The Dream Thieves
Something about them was making him lose patience. Perhaps it was that they still hadn’t noticed that he was watching them. Or perhaps it was the inefficiency of their process. Whatever it was, it solidified precisely as they began to trundle through the miniature model of Henrietta. He didn’t know what the Greywaren looked like, but he was certain that he could find it without kicking in the front of a miniature cardboard courthouse.
He swiftly moved out of Ronan’s room.
“Whoa!” said Missile from the middle of the destroyed Henrietta. “Don’t move.”
By way of reply, the Gray Man stuck the sharp end of the earpiece into Polo Shirt’s neck. They fought briefly. The Gray Man used a combination of physics and the edge of the window air conditioner to gently lay the other man down on the floor.
It happened so quickly that Missile had only just reached them when the Gray Man wiped his hands on his slacks and stepped over the body.
“Jesus F. Christ,” said Missile. He pointed a knife at the Gray Man.
This fight lasted slightly longer than the first. It was not that Missile was bad; it was that the Gray Man was better. And once the Gray Man had relieved the other man of his knife, it was over immediately. Missile crouched in the wreckage of Henrietta, fingers braced on the floorboards, gasping for breath.
“Why are you here?” the Gray Man asked him. He rested the tip of the knife as far into the man’s ear as it would go without making a mess.
The man was already trembling, and unlike Declan Lynch, he folded at once. “Looking for an antique for an employer.”
“Who is?” the Gray Man prompted.
“We didn’t get his name. He’s French.”
The Gray Man licked his lips. He wondered if Maura Sargent’s thing was environmental issues. She hadn’t been wearing shoes, and that, to him, possibly was the sort of thing that someone interested in the environment might do. “French living in France or French living over here?”
“I don’t know, man, what does it matter? He’s got an accent!”
It would’ve mattered to the Gray Man. It occurred to him that he was going to have to change clothing before he went to 300 Fox Way for his wallet. He had intestinal matter on his slacks.
“Do you have a contact number? Of course you do not. What was this antique?”
“A, uh, box. He said it was probably a box. Called the Greywaren. That we’d know it when we saw it.”
The Gray Man doubted that highly. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven; the day was racing by and he had so many plans. He said, “Do I kill you or let you go?”
“Please —”
The Gray Man shook his head. “It was a rhetorical question.”
24
Would you like to explain, now, why we’re in the middle of this puddle?” Adam asked.
“Godforsaken puddle,” Ronan corrected from beside Gansey. As a pale-skinned, dark-haired Celtic sort, he didn’t care for the heat.
The five of them — plus Chainsaw, minus Noah (he had been present, but feebly, when they’d left) — floated in the boat in the middle of the belligerently ugly man-made lake they had found before. It was relentlessly sunny. The smell of the field — warm dirt — reminded Gansey of all the mornings he’d picked up Adam from his parents’ double-wide.
From shore, crows hollered apocalyptically at them. Chainsaw hollered back.
It really was some of the worst Henrietta had on offer.
“We’re looking under it.” Gansey eyed his laptop. He couldn’t get the sonar device to communicate with it, despite a cursory examination of the instructional manual. Vexation was beginning to bead at his temples and on the back of his neck.
Blue, perched at the other end of the boat, asked, “Are we going to sonar every lake on the ley line? Or just the ones that piss you off?”
She was still angry about the couch and the pool table and Orla’s bare midriff. Orla, tanning idly, wasn’t helping. She took up most of the boat, her legs trailing up one side of it and her long brown torso draped up the other. Every so often she opened her eyes to smile widely at one of the boys, twisting herself this way and that as if she were merely readjusting her spine.
“This is a pilot mission,” said Gansey. He was more profoundly uncomfortable with Blue being angry at him than he cared to admit to anyone, least of all himself. “Odds suggest that Glendower’s not under this lake. But I want to have recourse should we find a body of water we suspect he’s under.”
“Recourse,” echoed Ronan, but without real force. The water reflected the sun at his face from beneath, rendering him a translucent and fretful god. “Shitdamn, it’s hot.”
Gansey’s explanation was not precisely true. He occasionally had hunches, always about finding things, always about Glendower. They were a result of poring over maps and sorting through historical records and recalling the historical finds he’d made before. When you’d found impossible things before, it made the location of another impossible thing more predictable.
The hunch about this lake had something to do with this wide field looking like one of the only easy passes through this section of challenging mountains. Something to do with the name of the tiny lane at the bottom of the hill — Hanmer Road, Hanmer being the last name of Glendower’s wife. Something to do with where it sat on the line, the look of the field, the prickling of stop and look closer.
“Is it possible that you’ve bought a sixty-five-hundred-dollar piece of junk?” Ronan pulled a cord out of the back of the laptop and hooked it up in a different way. The laptop pretended it couldn’t tell the difference. Gansey hit some keys. The laptop pretended he hadn’t. The entire process had looked a lot more straightforward on the instructional video online.
From the deck of the boat, Orla said, “I’m having a psychic moment. It involves you and me.”
Distracted, Gansey glanced up from the computer screen. “Were you talking to me or Ronan?”
“Either. I’m flexible.”
Blue made a small, terrible noise.
“I would appreciate if you’d turn your inner eye toward the water,” Gansey said. “Because — god damn it, Ronan, that made the screen go black.”
He was beginning to think he had bought a sixty-fivehundred-dollar piece of junk. He hoped the pool table worked better.
“How long are we in D.C. for?” Adam asked suddenly.
Gansey said, “Three days.”