The Dream Thieves

“Life’s short.”

“And getting shorter every day.”

“So you see my point.”

“I never disputed it.”

Then they were in the kitchen, with all its mugs and halfpackaged tea and boxes of essential oils waiting to be mailed and decapitated flowers waiting to be boiled.

Blue pointed to a chair beneath the fake Tiffany lamp. “Sit.”

“I’d rather stand.”

She made a neat rack of teeth at the Gray Man. “Sit.”

The Gray Man sat. He glanced over his shoulder, back down the hall, then back to her. He had those bright, active eyes that Dobermans and blue jays had.

“No one’s going to murder you here.” She handed him a glass of water. “That’s not poisoned.”

“Thanks.” He set it down but didn’t drink it. “My only intentions right now are to ask her to dinner.”

Leaning her butt on the counter, Blue crossed her arms and studied him. She was thinking about her biological father, Artemus. The truth was that Blue had never met him and in fact knew very little about him — little more than his name, Artemus. She felt strangely protective of him, though. She didn’t like to think of him reappearing and finding a usurper in his place. But then again, it had been sixteen years. The likelihood of him coming back was a very narrow one.

And it was only dinner.

“You aren’t staying here, are you?” Blue asked. She meant Henrietta, not the house.

She should’ve clarified, but he seemed to catch her meaning, because he replied, “I don’t stay anywhere. Not for long.”

“That doesn’t seem very pleasant.”

In the background, the phone rang. Not her problem. No one was calling this house for a non-psychic.

His keen expression didn’t flag. “Got to keep moving.”

Blue considered this wisdom before replying, “The planet spins at over a thousand miles an hour all the time. Actually, it’s going around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, even if it wasn’t spinning. So you can move plenty fast without going anywhere.”

Mr. Gray’s mouth quirked. “That’s a very philosophical loophole.” After a pause, he said, “Þing sceal gehegan / frod wiþ frodne. Biþ hyra ferð gelic.”

It sounded like German, but from hearing Calla’s whispers about the Gray Man, she knew it was Old English.

“A dead language?” she asked, with interest. She seemed to be hearing a lot of them lately. “What’s it mean?”

“‘Meetings are held, wise with the wise. Because their spirits are alike.’ Or minds. The word ferð has the sense of mind or spirit or soul. It’s one of the Anglo-Saxon Maxims. Wisdom poetry.”

Blue wasn’t certain that she and this Gray Man thought exactly alike, but she didn’t think they were that different, either. She could hear the pragmatic beat of his heart, and she appreciated it.

“Look, she doesn’t like pork,” she said. “Take her someplace they use lots of butter. And don’t ever say the word chuckle around her. She hates it.”

The Gray Man drank his water. He flicked his eyes to the hall doorway, and a moment later, Maura appeared in it, phone in one hand.

“Hi, daughter,” she said warily. For a millisecond, her expression was sharp as she analyzed whether or not Blue was in any danger from this strange man sitting at her kitchen table. She took in the glass of water in front of the Gray Man and Blue’s casually folded arms. Only then did she relax. Blue, for her part, enjoyed the millisecond of her mother looking dangerous. “What can I do for you, Mr. Gray?”

What a strange thing this was that they all knew that Mr. Gray was certainly not Mr. Gray, and yet they all went along with it. This playacting should have rankled Blue’s sensible side, but instead, it struck her as a reasonable solution. He didn’t want to say who he was, and they needed to call him something.

The Gray Man said, “Dinner.”

“If you mean me cooking it for you, no,” Maura said, “If we’re going out, maybe. Blue, this phone’s for you. It’s Gansey.”

Blue noticed that the Gray Man was abruptly not interested in who was on the phone. Which was interesting because he had been so interested in absolutely everything else before.

Which Blue took to mean that, really, he was very interested in who might be on the phone, only he didn’t want them to know he was interested.

Which was interesting.

“What’s he want?” Blue asked.

Maura handed her the phone. “Apparently, someone broke into his place.”

27

Although both Kavinsky and Gansey were hopelessly entwined in the infrastructure of Henrietta, Ronan had always done a fine job keeping them separate in his mind. Gansey held court over the tidier, brighter elements of the town; his was a sunshiney world of Aglionby desks, junior faculty waving at his car from the sidewalk, tow truck drivers knowing his name. Even the apartment in Monmouth Manufacturing was typical Gansey: order and aesthete imposed on the ruined and abandoned. Kavinsky, on the other hand, ruled the night. He lived in the places that wouldn’t even occur to Gansey: in the back parking lots of the public schools, the basements of McMansions, crouched behind the doors of public bathrooms. Kavinsky’s kingdom was not so much conducted in the red-yellow-green glow of a traffic light, but in the black place just outside of the glow.

Ronan preferred them separate. He did not like his foods to touch.

And yet here he was, the night before Gansey left town, taking him to one of Kavinsky’s coarsest rituals.

“I can do this without you,” Ronan said, kneeling to pick up one of the dozens of identical fake licenses.

Gansey, pacing next to his ruined miniature Henrietta, set his eyes on Ronan. There was something intense and heedless in them. There were many versions of Gansey, but this one had been rare since the introduction of Adam’s taming presence. It was also Ronan’s favorite. It was the opposite of Gansey’s most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia.

But this version of Gansey was Gansey the boy. This was the Gansey who bought the Camaro, the Gansey who asked Ronan to teach him to fight, the Gansey who contained every wild spark so that it wouldn’t show up in other versions.

Was it the shield beneath the lake that had unleashed it? Orla’s orange bikini? The bashed-up remains of his rebuilt Henrietta and the fake IDs they’d returned to?