The Dream Thieves

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. That Ronan, he thought, would’ve been intrigued but wary of the young man standing in the motes of dust. Ronan’s closeshaved 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?”

“Ada m’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 the 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.