The Dream Thieves (48 page)

It was an old sort of power.

Adam walked out and out beneath the growing purple thunderheads. Something in him said
ahhh
and
ahhh
and
ahhh
again, relieved over and over that he was himself again, himself and something more, that he was alone and didn’t have to worry about hurting or wanting anyone else.

He walked to the tiny stream that used to lead into Cabeswater and now led only to more field. Kneeling, he hovered his hands over the trickle of water. There was no one to see him, but he smiled anyway, bigger and bigger. Because the first time they’d been at this stream, Gansey had been holding an EMF reader over the water and watching the flashing red lights. He’d been so excited by those lights — they’d found something, the machine told them they’d found something!

And now Adam felt it in his hands. He felt it in his spine. He could
see
it mapped in his brain. The ley line traveled beneath him, waves of energy, but it detoured here, snagged and conducted through the water, traveling upward to the surface. It was only a small stream, only a small crack in the bedrock, so this was only a small leak.

Thunder rumbled, reminding Adam of time’s passage. He straightened and followed the stream upward through the rising field. The ley line strengthened inside him, tripping his heart, but he kept going. Cabeswater was not here now, but his memory of walking through it the first time was nearly as clear as experiencing it again. Here was where they’d had to climb between two rocks to follow the stream. Here was where the trees had begun to grow larger in diameter, big knuckles of roots bursting from the forest floor. Here the moss furred the trunks.

And here was the pool and the dreaming tree. The first place Cabeswater had changed itself for Gansey, and the first place magic had truly revealed itself to all of them.

He hesitated. His vision in the dreaming tree pressed into his mind. Gansey on the ground, dying. Ronan, furious with grief, spitting at Adam, “
Are you happy now, Adam? This is what you wanted, wasn’t it?
”

That wasn’t going to happen now. He’d changed his future. He’d chosen a different way.

Thunder guttered and popped distantly. With a deep breath to steel himself, Adam waded through the grass to where the dreaming tree had been — would be — was still? No vision overcame him, but he felt the surge of the ley line beneath his feet.

Yes, this was where he needed to be. Crouching, he parted the grass and pressed his palms to the soil. It was hot, like a living body. He closed his eyes.

He felt the course of the ley line stretching out on either side of him. Hundreds of miles one way, hundreds of miles the other. There were distant starbursts where the line intersected with other lines, and for a moment, he was dazzled by them. By the possibility of endless wonders. Glendower was miracle enough, but if there was a miracle on each line that he felt, it was enough miracles for a lifetime, if only you had the patience to look.

Oh, Gansey
, he thought suddenly. Because Gansey had the patience to look. And because things wanted Gansey to find them. He should have been here, now.

No. It wouldn’t work like this if he was here. You have to be alone for this.

Adam pulled his mind away from Gansey and from those intersections, focusing instead on only the ley line beneath him. He raced along it, following the peaks and valleys of energy. Here it spurted up through an underground river. Escaped through an earthquake-shocked bedrock. Burst up through a well. Exploded through a transformer.

No wonder it was so drained by the dreaming. It was a frayed wire, energy leaking at a hundred different points.

“I feel it,” he whispered.

The wind hissed through the grass around him. He opened his eyes.

If he could repair those points, like electrician’s tape on a wire, he might be able to make it strong enough to bring Cabeswater back.

Adam stood up. It felt good to have identified the problem. That had always been the hardest part. With an engine, with school, with life. Solutions were easy, once you knew what was in your way.

Cabeswater murmured urgently. The voices tickled inside him and crackled in the corners of his eyes.

Wait
, he thought. He wished he had the cards. Something to focus his thoughts on what Cabeswater was trying to say.
I won’t be able to understand you. Wait until I can understand you.

As he looked back down the hill, he saw a woman approaching. He shielded his eyes with his hand. At first he thought she was one of Cabeswater’s manifestations. Certainly she seemed whimsical and imaginary from this distance — a great cumulonimbus of hair, a gray frock, boots up her entire leg.

But then he saw that she had a shadow and form and mass, and that she was a little out of breath.

Persephone climbed up to meet him and then stood with her hands on her hips. She turned in a slow circle, looking at the view, blowing out her breath.

“Why are you here?” he asked her. Was she here to bring him back? To tell him he was wrong to be so sure?

She grinned at him, a strangely impish, child-like expression. He thought of what a cruel mockery that mirror-version of her had been, the terrible child-creature from his ritual before. Nothing like this airy whisper of a person in front of him now. Unzipping her butterfly handbag, she retrieved a black silk bag from inside. It was the sort of fabric that you wanted to touch, smooth and shimmery and floaty. It seemed to be the only thing inside the handbag.

“You left, Adam, before I could give you these,” she said, offering the smaller silk bag.

Adam accepted it, feeling its weight. Whatever was inside was vaguely warm, as if it, like the hill, were alive. “What is it?”

After he asked, he thought suddenly about how she had taken care to say his name just before. It could have been nothing. But it felt as if she were reminding him of what it was.

Adam. Adam Parrish.

He slid the contents of the bag into his other hand. A word leapt out at him.

Magician.

Persephone said, “My tarot cards.”

hey Lynch I didn’t leave that car for it to just sit while you blow III

T
he Gray Man checked out of Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast and placed his suitcase just inside the door of Maura’s bedroom. He didn’t unpack it. It was not that long until the Fourth. There was no point.

Calla said, “Give me some poetry, and I’ll make you a drink.”

The Gray Man said, “‘Our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant, our spirits must be great, though our strength grows less.’”

Then he did it in the original Old English.

Calla made him a drink.

Then Maura made something with butter and Calla made something with bacon and Blue steamed broccoli in self-defense. In the rest of the house, Jimi got ready for her night shift and Orla answered the ever-ringing psychic hotline. The Gray Man got underfoot trying to be helpful. He understood that this was an ordinary night at 300 Fox Way, all of this noise and commotion and disorder. It was a senseless sort of dance, artful and confused. Blue and Maura had their own orbit; Maura and Calla another. He watched Maura’s bare feet circle on the kitchen floor.

It was the opposite of everything he had cultivated for the past five years.

How he wanted to stay.

This isn’t a life for what you are
, he told himself.

But for tonight, he would pretend.

At dinner, Calla said, “So, what’s next?” She was only eating the foods with bacon in them.

Blue, who was only eating broccoli, answered, “I guess we have to find a way to make Joseph Kavinsky stop dreaming.”

“Well,” Maura asked. “What does he want?”

Blue shrugged from behind her mountain of broccoli. “What does a drug addict want? Nothing.”

Maura frowned over her plate of butter. “Sometimes everything.”

“Either way,” Blue replied, “I can’t see how we can offer that.”

The Gray Man politely interjected, “I could talk to him this evening for you.”

Blue stabbed a piece of broccoli. “Sounds great.”

Maura gave her a look. “What she means to say is, no thanks.”

“No,” Blue said, brows beetled, “I meant to say, and can you make him feel worthless while you do?”

“Blue Sargent!” Maura looked shocked. “I didn’t raise you to be violent!”

Calla, who’d inhaled some bacon while laughing, clutched the table until she stopped choking.

“No,” Blue said dangerously. “But sometimes bad things happen to good children.”

The Gray Man was amused. “The offer stands until I go.”

The phone rang. Upstairs, they heard the sound of Orla scrambling desperately for it. With a pleasant smile, Maura snatched the downstairs extension and listened for a moment.

“What an excellent idea. It
will
be harder to trace,” Maura told the phone. To the table, she said, “Gansey has a Mitsubishi that Mr. Gray can take instead of his rental. Oh, he says it was actually Ronan’s idea.”

The gesture warmed the Gray Man considerably. The reality of his escape was far more difficult than he’d admitted to any of them. There was a car to worry about, money for food, money for gas. He had left a dirty pot in the sink at his home back in Massachusetts, and he would think about it forever.

It would help if he didn’t have to steal the Champagne Disappointment. He was gifted at car theft, but he longed for simplicity.

To the phone, Maura said: “No — no, Adam’s not here. He’s with Persephone, I believe. I’m sure he’s all right. Would you like to talk to Blue? No —?”

Blue’s head ducked to her plate. She stabbed another piece of broccoli.

Maura hung up the phone. She looked narrowly at Blue. “Did you two fight again?”

Blue muttered, “Yep. Definitely.”

“I can have a talk with him as well,” the Gray Man offered.

“I’m good,” she replied. “But thanks. My mother didn’t raise me to be violent.”

“Neither,” observed the Gray Man, “did mine.”

He ate his broccoli and butter and bacon, and Maura ate her butter, and Calla ate her bacon.

It was another frenzied dance to clean up after dinner and fight for showers and television and who got which chair. Maura gently took the Gray Man’s hand and led him to the backyard instead. Under the black, spreading branches of the beech tree, they kissed until the mosquitos became relentless and the rain began to fall.

Later, as they lay in her bed, his phone buzzed a call, and this time it went to voicemail. Somehow, he always knew it would end this way.

“Hey, Dean,” said his brother. His voice was slow, easy, patient. The Allen brothers were alike, that way. “Henrietta is a pretty little place, isn’t it?”

H
urry.”

Persephone and Adam didn’t speak much through that night, or as the pugilistic sun rose the next morning, and when they did, it was usually that word:
hurry
. They had already driven to a dozen other locations to repair the ley line, some as far as two hours away, and now they pushed their way back into Henrietta.