noah lifted the tiny plane between thumb and forefinger, as if he were getting ready to launch a pencil. Something in Blue’s chest thrummed with excitement. It was impossible that Ronan had dreamt that little plane. But so many impossible things had happened already.

“Kerah,”
Chainsaw said. This was her name for Ronan.

“Yes,” agreed Ronan. Then, to the others, he said imperiously, “Count it down.”

Adam made a face, but Gansey, Noah, and Blue obligingly chanted, “Five-four-three —”

On
blast-off
, Ronan pressed one of the buttons.

Soundlessly, the tiny plane darted from Noah’s hand and into the air.

It worked. It really worked.

Gansey laughed out loud as they all tipped their heads back to watch its ascent. Blue shielded her eyes to keep sight of the tiny white figure in the haze. It was so small and nimble that it looked like a real plane thousands of feet above the slope. With a frenzied cry, Chainsaw launched herself from Ronan’s shoulder to chase it. Ronan pitched the plane left and right, looping it around the crest, Chainsaw close behind. When the plane passed back overhead, he hit that fifth button. Seed heads cascaded from the open hatch, rolling off their shoulders. Blue clapped and reached her palm out to catch one.

“You incredible creature,” Gansey said. His delight was infectious and unconditional, broad as his grin. Adam tipped his head back to watch, something still and faraway around his eyes. Noah breathed
whoa
, his palm still lifted as if waiting for the plane to return to it. And Ronan stood there with his hands on the controller and his gaze on the sky, not smiling, but not frowning, either. His eyes were frighteningly alive, the curve of his mouth savage and pleased. It suddenly didn’t seem at all surprising that he should be able to pull things from his dreams.

In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them. Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness. Her raven boys.

Gansey punched Ronan’s shoulder. “Glendower traveled with magi, did you know? Magicians, I mean. Wizards. They helped him control the weather — maybe you could dream us a cold snap.”

“Har.”

“They also told the future,” added Gansey, turning to Blue.

“Don’t look at me,” she said shortly. Her lack of psychic talents was legendary.

“Or helped
him
tell the future,” Gansey went on, which did not particularly make sense, but indicated that he was trying to un-irritate her. Blue’s short temper and her ability to make other people’s psychic talents stronger were also legendary. “Shall we go?”

Blue hurried to pick up the telescope before he could get to it — he shot her a look — and the other boys fetched the maps and cameras and electromagnetic-frequency readers. They set off on the perfectly straight ley line, Ronan’s gaze still directed up to his plane and to Chainsaw, a white bird and a black bird against the azure ceiling of the world. As they walked, a sudden rush of wind hurled low across the grass, bringing with it the scent of moving water and rocks hidden in shadows, and Blue thrilled again and again with the knowledge that magic was real, magic was real, magic was real.

D
eclan Lynch, the oldest of the Lynch brothers, was never alone. He was never with his brothers, but he was never alone. He was a perpetual-motion machine run by the energy of others: here leaning over a friend’s table at a pizza joint, here drawn into an alcove with a girl’s palm to his mouth, here laughing over the hood of an older man’s Mercedes. The congregation was so natural that it was impossible to tell if Declan was the magnet attracting or the filings attracted.

It was giving the Gray Man a not inconsiderable difficulty in finding an opportunity to speak with him. He had to loiter around the Aglionby Academy campus for the better part of a day.

The waiting wasn’t entirely disagreeable. The Gray Man found himself quite charmed by the oak-shaded school. The campus possessed a shabby gravitas that was only possible with age and affluence. The dorms were emptier than they would’ve been during school term, but they were not
empty
. There were still the sons of CEOs traveling to third-world countries for photo ops and the sons of touring punk musicians with heavier things to bring along than seventeen-year-old accidental progeny and the sons of men who were dead and never coming to retrieve them.

These summer sons, few as they were, were not entirely noiseless.

Declan Lynch’s dorm was not quite as pretty as the other buildings, but it was still handsome with money. It was a remnant from the seventies, a Technicolor decade the Gray Man had enormous fondness for. The front door was meant to be accessible only with a key code, but someone had propped it open with a rubber door stopper. The Gray Man clucked in disapproval. A locked door wouldn’t have kept him out, of course, but it was the thought that counted.

Actually, the Gray Man wasn’t certain he believed that. It was the deed that counted.

Inside, the dorm offered the neutral-toned welcome of a decent hotel. From behind one of the closed doors, a Colombian hip-hop track raged, something seductive and violent. It wasn’t the Gray Man’s sort of music, but he could hear the appeal. He glanced at the door. The dorm rooms at Aglionby were not numbered. Instead, each door bore an attribute the administration hoped its students would walk away with. This door was labeled
Mercy
. It was not the one the Gray Man was looking for.

The Gray Man headed in the opposite direction, reading doors (
Diligence
,
Generosity
,
Piety
) until he got to Declan Lynch’s.
Effervescence.

The Gray Man had been called
effervescent
, once, in an article. He was fairly certain it was because he had very straight teeth. Even teeth seemed to be a prerequisite for effervescence.