The Dream Thieves (44 page)

Another spirit appeared, hand outstretched to him. And another. And another. All of the flashes he had seen, a dozen figures. Incomprehensible.

A small voice at his elbow said, “I will translate for you.”

He turned to see a small girl in a black frock. She was not unlike a miniature Persephone: mountainous white hair spun like cotton candy, narrow face, black eyes. She took his hand. Hers was very cold, and a little damp.

He shivered warily. “Will you translate truthfully?”

Her tiny fingers were tight on his. He had not seen her before, he was certain. Of all of the flashes and visions he’d had since making the sacrifice, she’d not been one of them. She was so like Persephone, but twisted.

“No,” he said. “I can only help myself.”

She tipped her head back, angry. “You’re already dead in here.” Before he could pull away, she clawed her other hand down his wrist. Three sharp lines of blood welled up. He could taste it, like she had torn his tongue instead.

It was like a bad dream.

No.
If this was like a dream, if Cabeswater was like a dream, it meant it was all in his control, if he chose it. Adam shook himself free. He wasn’t going to give his mind away.

“Cabeswater,” he said out loud. “Tell me what you need.”

He reached into the pool. It was cold and insubstantial, like sliding his hand against sheets. Carefully, he scooped out the single drop of water he’d followed into the vision. It tipped back and forth in his palm, rolling along his life line.

He hesitated. On the other side of this moment, he knew, there was something that would separate him from the others forever. How much, he didn’t know. But he would have been somewhere they hadn’t. He would be something they weren’t.

But he already was.

And then he was in the drop of water. No longer did Cabeswater need to reach out to him through apparitions. He didn’t need the clumsy flickers in his vision. No desperate pleas for his attention.

He was Cabeswater, and he was the dreaming tree, and he was every oak with roots digging through rocks, looking for energy and hope. He felt the suck and pulse of the ley line through him — what a crass, mundane term for it,
ley line
, now that he’d felt it. He could remember every other name for it now, and they all seemed more fitting.
Fairy roads. Spirit paths. Song lines. The old tracks. Dragon lines. Dream paths.

The corpse roads.

The energy flickered and sputtered through him, less like electricity and more like remembering a secret. It was strong, all-encompassing, and then fading, waiting. Sometimes he was nothing but it, and sometimes, it was nearly forgotten.

And beneath it all, he felt the oldness of Cabeswater. The strangeness. There was something true and inhuman at its core. It had been there so many centuries before him, and it would exist for centuries after. In the relative scheme of things, Adam Parrish was irrelevant. He was such a small thing, just a whorl in the fingerprint of a massive being —

I didn’t agree to give my thoughts away.

He would be Cabeswater’s hands and Cabeswater’s eyes, but he wouldn’t be Cabeswater.

He would be Adam Parrish.

He sat back.

He was in the reading room. A drop of water sat on top of the framed photograph. Across from him, Persephone dabbed three bloody scratches on her wrist; her sleeve had been ripped through.

Everything in the room looked different to Adam. He just wasn’t sure how. It was like — like he’d adjusted the aspect on his television, from wide screen to normal.

He didn’t know how he’d thought before that Persephone’s eyes were black. Every color combined to make black.

“They won’t understand,” Persephone said. She laid her deck of tarot cards on the table in front of him. “They didn’t when I came back.”

“Am I different?” he asked.

“You were different before,” Persephone replied. “But now they won’t be able to stop noticing.”

Adam touched the tarot cards. It seemed a very long time ago that he’d looked at the deck on the table. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

“Knock on them,” she whispered. “Three times. They like that. Then shuffle them. And then hold them to your heart.”

He softly rapped his knuckles on the deck, shuffled the cards, and then grasped the oversized deck. When he held it to his chest, the cards felt warm, like a living creature. They hadn’t felt like
that
before.

“Now ask them a question.”

Adam closed his eyes.

What now?

“Put down four of them,” Persephone said. “No, three. Three. Past, present, future. Faceup.”

Carefully, Adam laid three cards on the table. The art in Persephone’s deck was dark, smudgy, barely visible in this dim light. The figures on them seemed to move. He read the words at the bottom of each:

The Tower. The Hanged Man. Nine of swords.

Persephone pursed her lips.

Adam’s eyes drifted from the first card, where men fell from a burning tower, to the second, where a man hung upside down from a tree. And then to the last, where a man wept into his hands. That third card, that utter despair. He couldn’t take his gaze from it.

Adam said, “It looks like he’s woken from a nightmare.”

It looks
, he thought,
like I will, if the vision from the dreaming tree comes true.

When Adam lifted his eyes to Persephone, he was certain she was seeing the same things he was seeing. He could tell from the flattening of her lips, the remorse in her eyes. The room stretched out around them, black and limitless. A cave or an old forest or a flat, mirror-black lake. The future kept being a something Adam was thrown into: a quest, a sacrifice, the dead face of a best friend.

“No,” Adam said softly.

Persephone echoed, “No?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Maybe this
is
the future. But it’s not the end.”

Persephone said, “Are you sure?”

There was a note to her voice that hadn’t been there before. Adam thought about it. He thought about the warm feeling to the deck of cards, and how he’d asked that question
what now
and they had given him this terrible answer. He thought about how he could still hear the sound of Persephone’s voice echoing all around him, although it should have disappeared into the close walls of this reading room. He thought about how he had been Cabeswater and felt the corpse road snaking through him.

He said, “I am. I’m — I’m pulling another card.”

He hesitated, waiting for her to tell him it wasn’t allowed. But she just waited. Adam cut the deck, laid his hand on each stack. He took the card that felt warmer.

Flipping it, he placed the card beside the nine of swords
.

A robed figure stood before a coin, a cup, a sword, a wand — all of the symbols of all the tarot suits. An infinity symbol floated above his head; one arm was lifted in a posture of power.
Yes
, thought Adam. Understanding prickled and then evaded him.

He read the words at the bottom of the card.

The Magician.

Persephone let out a long, long breath and began to laugh. It was a relieved laugh that sounded as if she’d been running.

“Adam,” she said, “finish your pie.”

B
lue had indeed cut herself.

After Adam had gone into the reading room, she’d experimentally opened the switchblade and it had obligingly attacked her. It was just a scratch, really. It barely warranted a Band-Aid, but she put one on anyway.

She did not feel like Blue Sargent, superhero, or Blue Sargent, desperado, or Blue Sargent, badass.

Maybe she shouldn’t have told the truth.

Even though it had been hours since the fight, her heart still felt jittery. Like it wasn’t attached to anything and every time it beat, it rattled around in her chest cavity. She kept replaying their words. She shouldn’t have lost her temper; she should have told him at the very beginning; she should have —

Anything but how it happened.

Why couldn’t I have fallen in love with him?

He was sleeping now, thrown across the couch, lips parted in unselfconscious exhaustion. Persephone had informed Blue that she expected him to sleep for sixteen to eighteen hours after the ritual, and that he might experience light nausea or vomiting once he woke. Maura, Persephone, and Calla sat at the kitchen table, heads together, debating. Every so often, Blue heard snatches of conversation:
should have done it sooner
and
but he needed to accept it!

She looked at him again. He was handsome and he liked her and if she hadn’t told him the truth, she could have dated him like a normal girl and even kissed him without worrying about killing him.

Blue stood by the front door, her head leaning against the wall.

But she didn’t want that. She wanted
something more.

Maybe there is nothing else!

Maybe she’d go for a walk, just her and the pink switchblade. They were a good pair. Both incapable of opening up without cutting someone. She didn’t know where she’d go, though.

She crept up to the reading room, quietly, so that she wouldn’t wake Adam or alert Orla. Picking up the phone, she listened to make sure no one was having a psychic experience on the other end. Dial tone.

She called Gansey.

“Blue?” he said.

Just his voice. Her heart tethered itself. Not completely, but enough to stop quivering so much. She closed her eyes.

“Take me somewhere?”

They took the newly minted Pig, which indeed seemed identical to the last one, down to the odor of gasoline and the coughing start of the engine. The passenger seat was the same busted vinyl bucket it had been before. And the headlights on the road ahead were the same twin beams of weak golden light.

But Gansey was different. Though he wore his usual khakis and stupid Top-Siders, he was wearing a white, collarless T-shirt and his wireframe glasses. This was her favorite Gansey, the scholar Gansey, not a hint of Aglionby about him. There was something terrible about how this Gansey made her feel at the moment, though.

When she got in, he asked, “What happened, Jane?”

“Adam and I fought,” she said. “I told him. I don’t want to talk about it.”

He put the car in gear. “Do you want to talk at all?”

“Only if it isn’t about him.”

“Do you know where you want to go?”

“Someplace that isn’t here.”

So he drove them out of town and he told her about Ronan and Kavinsky. When he’d done with that, he kept driving into the mountains, onto ever more narrow roads, and he told her about the party and the book club and organic cucumber sandwiches.

The Camaro’s engine growled, echoing up the steep bank beside the road. The headlights only illuminated as far as the next turn. Blue pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. Resting her cheek on her knees, she watched Gansey switch gears and glance in his rearview mirror and then at her.

He told her about the pigeons and he told her about Helen. He told her about everything except for Adam. It was like describing a circle without ever saying the word.

“Okay,” she said finally. “You can talk about him now.”

There was silence in the car — well, less sound. The engine roared and the anemic air-conditioning blew fitful breaths over them both.

“Oh, Jane,” he said suddenly. “If you’d been there when we got the call about him walking on the interstate, you would’ve …” He trailed off before she found out what she would’ve done. And then, all of a sudden, he pulled himself together. “Ha! Adam’s communing with trees and Noah keeps reenacting being murdered and Ronan’s wrecking and then making me new cars. What’s new with you? Something terrible, I trust?”

“You know me,” Blue said. “Ever sensible.”

“Like myself,” Gansey agreed grandly, and she laughed delightedly. “A creature of simple delights.”

Blue touched the radio knob, but she didn’t turn it. She dropped her fingers. “I feel terrible about what I said to him.”

Gansey guided the Pig up an even more narrow road. It might have been someone’s driveway. It was difficult to tell in these mountains, especially after dark. The insects in the close-pressed trees trilled even louder than the engine.