The Dream Thieves

Anger snarled up in him, instantly owning him. It was a binary emotion in the Parrishes. No such thing as slightly mad. Only nothing, and then this: all-encompassing fury.

“What’s pitiful about me, Blue? Tell me what’s pitiful.” He jumped up. “Is it ’cause I work for everything I get? Is that what makes me pitiful and Gansey not?” He shook the letter. “Is it because I don’t get this given to me?”

She didn’t flinch, but something simmered in her eyes. “No.”

His voice was terrible; he heard it. “I don’t want your damn pity.” Her face was shocked. “What did you say?”

She was looking at the box that served as his nightstand. Somehow it had moved several feet away from the bed. The side was badly dented, its former contents scattered violently across the floor. Only now did he remember the act of kicking the box, but not the decision to kick it.

It hadn’t switched off the anger.

For a long moment, Blue stared at him, and then she stood up.

“You be careful, Adam Parrish. ’Cause one day you might get what you ask for. There might be girls in Henrietta who’ll let you talk to them like that, but I’m not one of them. Now I’m going to go sit on those stairs out there until my shift. If you can be — be human before then, come get me. If not, I’ll see you later.”

She ducked a little to keep from smashing her head, and then she shut the door behind herself. It would have been easier if she’d yelled or cried. Instead his words just kept hitting flint inside his thoughts, again and again, another spark, and another. She was just as bad as Gansey. Where does she get off? When he graduated and flew from this place, and she was still trapped here, she’d feel stupid about all this.

He wanted to open the door and shout this fact at her.

He made himself stay where he was.

After a moment, he calmed enough to see how his anger was a separate thing inside him, a dingy, surprise gift from his father. He calmed enough to remember that if he waited long enough, carefully analyzing how it felt, the emotion would lose its inertia. It was the same as physical pain. The more he tried to mentally decide what made pain hurt, the less his brain seemed able to remember the pain at all.

So he took apart the anger inside him.

Is this what he felt like, he wondered, when he grabbed my sleeve as I was going out the door? Is this what made him shove my face into the fridge? Did he feel this when he passed by my bedroom door? Was this what he fought every time he remembered I existed?

He calmed enough to realize it wasn’t even Blue he had been angry at. She’d just been unlucky enough to be standing in the blast zone when he went off.

He’d never escape, not really. Too much monster blood in him. He’d left the den, but his breeding betrayed him. And he knew why he was pitiful. It wasn’t because he had to pay for his school or because he had to work for a living. It was because he was trying to be something he could never be. The sham was pitiful. He didn’t need to graduate. He needed Glendower.

Some nights he lured himself to sleep by imagining how he would word the favor for Glendower. He needed to get the words exactly right. Now, he rolled phrases around his mouth, desperately reaching for one that would comfort him. Ordinarily, words would tumble and lull through his mind, but this time, all he could think was Fix me.

Suddenly, he caught another image.

Right after he did, he thought, What does that mean? One couldn’t catch an image. And he certainly hadn’t done it more than once. But the sensation lingered, an idea that he had glimpsed, or felt, or remembered some movement at the corner of his eye. A snapshot captured just behind his eyes.

He had a strange, disconcerting feeling that he couldn’t trust his senses. Like he was tasting an image or smelling a feeling or touching a sound. It was the same as just a few minutes before, the idea that he’d glimpsed a slightly wrong reflection of himself.

Adam’s previous worries vanished, replaced with a more immediate concern for this ragged body he was carting around in. He’d been hit so many times. He’d already lost his hearing in his left ear. Maybe something else had been destroyed on one of those tense, wretched nights.

Then he caught another image.

He turned.

9

When Adam called, Ronan, Noah, and Gansey were at the Dollar City in Henrietta, loitering. Theoretically, they were there for batteries. Practically, they

were there because both Blue and Adam had work, Ronan’s shapeless anger always got worse at night, and Dollar City was one of the few stores in Henrietta that allowed pets.

Gansey answered his phone as Ronan examined a package of erasers shaped like alligators. The Day-Glo animals wore an assortment of six aghast expressions. Noah tried to skew his mouth to match as Chainsaw, buried in the crook of Ronan’s arm, eyed them suspiciously. At the end of the aisle, the clerk viewed Chainsaw with equal distrust. When Dollar City had said Pets Welcome, Dollar City wasn’t certain they’d meant carrion birds.

Ronan was very much enjoying the clerk’s petulant gaze. “Hello? Oh, hey,” Gansey said to the phone, touching a notebook with a handgun printed on the cover. The oh, hey was accompanied by a definite change in the timbre of his voice. That meant it was Adam, and that somehow stoked Ronan’s anger. Everything was worse at night. “I thought you were still at work. What? Oh, we’re at the Bourgeoisie Playground.”

Ronan showed Gansey a plastic wall clock cleverly molded in the shape of a turkey. The wattle, hanging below the clock face, ticked off the seconds.

“Mon dieu!” Gansey said. To the phone, he said, “If you’re not sure, it probably wasn’t. A woman is hard to mistake for anything else.”

Ronan wasn’t exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan’s rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey’s hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was barelegged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall.