The Dream Thieves (17 page)

“Ronan!”

Ronan curled on his bed, half-propped against the wall, his headphones still around his neck. His body was frozen, as it always was after dreaming, but this time he could feel fire through every nerve. The nightmare still pumped adrenaline through him, although he couldn’t move to use it. His breath came in great, uneven puffs. He couldn’t uncurl or answer or stop seeing Adam’s ruined face.

It was morning. Early, gray morning, rain beating on the window beside his head. He floated above himself. The boy below him was locked in an unseeable battle, every vein standing on his arms and neck.

“Ronan,” whispered Noah. He crouched inches away, colorless in this light. He was solid enough for his knees to leave an impression on the bedspread but not enough to cast any sort of shadow. “You’re awake, you’re awake.”

For a long minute, Noah blinked at him while Ronan looked back, wrung out. Gradually, his heart slowed. With an icy touch, Noah worked Ronan’s fingers free of the dream’s spoils. The mask. Ronan hadn’t meant to bring it with him. He’d have to destroy it. Maybe he could burn it.

Noah lifted it into the window’s diffuse light and shivered. The mask’s surface was splattered with red-black drops. Whose DNA, Ronan wondered, would a lab find in that blood?

“Yours?” Noah asked, barely audible.

Ronan shook his head and sealed his eyes again. Behind his closed eyelids, it was Adam’s dreadful face he saw, not Noah’s.

In the corner of the room, there was a sound. Not the corner where Chainsaw’s cage was. And not a sound like a young raven. It was a long, slow scrape on the wood floor. Then a rapid sound like a drinking straw in bicycle spokes.
Tck-tck-tck-tck-tck.

It was a sound Ronan had heard before.

He swallowed.

He opened his eyes. Noah’s eyes were already wide.

Noah said, “What were you dreaming about?”

G
ansey had woken before dawn. It had been a while since he’d had to wake up early for crew team practice, but he still sometimes sat bolt upright at 4:45 a.m., ready to hit the river. Usually, he’d spend those sleepless early-morning hours quietly going through his books or surfing the Internet for new references to Glendower, but after the disappearance of Cabeswater, he couldn’t bring himself to be productive. Instead he had retreated outside through the drizzle to the early-morning Pig. Immediately, he had been comforted. He’d spent so many hours sitting in it like this — doing his homework before going in to class, or stranded by the side of the road, or wondering what he would do if he never found Glendower — that it felt like home. Even when it wasn’t running, the car smelled intimately of old vinyl and gasoline. As he sat, a single mosquito found its way into the car and worried at his ear, a high tremolo against the basso continuo of the rain and thunder.

Cabeswater’s gone. Glendower is there — he must be — and it’s gone.

The drops pattered and dispersed on the windshield. He thought about the day he’d been stung to death by hornets and lived anyway. Gansey ran over the memory until he no longer felt the thrill of hearing Glendower’s name whispered in his ear, and then instead gave himself over to feeling sorry for himself, that he should have so many friends and yet feel so very alone. He felt it fell to him to comfort them, but never the other way around.

As it should be
, he thought, abruptly angry with himself.
You’ve had it the easiest. What good is all your privilege, you soft, spoiled thing, if you can’t stand on your own legs?

The door to Monmouth opened. Noah immediately spotted Gansey and made a generalized flapping gesture. It seemed to mean he wanted Gansey and, furthermore, that he was feeling fairly urgent about it.

Ducking his head against the rain, Gansey joined Noah. “What?”

More hand flapping. In they went.

Inside, the small smells of the building — the rusty fixtures, the wormholed wood, his mint plants — had been overtaken by an unfamiliar odor. Something damp and strangely fertile and unpleasant. Perhaps it was brought out by the rain and the humidity. Perhaps an animal had died in a corner. At Noah’s urging, Gansey cautiously stepped into the main room instead of continuing to the second-floor apartment. Unlike the second floor, the ground floor was dim, lit only by small windows high up on the walls. Rusty metal columns held the ceiling aloft, spaced wide to leave room for whatever the room had been designed for. Something substantial in both height and width. Everything was dust in this forgotten factory — the ground, the walls, the shifting shape of the air. It was unused, spacious, timeless. Eerie.

Ronan stood in the center of the room with his back to them. This Ronan Lynch was not the one that Gansey had first met. No. That Ronan, he thought, would’ve been intrigued but wary of the young man standing in the motes of dust. Ronan’s close-shaved head was bowed, but everything else about his posture suggested vigilance, distrust. His wicked tattoo hooked out from behind his black muscle T. This Ronan Lynch was a dangerous and hollowed-out creature. He was a snare for you to step your foot in.

Do not think of this Ronan. Remember the other one.

“What are you doing down here?” Gansey asked, vaguely unnerved.

Ronan’s posture didn’t alter at the sound of Gansey’s voice, and Gansey saw now that it was because he was already wound to the utmost. A muscle stood out on his neck. He was an animal poised for flight.

Chainsaw rolled in the dust between his feet. She appeared to be in the midst of ecstasy or seizure. When she saw Gansey, she stilled and studied him with one eye and then the other.

Outside, thunder rumbled. Rain pattered through the broken panes above the staircase. A whiff of that humid scent came through again.

Ronan’s voice was flat.
“Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit; occidentis telum est.”

Gansey had a strict policy of avoiding noun declension before breakfast. “If you’re trying to be wise, you win. Is
quemadmodum
‘just like’?”

When Ronan turned, his eyes were shuttered and barred. His hands were also coated in blood.

Gansey had a pure, logicless moment where his stomach dropped and he thought,
I don’t know who any of my friends really are.
Then reason filtered back in. “Jesus Christ. Is that yours?”

“Adam’s.”

“Dream Adam’s,” Noah corrected quickly. “Mostly.”

In the rain, in the dim, the shadows shifted in the corners. It reminded Gansey of the first nights he’d spent here, when the only way he could sleep was to pretend that this vast room didn’t exist beneath his bed. He could hear Ronan breathing.

“Do you remember last year?” Ronan asked. “When I told you … it wouldn’t happen again?”

It was a foolish question. Gansey never forgot. Noah discovering Ronan in a slick of his own blood, veins ripped to shreds. Hours in the hospital. Counseling and promises.

No point being coy. Gansey said, “When you tried to kill yourself.”

Ronan shook his head once. “It was a nightmare. They tore me apart in my dream, and when I woke up —” He gestured with his bloody hands. “I brought it with me. I couldn’t tell you. My father told me to never tell.”

“So you let me think you’d tried to kill yourself?”

Ronan allowed the weight of his blue-eyed gaze to rest heavily on Gansey, making him understand that he wasn’t getting another answer. His father had told him to never tell. And so he had never told.

Gansey felt the entire year reshaping itself in his head. Every night he’d been terrified for Ronan’s well-being. All of the times Ronan had said,
It’s not like that.
At once he was incensed Ronan would have allowed him such continuous fear and relieved that Ronan was not such a foreign creature after all. It was easier for Gansey to wrap his head around a Ronan who made dreams real than a Ronan who wanted to die.

“Then why … why are you down here?” Gansey said finally.

Overhead, something banged. Both Ronan and Chainsaw snapped their chins upward.

“Noah?” Gansey asked.

“I’m still here,” Noah replied from behind him. “But not for long.”

Through the constant hiss of the rain, Gansey heard a scrape across the floor upstairs, and another bang as something fell over.

“It’s not just the blood,” Ronan said. His chest moved up and down with his breath. “Something else got out, too.”

The door to Ronan’s room was closed. A bookshelf had been emptied, tipped on its side, and pushed in front of it. The books were hastily piled beside the knocked-over telescope. Everything was silent and gray as the rain beaded on the windows. The smell Gansey had noticed downstairs was more prominent up here: moldy, sweet.

“Kerah?”
croaked Chainsaw from Ronan’s arm. He made a soft noise back at her before lowering her onto Gansey’s desk; she disappeared into the rain-black shadow beneath it. Switching a crowbar to his right hand, Ronan pointed to the box cutter on the desk until Gansey realized he meant for him to take it. He dubiously extended and retracted the blade a few times before glancing at Noah. The latter looked ready to vanish, either from a lack of energy or a lack of courage.

“Are you ready?” Ronan asked.

“What is it I’m preparing myself for?”

Behind the door, something scratched on the floorboard.
Tck-tck-tck.
Like a mallet dragged across a washboard. Something in Gansey’s heart thrilled with fear.

Ronan said, “What’s in my head.”

Gansey didn’t think there was a way to steel oneself for
that
. But he helped Ronan push the bookshelf out of the way.

“Gansey,” Ronan said. The doorknob was turning on its own accord. He reached out and held it still. “Watch — watch your eyes.”

“What’s our plan?” Gansey’s attention was on Ronan’s grip on the doorknob. His knuckles were white with the effort of keeping it from turning.

Ronan said, “Kill it.”

He flung open the door.

The first thing Gansey saw was the disaster: Chainsaw’s cage flattened, the perch splintered. The mesh cover of a speaker was bent like a clam near the threshold. A computer keyboard wedged beneath an overturned stool. A tattered shirt and pair of jeans sprawled on the floor, at first glance a corpse.

Then he saw the nightmare.

It moved from the rear corner. Like it was a shadow, and then it was a thing. Fast. Black. Bigger than he’d expected. Realer than he’d expected.

It was as tall as he was. Two-legged. Clothed in something torn, black, greasy.

Gansey couldn’t stop staring at the beak.

“Gansey!” Ronan snarled, and then he swung the crowbar.

The creature hurtled to the floor. It twisted out of Ronan’s reach as he swung again. Gansey became aware of a claw. No,
claws
, dozens of them. Massive, shiny, curled to needle points. They snatched at Ronan.

Gansey darted in, slashing at a limb. The creature’s clothing parted beneath the blade. It leapt up, straight at Ronan, who blocked it with the crowbar. With a mighty flap, the creature launched itself through the air and perched on the doorjamb, hands between its legs, clinging like a spider. There was nothing human about it. It hissed at the boys. Red-pupiled eyes snapped shut and open. A bird. A dinosaur. A demon.

No wonder Ronan never sleeps.

“Close the door!” snapped Ronan. “We don’t want to play hide-and-seek in there!”

The bedroom seemed too small to shut themselves in with a monster, but Gansey knew Ronan was right. He slammed the door just as the creature flew at him. Hooks and beak, black and twisted. At the same instant, Ronan hurled himself, pushing Gansey to the floor.

In a brief, crystal moment, pinned beneath both Ronan and the beaked creature, Gansey saw the thing’s claws seize Ronan’s arm, and with hyperawareness, saw matching scabs crisscrossed beneath the fresh ones. The beak darted for Ronan’s face.

Gansey stabbed the box cutter blade into the waxy black flesh between the claws.

The thing made no sound as it reared back. Ronan swung again with the crowbar, and when it glanced off the creature, he aimed a fist instead. The two of them stumbled over the corner of the bed. The nightmare was on top of Ronan. Both of them fought soundlessly; Ronan could die, and Gansey wouldn’t know it until after.