The Dream Thieves (29 page)

Maura flapped her hand. By the time Blue joined them at the table with her cup, all three women were drawn over a single object, one blond head, one brunette, one black. Three people but one entity.

Blue shivered a little as she sat down.

“Oh,
mint
tea,” Calla said meaningfully, ruining the mood.

Rolling her eyes, Blue asked, “What is it I’m helping with?”

They opened their ranks enough for her to see what they clustered around: a cell phone. It was cupped in Calla’s hand; clearly they’d been trying to get her reading on it.

“This is Mr. Gray’s,” Maura said. “Will you help us?”

Wearily, Blue placed her hand on Calla’s shoulder.

“No,” Maura said. “Not like that. We’re trying to figure out how to access his email.”

“Oh.” She accepted the phone. “Kids these days.”

“I know, right?”

Blue thumbed through the screens. Though she had no cell phone of her own, she had handled them plenty, and this was the same model as Gansey’s. It took no particular skill to open Mr. Gray’s email. She handed it back.

The three women leaned in.

“Did you steal that?” Blue asked.

There was no answer. Their necks were all craned, looking.

“Shall I light some orris? And celery?”

Persephone blinked up, her black eyes a little far away. “Oh, yes, please.”

With a yawn, Blue pushed up from the table and prepared a little plate of celery seed and orris root from the cabinet. She used one of the candles on the counter to light it. Or sort of light it. The mixture smoked and popped, the celery seeds twitching like popcorn and the orris root smelling of burning violets. The smoke of them was meant to clarify psychic impressions.

She set the plate down on the table between them. It had begun to smell a little like fireworks. “So why are you going through his phone?”

“We all knew he was looking for something,” Maura replied. “We just didn’t know what. Now we know what.”

“And what is that?”

“Your snake boy,” Calla said. “Only he doesn’t know it’s a boy.”

Maura said, “He calls it the Greywaren and says it’s to take things out of dreams. You’re going to have to be careful, Blue. I think that family is all tangled up in something messy.”

Something messy that involved Ronan’s father being beaten to death with a tire iron. That part Blue already knew.

“Do you think he’s dangerous to Ronan?” Blue remembered Declan Lynch’s battered face. “I mean, if he finds out that the Greywaren is a
he
and not an
it
?”

Calla said, “Absolutely” at the same time that Maura said, “Probably not.”

Persephone and Calla shot looks at Maura.

“I’ll take that as a maybe,” Blue said.

At that moment, the phone leapt from the table surface. All four of them jumped. Blue was the first to calm; it was only ringing. Or rather, buzzing and vibrating its way across the table.

“Write down the number!” Calla called, but she must’ve been talking to herself, because she already was.

In a small voice, Persephone said, “It’s a Henrietta number. Do you want to pick it up?”

Maura shook her head. After a moment, a voicemail buzzed through. “That we’ll listen to, though. Uh. Blue? Make it work?”

Shaking her head, Blue swiped the phone and thumbed to the voicemail. She handed it to Maura.

“Oh,” Maura said, listening. “It’s him. Do I push this button to call him back —? Yes.” She waited as the phone rang and then — “Ah, hello, Mr. Gray.”

Blue loved that voice of her mother’s, except for when it was being used on her. It was her authoritative, cheerful voice, the one that said she had all of the cards. Only now she was using it on a hit man whose phone she had just stolen. Blue couldn’t decide if this was delightfully cheeky or incredibly foolish.

“Well, you didn’t think I was going to answer a call on
your
phone, did you? That would be awfully rude. Did you get home all right? Oh, yes, you can have it back now. I’m sorry if you needed it. Did you — oh.”

Whatever the Gray Man had said immediately shut Maura up. She dropped her eyes from the others and sucked her upper lip between her teeth. The tips of her ears were pink. She listened for a moment, swatting Calla and Persephone back.

“Well,” she said finally. “Any time. I’d say that you should call first, but — well. You know. I have your phone. Ha. All right. All right. Don’t sleep on your back. All the swords will go through to the other side. Yep, that’s my professional advice.”

Maura pressed end.

“What did he say?” Blue demanded.

“That we might as well just ask him which valuables we wanted from him next so he could plan for their absence,” Maura said.

Calla’s lips pursed. “Is that all?”

Maura busied herself moving the phone from her left hand to her right and back to her left. “Oh, just that he had a nice time at dinner.”

Blue burst out, “But you haven’t forgotten Butternut.”

Her mother didn’t protest the name, for once. She said, “I never do.”

T
hat night, Ronan dreamt of his tattoo.

He had gotten the spreading, intricate tattoo only months before, a little to irritate Declan, a little to see if it was really as bad as everyone said, and definitely so everyone who glimpsed the hooks of it had fair warning. It was full of things from his head, beaks and claws and flowers and vines stuffed into screaming mouths.

It took him a long time to fall asleep that night, his thoughts crowded with the burning Mitsubishi, Gansey holding the Molotov cocktail, the enigmatic language on the puzzle box, the dark bags beneath Adam’s eyes.

And when he fell asleep, he dreamt of the tattoo. Ordinarily, Ronan only saw bits and pieces of it; he had not seen the full design since he’d gotten it. But tonight he saw the tattoo itself, from behind, as if he were outside of his own body, as if it were apart from his body. It was more complicated than he remembered. The road to the Barns was threaded through it, and Chainsaw peered out from a thicket of thorns. Adam was in the dream, too; he traced the tangled pattern of the ink with his finger. He said,
“Scio quid hoc est.”
As he traced it farther and farther down on the bare skin of Ronan’s back, Ronan himself disappeared entirely, and the tattoo got smaller and smaller. It was a Celtic knot the size of a wafer, and then Adam, who had become Kavinsky, said,
“Scio quid estis vos.”
He put the tattoo in his mouth and swallowed it.

Ronan woke with a start, ashamed and euphoric.

The euphoria wore off long before the shame did.

He was never sleeping again.

T
he next morning, Helen came in the helicopter for Gansey and Adam. As they took off, Adam leaned his head in his hands, his eyes glassily terrified, and Gansey, ordinarily a fan of flying, tried to be sympathetic. His head was a tumble of burning cars and ancient Camaro wheels and the deconstruction of everything Blue had said to him.

Below, he could still see Ronan where he lay on the roof of the BMW, watching them ascend. It felt ridiculous to leave Henrietta, the epicenter of the universe, for his parents’ house.

As they sailed up and over the roof of Monmouth, Gansey caught a last image of Ronan sarcastically blowing him a kiss before turning his head away.

The rest of the flight left no time for introspection, however. Helen handed Gansey her phone and spent the entire flight dictating texts to him through the headphones. It was impossible for Gansey to consider what they’d do about Cabeswater when Helen’s voice sounded directly in his head:
Tell her the centerpieces are in the garage. The bay farthest away from the house. Of course not where the Adenauer’s parked! Do I look like an idiot? Don’t type that. What does she say now? The extra champagne flutes are being delivered by Chelsea. Tell her if the cheese isn’t in the fridge, I don’t know where it is. Don’t you have Beech’s cell phone? Of course I know what a vegan is! Tell her they have to use olive oil instead of butter. Because cows make butter and Italians make olive oil! Fine! Tell her I will pick her up some vegan hors d’oeuvres. Vegans vote, too! Don’t type that.

If Gansey hadn’t guessed the scope of the party, he would’ve gotten all the clues he needed during the flight. Of course, it wasn’t just the party this evening. There was also the tea party the next morning and the book club speech the day after that. Adam looked as if he might throw up. Gansey wanted badly to tell him that he would be all right, but there was no way to be confidential with the headsets on. Adam would’ve been mortified for Helen to know how nervous he was.

Just forty-five minutes later, Helen landed the helicopter at the airfield and transferred herself, her overnight bag, the boys, and their suit bags to her silver Audi.

Gansey felt vaguely shell-shocked to be back in northern Virginia. Like he’d never left. The sun seemed more unforgiving on the backs of all the clean, new cars, and the air through the vents smelled like exhaust and someone else’s cooking. Numerous archipelagos of stores thrust through seas of asphalt. It seemed like there were brake lights everywhere but nothing was actually motionless. Questing for hors d’oeuvres, Helen managed to find parking at the very back of the Whole Foods lot. She turned to face Gansey and Adam. “Do you want to come in and help me?”

They stared at her.

“What a royal shock. I’ll leave it running,” she said.

As soon as she’d shut the door, Gansey swiveled in the passenger seat to face Adam in the back, resting his cheek against the cool leather headrest. “How are you doing?”

Adam had melted across the length of the backseat. He said, “Praying I haven’t grown since last year.”

Gansey had gone with Adam to get fitted for a suit the winter before. He said, “I tried mine on before we left. I don’t think you’re any taller. It’s only been a few months.”

Adam closed his eyes.

“You’ll be okay.”

“Don’t talk to me about it. I can’t …” Adam slithered down even farther so that he lay on the seat and let his legs rest against the opposite door. “Talk about something else.”

“What else is there to talk about?”

Blue.

He didn’t say anything.
Knock it off, Gansey.

Adam said, “Malory? Did he ever get back to you?”

He hadn’t. Gansey dialed Malory’s number. He heard the tinny, double ring of a UK number, and then Malory answered, “What?” He sounded confused that his phone had accepted a call. There was a tremendous amount of undefined background noise.

“It’s Gansey. Is this a bad time?”

“No, no, no. No, no.”

Putting the phone on speaker, Gansey slid it onto the dash. “Did you have any more thoughts by any chance? No? Well, we have a new problem.”

“What’s the trouble?”

He told him.

“Give me a moment to think,” Malory said. Commotion hummed on the line. A dreadful shriek rang out.

“What in the world is that
noise
?”

“Birds, Gansey, the king of birds.”

Gansey exchanged a look with Adam. “An eagle?”

“Don’t be blasphemous. Pigeons! It’s the regional today. I used to show them myself, you know. Don’t have the time these days, but I still love the look of a quality Voorburg Shield Cropper.”

Gansey said, “A pigeon show.”

“If you could see them, Gansey!” On his end of the line, a loudspeaker blared.

Adam’s mouth quirked. Gansey prompted, “The Voorburg Shield Croppers.”

“There is so much more on offer here,” Malory replied. “Much more than the Croppers.”

“Tell me what you are looking at
right now
.”

Malory smacked his lips — he was really the absolute worst human to speak to on the telephone — and considered. “I’m looking at, what does this seem to be? West of England Tumbler, I should think. Yes. Lovely example. You should see his muffs. Right next to him is a dreadful little Thuringen Field Pigeon. I’ve never had them but I’m
quite
certain they aren’t meant to have that hideous stallion neck. I have no idea what this one is. Let’s read the card. Anatolian Ringbeater. Of course. Oh, and here’s a German Beauty Homer.”