The Dream Thieves (21 page)

“I’m not using any word,” Ronan said. The annoying thing about Ronan was always that he was angry when everyone else was calm, and calm when everyone else was angry. Because Blue was ready to bust a vein, his voice was utterly pacific. “I’m just telling you I’m not going. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s not. My soul’s in enough peril as it is.”

At this, Gansey’s face turned to a genuine frown and he looked as if he was about to say something. Then he just shook his head a little.

“Do you think we’re in league with the devil, Ronan?” Blue asked. The question would’ve had a better effect if she’d asked it with sickly sweetness — she could just imagine Calla pulling it off — but she was too irritated to manage it. “They’re evil soothsayers?”

He rolled his eyes luxuriously at her. It was like he merely absorbed her anger, saving it all up for when he needed it for himself.

“My mom first knew she was psychic because she saw the future in a dream,” Blue said. “A
dream
, Ronan. It wasn’t like she sacrificed a goat in the backyard to see it. She didn’t
try
to see the future. It’s not something she became; it’s something she
is
. I could just as easily say that you’re evil because you can take things from your dreams!”

Ronan said, “Yeah, you could.”

Gansey’s frown deepened. Again he opened his mouth and closed it.

Blue couldn’t drop it. She said, “So even if it could help you understand you and your dad, you won’t go talk to them.”

He shrugged, as dismissive as Kavinsky. “Nope.”

“Why, you close-minded —”

“Jane,” Gansey rumbled.
Oblivious!
He cut his eyes to her, looking as stately as one could look lying on their back in a salmon polo shirt. “Ronan.”

Ronan said, “I am being perfectly fucking civil.”

“You’re being medieval,” Gansey replied. “Multiple studies have suggested that clairvoyance lies in the realm of science, not magic.”

Oh. Enlightened.

“Come on, man,” Ronan said.

Gansey sat up. “Come on, man, yourself. We’re all aware here that Cabeswater bends time. You yourself somehow managed to write on that rock in Cabeswater before any of us ever got there. Time’s not a line. It’s a circle or a figure eight or a goddamn Slinky. If you can believe that, I don’t know why you can’t believe that someone might be able to glimpse something farther along the Slinky.”

Ronan looked at him.

That look, Blue thought. Ronan Lynch would do anything for Gansey.

I probably would, too
, she thought. It was impossible for her to understand how he managed to pull off such an effect in that polo shirt.

“Whatever,” Ronan said. Which meant he’d do it.

Gansey looked at Blue. “Happy, Jane?”

Blue said, “Whatever.”

Which meant she was.

Maura and Persephone were working, but Blue managed to corner Calla in the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room. If she couldn’t have all three of them, Calla was the one she wanted anyway. Calla was as traditionally clairvoyant as the other two, but she had an additional, strange gift: psychometry. When she touched an object, she could often sense where it had come from, what the owner had been thinking when he or she used it, and where it might end up. As they seemed to be dealing with things that were both people
and
objects at the same time, Calla’s talent seemed apropos.

Standing in the doorway with Ronan and Gansey, Blue said, “We need your advice.”

“I’m sure you do,” replied Calla, in not the warmest of ways. She had one of those low, smoky voices that always seemed more appropriate to a black-and-white movie. “Ask your question.”

Politely, Gansey asked, “Are you sure you can think that way?”

“If you’re doubting me,” Calla snapped, “I don’t see why you’re here.”

In Gansey’s defense, Calla was upside down. She hung magnificently from the ceiling of the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room; the only thing preventing her from crashing to the floor was a deep purple swath of silk wrapped around one of her thighs.

Gansey averted his eyes. He whispered in Blue’s ear, “Is this a ritual?”

There was something a bit magical about it, Blue supposed. Although the green gingham-wallpapered room was full of a multitude of odds and ends to lure the attention, it was difficult to look away from Calla’s slowly spinning form. It seemed impossible the length of silk would hold her weight. Currently, she was rotated toward the corner, her back to them. Her tunic hung down, revealing a lot of dark brown skin, a pink bra strap, and four tiny tattooed coyotes running along her spine.

Blue, holding the puzzle box in her hands, whispered back: “It’s aerial yoga.” Louder, she said, “Calla, it’s about Ronan.”

Calla readjusted, wrapping the silk around her other thigh instead. “Which one’s he again? The pretty one?”

Blue and Gansey exchanged a look. Blue’s look said,
I’m so, so sorry.
Gansey’s said,
Am I the pretty one?

Calla continued turning, almost imperceptibly. It was becoming more obvious as she swiveled that she was not the thinnest woman on the planet, but that she had stomach muscles like
whoa
. “The Coca-Cola shirt?”

She meant Adam. He’d worn a red Coca-Cola shirt to the first reading and was now and forevermore identified by it.

Ronan said, his voice a low growl, “The snake.”

Calla’s rotation finished just as he said it. They looked at each other for a long moment, him right side up, her upside down. Chainsaw, on Ronan’s shoulder, twisted her head to get a better look. There was nothing particularly sympathetic about Ronan just then, handsome mouth drawing a cruel line, eerie tattoo creeping out the collar of his black T-shirt, raven pressed against the side of his shaved head. It was hard to remember the Ronan who’d pressed that tiny mouse to his cheek back at the Barns.

Upside down, Calla was trying to look dismissive, but it was clear that one of her arched eyebrows was terribly interested.

“I see,” she replied finally. “What sort of advice do you need, Snake?”

“My dreams,” Ronan replied.

Now Calla’s eyebrows matched her dismissive mouth. She allowed herself to circle away from them again. “Persephone’s the one you’ll want for dream interpretation. Have a nice life.”

“They’ll interest you,” Ronan said.

Calla just cackled and stretched one of her legs out.

Blue made an irritated noise. Taking two strides across the room, she pressed the puzzle box to Calla’s bare cheek.

Calla stopped spinning.

Slowly, she righted herself. The gesture was as elegant as a ballet move, a swan dancer unfolding. She said, “Why didn’t you say so?”

Ronan said, “I did.”

Her plum lips pursed. “Something you should know about me, Snake. I don’t believe anyone.”

Chainsaw hissed. Ronan said, “Something you should know about me. I never lie.”

Calla continued performing aerial yoga for the entirety of the conversation.

Sometimes she was right side up, her legs curved beneath her. “All of these things are still a part of you. To me, they feel precisely the same as you feel. Well, mostly. They’re like your nail clippings. So they all share the same life as you. The same soul. You’re the same entity.”

Ronan wanted to protest this — if Chainsaw fell off a table, he didn’t feel her pain — but he wouldn’t feel the pain of one of his nail clippings, either.

“So when you die, they’ll stop.”

“Stop? Not die themselves?” Gansey asked.

Calla turned herself upside down, her knees bent and her feet pressed to each other. It made her a cunning spider. “When you die, your computer doesn’t die, too. They never really lived like you’re thinking of life. It’s not a soul that’s animating them. Take away the dreamer and — they’re a computer waiting for input.”

Ronan thought of what Declan had said all those months before:
Mom is nothing without Dad.
He’d been right. “So my mother is never going to wake up.”

Calla slid slowly upright, freeing her hands. “Snake, hand me that bird.”

“Don’t squeeze,” Ronan said narrowly, folding the raven’s wings against her body and relinquishing her.

Chainsaw promptly bit Calla’s finger. Unimpressed, Calla snapped her teeth back at the raven.

“Careful, chickadee,” she told Chainsaw, her smile deadly. “I bite, too. Blue?”

This meant she wanted to use Blue’s invisible ability to hone her vision. Blue rested one hand on Calla’s knee and used the other to keep Calla from rotating. For a long moment, Calla hung there with her eyes closed. Chainsaw was motionless in her hands, fluffed up over the ignominy of it all. Then Calla fixed her gaze on Ronan, a sharply structured smile manifesting on her plum-painted lips. “What
have
you done, Snake?”

Ronan didn’t reply. Silence was never a wrong answer.

Calla stuffed the bird into Blue’s hands, who tried to placate her before returning her to Ronan.

Calla said, “Here’s the deal. Your mother was a dream. Your fool father took her out — what, there aren’t enough women in the world without making one? — and now, she has no dreamer. You want her back, she has to go back in a dream.”

She did several elaborate procedures then, all of them elegant and effortless looking. They reminded Ronan a bit of the movement of the puzzle box in that they seemed to be a little illogical, a little impossible. It was hard to understand how she extracted an arm from the silk without getting her torso tangled. Difficult to see how she twisted that leg without falling to the floor.

Ronan interrupted the silence. “Cabeswater. Cabeswater is a dream.”

Calla stopped rotating.

“You don’t have to tell me I’m right,” Ronan said. He thought of all the times he had dreamt of Cabeswater’s old trees; how familiar it had felt to walk there; how the trees had known his name. He was tangled in their roots, somehow, and they, in his veins. “If Mom is in Cabeswater, she’ll wake up.”

Calla stared at him. Silence was never a wrong answer.

Gansey said, “I guess we really do have to get Cabeswater back, then.”

Blue tilted her head so that Calla was slightly less upside down to her. “Any ideas?”

“I’m not a magician,” Calla said. Blue gave her a spin. Calla laughed all the way around, a filthy, pleased sound. She pointed to Ronan as he headed out the door. “But he is. Also, get rid of that mask. It’s a nasty bit of work.”

L
AST
W
ILL &
T
ESTAMENT OF

N
IALL
T. L
YNCH

A
RTICLE 1

P
RELIMINARY
D
ECLARATIONS

I
AM MARRIED TO
A
URORA
L
YNCH AND ALL REFERENCES IN THIS
W
ILL TO MY SPOUSE REFER TO
A
URORA
L
YNCH
.

I
HAVE THREE LIVING CHILDREN, NAMED DECLAN
T. L
YNCH
, R
ONAN
N. L
YNCH, AND
M
ATTHEW
A. L
YNCH
. A
LL REFERENCES IN THIS
W
ILL TO MY “CHILD” OR “CHILDREN” OR “ISSUE” INCLUDE THE ABOVE CHILD OR CHILDREN, AND ANY CHILD OR CHILDREN HEREAFTER BORN TO OR ADOPTED BY ME.
A
LL REFERENCES TO “MIDDLE SON” REFER TO
R
ONAN
N. L
YNCH
.