The Dream Thieves

“Now,” Persephone said, and her voice was very small and soft. “Are you the Magician? Or aren’t you?”



Adam closed his eyes.



Connections.



His mind darted to the stones, the lake, the thunderheads. Lightning.



He thought, bizarrely, of the Camaro. Needing the battery just to get them home.



Indiget homo battery.



Yes.



He opened his eyes.



“I need the stone from the car,” he said. “The one from the garden.”



Hurry.



“Adam?” Ronan demanded. “Is it really you?”



Because suddenly, the landscape had shifted. The trees had moved and shivered to the side, and now there was the ugly manmade lake they had discovered with Gansey. Adam crouched beside the shore, laying out stones in a complicated pattern. Was it the real Adam? Or was it a dream Adam?



This Adam looked up sharply. He was himself, and he was something else. “Lynch. What did Kavinsky just dream?”



“A fire fucker,” Ronan said. He should wake up. He didn’t stand a chance lying on the ground back at the party.



Adam looked behind him and gestured wildly to someone. “What are you dreaming to take it down?”



Ronan tested the dream, cautiously. It felt stretched thin as a string of caramel. He wouldn’t be able to take a thing from it.



“Nothing. There’s nothing here.”



Persephone ran up to Adam, a large, flat rock in her arms.



“What are you doing?” Ronan demanded.



“Fixing it,” Adam said. “Start making something. I’ll try to have it up by the time you’re done.”



Ronan heard a scream, far away. It was from outside his dream. Sleep was collapsing around him.



“Hurry,” Persephone advised.



Adam looked up at Ronan. “I know it was you,” he said. “I figured it out. The rent.”



He held Ronan’s gaze for just a moment longer, until something inside Ronan unwound and he almost said something. And then Adam leapt up, snatched the rock from Persephone, and sprinted toward the opposite side of the shore.



“Now,” Persephone said.



Ronan turned to the failing trees. “Cabeswater,” he said, “I need your help. You need my help.”



Raptor, hissed the trees.



Plunderer.



There was no time for this. “I’m not here to steal! Do you want to save yourself?”



Nothing.



Damn Kavinsky.



Ronan shouted, “I’m not him, all right? I’m not like him. Damn it, you know me. Haven’t you always? Didn’t you know my father? We’re both Greywarens.”



There was Orphan Girl, finally. Yes. She peered out from behind one of the trunks. If she would help him, he could bring out something, anything. He stretched out his hand to her, but she shook her head. “Vos estis unum tantum.”



(You are the only one.)



In English, she added, “Many thieves. One Greywaren.”



In the way of a dream, knowledge flooded through him. How many could make their dreams real, but how few could speak to the dream. How he was meant to be Cabeswater’s right hand. Didn’t he know? asked Cabeswater — but not with words. Hadn’t he known it all along?



“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I had to figure everything out myself, and it took a fucking long time, okay? Please. I can’t do it without you.”



In his hands, suddenly, was the puzzle box. It didn’t feel like a dream. It felt weighty and cool and real. He flipped the dials and wheels until it read please on the English side. He turned it to the side with the mysterious language on it. This, he knew now, was not a language of men. This was a language of trees. He read, “T’implora?”



The effect was instantaneous. He could hear leaves moving and shifting in a wind he didn’t feel, and only now did he realize how many trees hadn’t been speaking before. Muttering and whispering and hissing in three different languages, they all agreed: They would help him.



He closed his eyes in relief.



It would be all right. They would give him a weapon, and he would wake and destroy this dragon of Kavinsky’s before anything else happened.



In the blackness of his closed lids, he heard: tck-tck-tck-tck.



No, thought Ronan. Not night horrors.



But there was the rattle of their claws. The chatter of their beaks.



Dream to nightmare, just like that.



There was no real fear, just dread. Anticipation. It took so long to kill him in a dream.



“This won’t help,” he told the trees. He knelt down, bracing his fingers into the soft soil. Even though he knew he couldn’t save himself, he couldn’t ever seem to convince himself to stop fighting. “This won’t save anyone.”



The trees whispered, Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit; occidentis telum est.



(A sword is never a killer; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.)



But the night horrors were not a weapon Ronan could wield.



“I can’t control them!” he shouted. “They only want to hurt me!”



A night horror appeared. It surged over the trees, blocking out the sky. It was like nothing he had dreamt before. Three times the size of the others. Reeking of ammonia. Glacially white. The claws were yellowed and translucent, darkening to red tips. Pink veins stood out on the tattered rag wings. Its red albino eyes were tiny and furious in its wrinkled head. And instead of one ferocious beak, there were two, side by side, screaming in unison.



On the other side of the lake, Adam held up his hands, pointing at the sky. He was an alien version of himself. A dream version of himself. Lightning struck the stone beside him.



Like a heart, the ley line jerked and spasmed to life.



Cabeswater was alive.



“Now!” Adam shouted. “Ronan, now!”



The night horror hissed a scream.



“It’s only you,” whispered Orphan Girl. She was holding his hand, crouched down next to him. “Why do you hate you?”



Ronan thought about it.



The albino night horror swept in, talons opening.



Ronan stood up, stretching out his arm like he would to Chainsaw.



“I don’t,” he said.



And he woke up.



62



Apart from ruining the Gray Man’s life, the Gray Man’s plan to lead the others out of Henrietta had been going exceptionally well. Greenmantle must not have ever



really trusted him, because he had immediately accepted the Gray Man’s confession of theft. He’d sworn and threatened, but really, Greenmantle had already done the worst thing he could manage, so his words lacked force.



And news had spread fast, apparently. Those headlights there were the two men who had, he’d discovered, trashed the Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast. And those headlights behind that, calculating and inexorable, were his brother’s.



Follow me, follow me.



For a mile, two miles, three miles, fifteen miles, the Gray Man played crack the whip with the other two cars. The car containing the other treasure seekers tried to be discreet, but the car in back didn’t. That was how he knew it was his brother. His brother always wanted Dean to know. That was part of the game.



My brother. My brother. My brother.



It had been paralyzing, at first, knowing that his brother was so close. At first, the only way the Gray Man could focus on driving was by thinking of everything he had become as the Gray Man instead of everything he had been as Dean Allen. Because Dean Allen kept telling him to just pull over and get it over with. It will only be worse, whispered Dean Allen in a small voice, if you make him come looking for you.



The Gray Man, on the other hand, said: He is a thirty-nineyear-old investment manager, and for efficiency, he should probably just be shot twice in the head and returned to his office with an ambiguous note.



And there was a third part of him, now, that was neither the Gray Man nor Dean Allen, that wasn’t thinking about his brother at all. This part — perhaps it was Mr. Gray — couldn’t stop thinking about everything he was leaving behind. The faded and beautiful crevices of the little town, the unapologetic spread of Maura’s smile, the new thunder of his suddenly operating heart. This part of him even missed the Champagne Killjoy.



The Gray Man’s eyes drifted down to the note still stuck to the steering wheel:



This one’s for you. Just the way you like it: fast and anonymous.



It was such a brilliant little plan, slick and simple. All he’d had to do was give up everything. And it was working so very well.



But then something happened.



There was nothing around them but trees and highway and blackness, but suddenly the lights on the dormant machines in the passenger seat exploded.



Not a flicker. Not a hint.



A blasted shout into the night. The headlights behind him dipped as the cars slammed on their brakes, their meters undoubtedly howling the same as his.



No, the Gray Man thought. One of those stupid boys had dreamt back in Henrietta and ruined everything.



But that wasn’t it.



Because the readings were solid and screaming. Ordinarily, the energy spiked at the moment of the dream object’s creation, and then fell off abruptly. But the meters were still pegged. And remained so, despite the fact that the Gray Man was headed away from Henrietta at seventy miles an hour.



Behind the Gray Man, the first car had faltered. They doubted the Gray Man’s story, perhaps. Assuming, like the Gray Man, that someone elsewhere was using the Greywaren.



But the longer the flashing lights and wailing alerts went on, the more obvious it was that this was not the Greywaren’s doing. Not only were the readings constant, but they were coming from everywhere. It had to be the line Maura had talked about. Something had happened to it, and now it was alive, blasting these energy readings through the roof.



The car behind him was still following, but slowly. They had access to the same readings as the Gray Man — and they were confused.



A realization gradually occurred to the Gray Man. As long as the ley line was creating such dramatic readings, the Greywaren was invisible. An energy spike wouldn’t be noticed in this already existing riot.



Which meant Henrietta didn’t have to worry about any new hunters coming after the Greywaren. No one could use these readings to pinpoint anything but the location of the line. It meant that if the Gray Man could somehow get rid of this carload of treasure seekers, there was only one reason for the Gray Man to run from Henrietta.



His brother.



Ronan had created this night horror to fight Kavinksy’s dragon, and fight they did.



Up through the black the creatures climbed, snarled around each other. Fireworks burst past them, illuminating their scales. The crowd, drunk and high and gullible and desirous of wonders, screamed their support.



Down on the ground, Ronan and Kavinsky leaned their heads back, too, watching what they had made.



The creatures were beautiful and terrible. Sparks cascaded from them as claws and fire met. A wheeling scream like a firework escaped from the night horror.



Up, up, up, into the black. Ronan’s eyes darted through the crowd. Gansey and Blue had gone separate ways and he saw them now tearing open the doors on Mitsubishis, looking for Matthew. The cars were all stopped as everyone watched the dragons. There weren’t that many cars. Gansey and Blue would find him. It would be all right.