The Dream Thieves (8 page)

Finally, a Labrador retriever barking at the door grounded him again. He shut the phone into the glove box, out of sight.

Back to Greenmantle’s devices.

They led him to a yellow house with an empty carport. With the EMF reader in one hand and a cesium magnetometer in the other, he climbed into the heat and followed the energy field.

He ducked under a desolate clothesline. There was a doghouse, but no dog. The air had the dry, complicated scent of a cornfield, but there was no cornfield. He was eerily reminded of the foreboding drugstore with the lights off.

In the backyard was an ambitious vegetable garden where seven impeccable rows flourished — textbook tomatoes, peas, beans, and carrots. The next four rows were not quite as productive. As he followed the increasingly frantic light on the EMF reader, the rows thinned further. The final three were merely strips of bare dirt pointed toward the distant fields. A few desiccated vines curled up the bamboo stakes, nothing but skeletons.

The instruments guided the Gray Man to a rosebush planted on the other side of the dead rows, directly in front of a concrete well cover. Unlike the dry vines, the rose was hyper-alive. Above an ordinary green trunk, dozens of twisted shoots clawed from the old canes, contorting tightly around one another. Each mutated cane was tinged the florid red of new growth; it looked eerily as if blood ran through them. The new shoots bristled with malevolent red spines.

The ultimate result of this furious growth was apparent in the blackened knots of branches above. Dead. The rose was growing itself to death.

The Gray Man was impressed by the deep
wrong
ness of it.

A few waves of the meters confirmed that the energy was centered directly on the bush or the ground beneath it. An energy anomaly could possibly explain its hideous overgrowth. He didn’t see, however, how it could be connected to the Greywaren. Unless —

Glancing toward the house, he set down his machines and hefted up the well’s lid.

The EMF reader screamed, every light furiously red. The magnetometer’s reading spiked jaggedly.

Cool air spiraled out of the impenetrably dark opening. He had a flashlight in the car, but he didn’t think it would begin to pierce the depths. He contemplated what it would take to retrieve an object hidden in a well, if it came to that.

Just as suddenly as they’d started, both of the machines went quiet.

Startled, he gave them an experimental swing of his arm — nothing. Carried them around the rosebush. Nothing. Hung them over the well. Nothing. Whatever spurt of wild energy had brought him here was gone.

It was possible, he thought, that the Greywaren was something that worked in pulses, and it had just shut off from its hiding place in the well.

But it was more possible, he thought, that this had to do with HEPCO’s little problem. The same energy surges that affected the stadium power might be at work here. Escaping from this water source. Somehow poisoning that blackened rose.

The Gray Man replaced the well cover, wiped a sheen of sweat from the back of his neck, and straightened.

He took a photo of the rose with his phone. And then he headed back to the car.

A
dam Parrish had bigger problems than Ronan’s dreams.

For starters, his new home. These days, he lived in a tiny room above the St. Agnes rectory. The entire place had been built in the late seventeen hundreds and looked it. Adam was constantly smashing his head heroically against sloped ceilings and jabbing lethal splinters into his sock feet. The entire room had that smell of very old houses — plaster must and timber dust and forgotten flowers. He had provided the furnishings: a flat IKEA mattress on the bare floor, plastic bins and cardboard boxes as nightstands and desk, a rug found on sale for three dollars.

It was nothing, but it was Adam Parrish’s nothing. How he hated and loved it. How proud he was of it, how wretched it was.

Adam Parrish’s nothing lacked air-conditioning. There was no escaping the heat of a Virginian summer. He was too familiar with the sensation of sweat trickling down the inside of his pants leg.

And then there were the three part-time jobs that paid his Aglionby tuition. He crammed in the work hours now to afford a more leisurely fall when school started. He’d spent just two hours at the easiest of the jobs — Boyd’s Body & Paint, LLC, replacing brake pads and changing oil and finding what was making that squeaking noise there, no,
there
— and now, even though he was off, he was ruined for anything else. Sticky and sore and, above all else, tired, always tired.

Little lights danced at the corner of his vision as he chained his bike to the staircase outside his place. Swiping the back of his sweaty hand over the front of his sweaty forehead, he climbed the stairs, and realized Blue was waiting at the top.

Blue Sargent was pretty in a way that was physically painful to him. He was attracted to her like a heart attack. Currently, she sat against his door in lace leggings and a tunic made of a ripped-up oversized Beatles shirt. She had been paging idly through the supermarket’s weekly saver, but she put it down when she saw him.

The only rub was, Blue was another troubling thing. She was like Gansey in that she wanted him to explain himself. What do you
want
, Adam? What do you
need
, Adam?
Want
and
need
were words that got eaten smaller and smaller: freedom, autonomy, a perennial bank balance, a stainless-steel condo in a dustless city, a silky black car, to make out with Blue, eight hours of sleep, a cell phone, a bed, to kiss Blue just once, a blister-less heel, bacon for breakfast, to hold Blue’s hand, one hour of sleep, toilet paper, deodorant, a soda, a minute to close his eyes.

What do you
want
, Adam?

To feel awake when my eyes are open.

“Hey,” she said. “You’ve got mail.”

He knew. He’d already seen the ignored, unopened envelope emblazoned with Aglionby Academy’s raven crest. For two days he’d been stepping over it, as if it might disappear if he failed to acknowledge it. He’d already gotten his grades, and the envelope wasn’t fat enough for the quarterly fund-raising gala information. It might be just an alumni banquet or a photo book advertisement. The school was always sending out notices for opportunities to enhance the Aglionby experience. Summer camps and flying lessons, deluxe yearbooks and custom raven-emblazoned apparel. These Adam threw out. They were meant for the eyes of affluent parents in houses decorated with framed images of their children.

But this time, he didn’t think it was a fund-raiser notification.

He stooped to retrieve it, then hesitated, fingers on the doorknob. “Are you coming in? I need a shower.”

There was a beat.
This was easier
, Adam thought suddenly,
when we didn’t know each other.

Blue said, “You can take one. I don’t mind. Just figured I’d come say hi before my shift.”

He played the key in the lock and let them both in. They stopped in the center of the room, the only place they could stand without ducking.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said.

“What’s new at work?”

Adam struggled to think of an anecdote. His mind was a box he tipped out at the end of his shifts. “Yesterday, Boyd asked me if I wanted to be his tech for his next season. Rally season.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’d have a job after I graduated. I’d be gone six or seven weeks out of the year.” It had been a flattering offer, actually. Most of the mechanics who traveled with Boyd had been at it far longer than Adam.

Blue guessed, “You said no.”

He glanced at her. He couldn’t read her as easily as he could read Gansey. He couldn’t tell if she was pleased or disappointed.

“I’m going to college.” He didn’t add that he wasn’t killing himself at Aglionby to end up a fancy mechanic. That might have been good enough, if he hadn’t known what else was out there. If he hadn’t grown up next door to Aglionby Academy. If you never saw the stars, candles were enough.

She poked a toe at a half-rebuilt fuel pump sitting on newspapers. “Yep.”

There was something there, lurking just behind her answer, some private distress. He touched her face. “Something wrong?”

It was not quite fair. He knew that his touch would distract both of them from the question. Sure enough, Blue closed her eyes. He pressed his palm on her cool cheek, then, after a pause, down her neck. His hand was hyperaware of what it was feeling: the stray hairs at the base of her neck, the faint tackiness of her skin that came from the memory of the sun, the lump of her throat moving as she swallowed.

He captured her with his other hand, pulling her closer. Carefully. Now she was pressed against him, close enough for him to be self-conscious of his sweaty T-shirt. His chin rested on the top of her head. Her arms linked loosely around him; he felt her breath heat the fabric of his shirt. He couldn’t forget that his hip bone was pressed against her.

It wasn’t enough. He ached inside. But there was a line he wasn’t allowed to cross, and he was never sure where it started. Surely this was close to it. He felt dangerous and kinetic.

Then her fingers cautiously pressed into his back, feeling his spine. He hadn’t gone too far, then.

He leaned in to kiss her.

Blue tore herself from his arms. She actually tripped in her haste to get away. Her head knocked against the slanted ceiling.

“I said
no
,” she gasped, hand clapped on the back of her skull.

Something stung in him. “Like
six
weeks ago.”

“It’s still no!”

They stared at each other, both hurt.

“Just,” she said, “… just, not kissing.”

He still ached. His skin was a constellation of nerve endings. “I don’t understand.”

Blue touched her lips as if they
had
been kissed. “I
told
you.”

He just wanted an answer. He wanted to know if it was him, or if it was her. He didn’t know how to ask it, but he did anyway. “Did something … happen to you?”

Her face was blank for a moment. “What? Oh.
No.
Does there have to be a reason? The answer’s just no! Isn’t that good enough?”

The correct answer was yes. He knew it. But the real answer was that he wanted to know if he had bad breath or if she was only doing this with him because he was the first one to ask her or if there was some other obstruction that he wasn’t considering.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said. He tried not to let it sound like he was still hurt, but he was, and it did. “You gonna be here when I get back out? When’s your shift start?”

“I’ll wait.” She tried not to let it sound like she was hurt, but she was, and it did.

While Blue paged through a few maps he had on his plastic bed stand, Adam stood in a cold shower until his heart stopped steaming.
What do you
want
,
Adam?
He didn’t even know. From inside the sloped old shower, he caught a half-image of himself in the mirror and startled. For a moment something about his own reflection had seemed wrong. His wide eyes and gaunt face peered back at him, troubled but not unusual.

And just like that, he was thinking of Cabeswater again. Some days he felt he didn’t think of anything else. He hadn’t owned many things in his life, properly owned them, him and no one else, but now he did: this bargain. It had been a little over a month since he’d offered his sacrifice to Cabeswater in order to wake Gansey’s ley line. The entire ritual felt swimmy and surreal in his mind, like he’d been watching himself perform it on a television screen. Adam had gone fully prepared to make a sacrifice. But he wasn’t quite sure how the specific one he’d eventually made had come to him:
I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.

So far, nothing had happened, not really. Which was almost worse. He was a patient with a diagnosis that he couldn’t understand.

In the shower, Adam scratched a thumbnail across his summer-brown skin. The line of his nail went from white to angry red in a moment, and as he studied it, it struck him that there was something odd about the flow of the water across his skin. As if it was in slow-motion. He followed the stream of water up to the showerhead and spent a full minute watching it sputter from the metal. His thoughts were a confusion of translucent drops clinging to metal and rain trembling off green leaves.

He blinked.

There was nothing odd about the water. There were no leaves. He needed to get some sleep before he did something stupid on the job.

Climbing out of the shower, his spine aching, shoulders aching, soul aching, Adam dried and dressed slowly. He feared — hoped? — that Blue might have left after all, but when he opened the bathroom door, scrubbing his hair dry, he discovered that she stood at the door, talking cheerfully to someone.

The visitor turned out to be St. Agnes’s office lady, her black hair curled in the humidity. She probably had an official title that Ronan knew, sub-nun, or something, but Adam only knew her as Mrs. Ramirez. She seemed to do everything a church required to keep it running, short of saying Mass.