The Dream Thieves (35 page)

All at once, Ronan was done. He seized the straps of Kavinsky’s tank top and shoved him. “
Enough
, already! This isn’t your fucking Mitsu. I can’t go out and buy another one tomorrow morning.”

With a knowing look, Kavinsky unhooked Ronan’s fingers. He watched as Ronan pushed off, pacing, hands behind his head, eyes darting down the road to see if any other cars were coming. But there was no fixing this, no matter how Ronan looked at it.

“Look, Lynch,” Kavinsky said. “It’s simple. Wrap your tiny Celtic brain around this concept. What did your mom do when your goldfish died?”

Ronan stopped pacing. “I told you. It’s not your rice rocket. I can get him another, but it won’t be the same. He doesn’t want another one. He wants this one.”

“I’m going to be fucking patient with you,” Kavinsky said, “because you’ve had a head injury. You’re not listening to the words I say.”

Ronan threw a hand toward the Pig. “This is not a goldfish.”

“You people are such drama queens. I’m going to pop the trunk and you’re going to scrape that thing into it. And then we’re going to take a field trip to concept-land.”

Ronan stared at him mistrustfully.

“Look, you’re having a life-changing experience here. Get in the car before I need to get high again.”

Ronan had nowhere else to go. He got in the car.

S
everal hours into the party, Gansey and Adam found themselves in the north-wing hallway between the back kitchen stairs and Gansey’s old room. Vigorous conversation still murmured up through the floor. Adam wasn’t sure of Gansey’s situation, but he was aware that he himself was drunk. At least, his mouth tasted of champagne and the world seemed blunted and dark. He had not been drunk before. His father had done all of that for him.

They stood side by side on a lush purple Persian runner beside a docile Queen Anne side table covered with hunt-themed knickknacks. Dim gold versions of Adam and Gansey stood in a crazed black mirror hung on the wall. In the reflection, the ordinarily assured line of Gansey’s mouth was twisted into something troubled. He tore the knot of his tie to a rakish angle.

“Can you believe,” he asked tragically, “that I grew up in a place like this?”

Adam did not tell Gansey that he usually couldn’t forget.

“I wish we could go back tomorrow,” Gansey said. “I wish we could drive back and see if Cabeswater appeared.”

When he said the word
Cabeswater
, Adam’s neck spasmed, like a sly finger plucked a taut, anxious ligament. Another image tried to work its way through — a blink, and he’d see a man in the corner of his eye, standing behind his shoulder, looking at him in the mirror. Sad eyes and a bowler hat.
Why not?
Adam thought angrily.
Why the hell not?
“
Rex Corvus.
I’m never drinking again.”

“You’re not drunk,” said Gansey. “It was ginger ale. Mostly. Look at our faces in there. We’re older than we used to be.”

“When?”

“Just a minute ago. We’re getting older all the time. Adam — Adam, is this what you want? This?” He made an elegant, dismissive gesture toward the lower floor, pushing it all away from himself.

Adam said, “I want to get out of Henrietta.”

He knew it was cruel to say, even if it was the truth. Because of course Gansey would say —

“I don’t.”

“I know you don’t. Look, it’s not like I’m trying to …” He was going to say
leave you behind
, but that was too much, even with the champagne lapping shores.

Gansey laughed terribly. “I’m a fish who’s forgotten how to breathe in water.”

But Adam was thinking about the suppressed truth: The two of them were on perpendicular paths, not parallel ones, and eventually, they’d have to go different ways. By college, probably. If not college, then after. A tension was building in him, like the one that sometimes haunted him late at night, where he wanted to save Gansey, or
be
Gansey.

Gansey turned to him; his breath was all mint leaves and champagne, him and them. He asked, “Why did you go to Cabeswater without me, Adam?”

Here it was, finally.

The truth was a complicated thing. Adam shrugged.

“No,” said Gansey. “Not that.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“How about the truth?”

“I don’t know what the truth is.”

“I just don’t believe that,” Gansey said. He was starting to use
the voice
. The Richard Gansey III voice. “You don’t do something without knowing why.”

“That whole deal might work on Ronan,” Adam replied. “But it doesn’t work on me.”

The Gansey in the mirror laughed humorlessly. “Ronan never took my car. He didn’t lie to me.”

“Oh, come on. I didn’t lie. Something had to be done, or Whelk would’ve had control of the line right now.” Adam cast a hand out in the direction of the stairs, back toward the party, toward the singing Latin. “
He
would be the one hearing that. I did the right thing.”

“That wasn’t the question. The question is:
that night
. You had to
walk right by me
to go. It’s like you’re so keen on being Adam Parrish, army of one.”

He
was
Adam Parrish, army of one. Gansey, raised by these adoring courtiers, would never be able to understand that.

Adam’s voice was heating. “What do you want me to say, Gansey?”

“Just tell me why. I’ve defended you to Blue and Ronan for weeks now.”

The idea of his behavior being a topic of conversation infuriated Adam. “If the others have a problem with me, they can take it up with me.”

“Damn it, Adam.
That’s
not the point, either. The point is — just tell me it’s not going to happen again.”

“What’s ‘it’? Someone doing something you didn’t ask for? If you wanted someone you could control, you picked the wrong person.”

There was a pause, full of the distant ringing of silverware and glasses. Someone laughed, high and delighted.

Gansey just sighed.

And that sigh was the final straw. Because it didn’t whisper of pity. It drowned in it.

“Oh, don’t even,” snapped Adam. “Don’t you dare.”

There was no switch this time. No flip from ordinary to angry. Because he’d already been angry. It was already dark, and now it was black.

“Look at you, Adam.” Gansey held up a hand, demonstrating. Exhibit A, Adam Parrish, impostor. “Just
look
.”

Adam felt stuffed full of the partygoers, their false civility, the glittering lights, the fakery of everything. He struggled for words. “That’s right. ‘There’s Adam, what a mess. What do you reckon he was trying to say when he woke the ley line by himself? I don’t know, Ronan. Let’s not ask
him
.’ How about this, Gansey?
It wasn’t about you.
I was doing what needed to be done.”

“Oh, don’t lie to me. There were so many other ways.”

“You weren’t doing them. Either you want to find this thing or you don’t.” There was something brutally freeing about being able to say it out loud, everything he’d been thinking. He shouted, “And you don’t need him.
I
do. I’m not going to sit back and let someone else take my shot out of this.”

Gansey’s eyes darted down the hall and back to Adam.
That’s right, Gansey, don’t wake the baby.
His voice was very low. “Glendower was not yours, Adam. This was mine first.”

“You asked us. Either you meant it or you didn’t. You did this.”

Gansey lightly pressed a finger into Adam’s chest. “
This?
I don’t think so.”

Adam seized Gansey’s wrist. He wasn’t nice about it. The suit was slippery as blood under his fingers. “I’m not going to be your minion, Gansey. Was that what you wanted? You want me to help you find him, you let me look
my
way.”

Gansey jerked his arm out of Adam’s grasp. Again his eyes darted down the hall and back. “You should look at yourself in the mirror.”

Adam didn’t.

“We do this, we do it as equals,” Adam said.

Gansey glanced over his shoulder, furtive. His mouth made the
shh
shape, but not the sound.

“Oh, what?” Adam demanded. “You’re afraid someone will hear? They’ll know everything isn’t perfect in the land of Dick Gansey? A dose of reality could only help those people!”

With a sudden twist, he swept all of the figurines from the Queen Anne table. Foxes in breeches and terriers seized in midflight. They all plunged to the floor with a satisfying and diseased smash. He raised his voice. “World’s ending, folks!”

“Adam —”

“I don’t need your wisdom, Gansey,” he said. “I don’t need you to babysit me. I got into Aglionby without you. I got Blue without you. I woke the ley line without you.
I won’t take your pity
.”

Now, finally, Gansey was silenced. There was something very remote about his eyes, or the set of his lips, or the lift of his chin.

He didn’t say anything else. He just gave a tiny shake to the sleeve Adam had grabbed, letting the wrinkles fall out. His eyebrows were pulled together as if the action required most of his attention. Then he left Adam standing in the hall.

Next to Adam, the mirror reflected both him and the flickering form of a ghost no one but Adam could see. She was screaming, but there was no sound.

T
his was the dream: sitting in the passenger seat of Joseph Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi, the odor of a crash clinging to Ronan’s clothing, the white dash lights carving Kavinsky a gaunt and wild face, foully seductive lyrics spitting from the speakers, the vein-covered peaks of Kavinsky’s knuckles on the gearshift between them. The smell in the car was sweet and unfamiliar, toxic and pleasant in the way Ronan had always thought marijuana would be before he came to Aglionby. Even the feel of the racing seats was unfamiliar; they held Ronan’s shoulders and sucked his legs into the very depths of the car like a trap. Every bump in the road transferred directly to Ronan’s bones, sharp and immediate. A touch of the wheel and they darted one way or another. It was like a car built to both feed on and produce anxiety.

Ronan didn’t know if he loved it or hated it.

They didn’t speak. Ronan didn’t know what he would say anyway. It felt like anything could happen. All of his secrets felt dangerously close to the surface.

Kavinsky drove out of Henrietta, past Deering, into nowhere. The road turned from four lanes to two, and pure black trees pressed out the dull black sky overhead. Ronan’s palms sweated. He watched Kavinsky change gears as he snaked along the back roads. Every time he shifted into the fourth gear, he missed the sweet spot. Couldn’t he feel the car hanging when he did?

“My eyes are up here, sweetheart,” Kavinsky said.

With a dismissive noise, Ronan lay his head back in the seat and looked out into the night. He could tell where they were now; they were nearly to the fairground where the substance party had been. Tonight the great floodlights were dark; the only evidence of the fairground was when the headlights swept over the bunting. They were only in the light for a moment, like colorless ghosts of flags, and then there was nothing but brush as Kavinsky pulled onto an overgrown gravel track before the fairground.

A few yards in, Kavinsky stopped. He looked at Ronan. “I know what you are.”

It was like after the crash. After waking from a dream. Ronan was frozen in the sea, staring back at him.

The Mitsubishi charged forward, and the road gave way to a limitless clearing. In the headlights, Ronan saw another white car parked up ahead. As they pulled closer, the lights illuminated a huge spoiler on the trunk, and then revealed a portion of a knife graphic on the side. It was another Mitsubishi. For a moment, Ronan thought that it might be the old one, somehow, its damage miraculously hidden by the poor light. But then the headlights swung to another car parked beside it. This second car was also white with a large spoiler. Another Mitsubishi. A knife graphic peeked around the shadowed side.

Kavinsky pulled forward another few feet. It brought a third car into focus. A white Mitsubishi. They kept creeping forward, field grass rustling against the low bumper. Another Mitsubishi. Another. Another.