The Dream Thieves

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 beaks, 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 hyper-awareness, 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.

Sweeping a hand across Ronan’s desk, Gansey seized a beer bottle and smashed it against the creature’s skull. Instantly, the smell of alcohol filled the room. Ronan cursed from beneath the monster. Gansey snatched one of the thing’s limbs — was it an arm? Was it a wing? Rrevulsion coursed up his throat — and swiped at its body with the box cutter. He felt the blade make contact, bite into greasy flesh. Suddenly, there was a claw around his neck, a claw shoved into the thin skin under his chin. Hooked like a fish.

He was aware of how tiny the blade of the box cutter was. How insubstantial in comparison to the bristling claws of this thing. He felt a warm trickle into the collar of his shirt. His lungs filled with the fecund smell of rot.

Ronan smashed the crowbar into the creature’s head. And then he smashed it again. And once more. Both Gansey and the thing crumpled to the ground; the weight of it was an anchor on Gansey’s skin. He was caught, impaled, snarled on this grip.

The box cutter was taken from Gansey. Gansey, seeing what Ronan meant to do, stretched his arms for that still-grasping beak. So it was the creature holding Gansey holding the creature. And then Ronan cutting its throat. It was neither fast nor bloodless. It was as ragged and slow as cutting wet cardboard.

Then it was over, and Ronan unhooked the claw carefully from Gansey’s skin.

Released, Gansey scrambled back from the creature. He pressed the back of his hand to the wound on his chin. He couldn’t tell what was his blood and what was its blood and what was Ronan’s blood. Both of them were out of breath.

“Are you murdered?” Ronan asked Gansey. A scratch came down his temple and skipped across his eyebrow to his cheek. Watch your eyes.

A soft probe with Gansey’s fingertips revealed that the actual wound under his chin was quite small. The memory of being caught on the claw wouldn’t soon leave him, though. He felt perilously undone, like he needed to hold on to something or be washed away. He kept his voice even. “I think so. Is it dead?”

“If it’s not,” Ronan said, “it’s a worse nightmare than I thought.”

Now Gansey did have to sit down, very slowly, on the edge of the torn-apart bedsheets. Because that thing had been impossible. The plane and the puzzle box, both inanimate objects, had been far easier to accept. Even Chainsaw, in all respects an ordinary raven apart from her origin, was easier to take in.

Ronan watched Gansey over the body of the creature — it seemed even larger in its death — and his expression was as unguarded as Gansey had ever seen it. He was being made to understand that this, all of it, was a confession. A look into who Ronan really had been the entire time he had known him.

What a world of wonders and horrors, and Glendower only one of them.

Gansey finally said, “Seneca. That’s who said that, right?”

While his body had been fighting a nightmare, his subconscious had been battling the Latin Ronan had greeted him with.

Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit; occidentis telum est.

Ronan’s smile was sharp and hooked as one of the creature’s claws. “ ‘A sword is never a killer; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.’ ”

“I can’t believe Noah didn’t stick around to help.”

“Sure you can. Never trust the dead.”

Shaking his head, Gansey pointed at the scabs he had seen on Ronan’s arm during the fight. “Your arm. Is that from fighting with it while I was in the Pig?”

Ronan shook his head slowly. In the other room, Chainsaw was making anxious noises, worried over the fate of him. “Kerah?”

“There was another one,” he said. “It got away.”

19

Jane, how do you feel about doing something slightly illegal and definitely distasteful?” Gansey asked.

Ronan’s back was already sticky with the heat. The bird man’s corpse was in the BMW’s trunk, and undoubtedly a dreadful scientific process was happening to it. Ronan had no doubt it was a process that was going to only get more odiferous as the day grew warmer.

“It depends on if it involves a helicopter,” Blue replied, standing in the doorway of 300 Fox Way. She scratched her calf with her bare foot. She wore a dress Ronan thought looked like a lampshade. Whatever sort of lamp it belonged on, Gansey clearly wished he had one.