The Dream Thieves

Finally, Kavinsky slid his gaze over to Ronan. His smile was sly. Pleased that Ronan recognized the game. “Well done, Lynch. Where’d you find them?”

Ronan smiled thinly. He turned off the air-conditioning.

“That’s how it’s gonna be? Hard to get?”

The opposing light turned yellow.

“Yes,” said Ronan.

The traffic light above them turned green. Without any particular prelude, both cars exploded off the mark. For two seconds, the Mitsubishi snarled ahead, but then Kavinsky screwed the shift from third to fourth.

Ronan did not.

He blew by.

Just as Ronan tore around a corner, Kavinsky honked his horn twice and made a rude gesture. Then Ronan was out of sight and speeding on his way back to Monmouth Manufacturing.

In the rearview mirror, he allowed himself the slightest of smiles.

This was what it felt like to be happy.

13

Blue very much liked having the boys over to her house.

Their presence at the house was agreeable for several different reasons. The absolute simplest one was that Blue sometimes got tired of being 100 percent of the non-psychic population of 300 Fox Way — more and more often, these days — and that percentage improved dramatically when the boys were over. The second reason was that Blue saw all the boys, particularly Richard Campbell Gansey III, in a very different light when they were there. Rather than the glossy, self-assured boy he’d been when she’d first met him, 300 Fox Way Gansey was a self-deprecating onlooker, at once eager and unsuited for all of the intuitive arts. He was a privileged tourist in a primitive country: flatteringly curious, unknowingly insulting, quite certainly unable to survive if left to his own devices.

And the third reason was that it suggested permanence. Blue had acquaintances at school, people she liked. But they weren’t forever. While she was friendly with a lot of them, there was no one that she wanted to commit to for a lifetime. And she knew this was her fault. She’d never been any good at having casual friends. For Blue, there was family — which had never been about blood relation at 300 Fox Way — and then there was everyone else.

When the boys came to her house, they stopped being everyone else.

Currently, both Adam and Gansey were situated in the narrow bowels of the house. It was a wide open, promising sort of sunny day; it invaded through every window. Without any particular discussion, Gansey and Blue had come to the decision that today was a day for exploring, once Ronan arrived.

Gansey sat the kitchen table in an aggressively green polo shirt. By his left hand was a glass bottle of a fancy coffee beverage he had brought with him. By his right hand was one of Maura’s healing teas. For several months now, Blue’s mother had been working on a line of healthful teas to augment their income. Blue had learned early on that healthful was not a synonym for delicious, and had very vocally removed herself from the test group.

Gansey didn’t know any better, so he accepted what he was given.

“I don’t think I can wait any longer. But I would like to minimize the risk,” he said as Blue rummaged in the fridge. Someone had filled an entire shelf with disgusting store-brand pudding. “I don’t think we can ever make it completely safe, but surely there is a way to be more cautious.”

For a moment Blue thought he was talking about the process of drinking one of Maura’s teas. Then she realized he was talking about Cabeswater. Blue loved it in a way that was hard to hold inside herself. She’d always loved the big beech tree in their backyard and the oaks that lined Fox Way, and forests in general, but nothing had prepared her for Cabeswater’s trees. Ancient and twisted and sentient. And — they’d known her name.

It felt an awful lot like a hint of something more.

Maura watched Gansey carefully. Blue suspected this was not because of anything Gansey was saying but because she was waiting for him to take a drink of whatever horrid potion she had steeping in that cup in front of him.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Blue said, settling on a yogurt. It had fruit on the bottom, but she’d eat around it. She threw herself into a chair at the table. “You’re going to say, ‘Well, then, don’t take Blue with you.’ ”

Her mother flipped a hand like, If you knew, why’d you ask?

Gansey said, “What? Oh, because Blue makes things louder?”

Crossly, Blue realized that Gansey had now called her Jane so often that it felt strange to hear him say her real name.

“Yes,” Maura replied. “But I actually wasn’t going to say that, even though it’s true. I was going to say that this place must have rules. Everything involved in energy and spirit has rules — we just don’t always know them. So it looks unpredictable to us. But it’s really just because we’re idiots. Are you sure you want to go back?”

Gansey took a drink of his healing tea. Maura’s chin jutted as she observed the lump of it heading down his throat. His face remained precisely the same and he said absolutely nothing, but after a moment, he made a gentle fist of his hand and thumped his breastbone.

“What did you say that was good for?” he asked politely. His voice was a little odd until he cleared his throat.

“General wellness,” Maura said. “Also, it’s supposed to manage dreams.”

“My dreams?” he asked.

Maura raised a very knowing eyebrow. “Who else’s would you be managing?”

“Mm.”

“Also, it helps with legal matters.”

Gansey had been swallowing as much of his fancy coffee as he could possibly manage without breathing, but he stopped and put the bottle on the table with a clink. “Do I need help with legal matters?”

Maura shrugged. “Ask a psychic.”

“Mom,” Blue said. “Seriously.” To Gansey, she prompted, “Cabeswater.”

“Oh, right. Well, no one else has to go with me,” he said, “But the incontrovertible fact remains that I am looking for a mystical king on a ley line and it is a mystical forest on a ley line. I can’t discount that coincidence. We can look elsewhere, but I think Glendower’s there. And I don’t want to waste time now that the ley line’s awake. I feel like time’s running out.”

“Are you sure you still want to find him?” Maura asked.

Blue already knew this question was irrelevant. Without cutting her gaze over to him, she already knew what she would see. She would see a rich boy dressed like a mannequin and coiffed like a newscaster — but his eyes were like the dreaming pool in Cabeswater. He hid the insatiable wanting well, but now that she’d seen it once, she couldn’t stop seeing it. After all, that was all she could see. But he wouldn’t be able to explain it to Maura.