The Dream Thieves

“I did mean it,” Adam said, anger rushing up, sudden and singing and pure. It was an undying enemy.

She just blinked at him with her pure black eyes. His fury shriveled.

“You promised to be Cabeswater’s hands and eyes, but have you been listening to what it’s asked you for?”

“It hasn’t said anything.”

Persephone’s expression was knowing. Of course, it had. All at once, he knew that that was the cause of the apparitions and halfvisions. Cabeswater had been trying to get his attention, the only way it could. All of this noise, this sound, this chaos inside him.

“I couldn’t understand.”

“It’s out of balance, too,” she said. “But that’s a different ritual for a different problem. Now, look inside yourself, but know there are things in there that are hurtful. Scrying is never safe. You never know who you will meet.”

He asked, “Will you help me if something goes wrong?”

Her black eyes held his. He understood. He’d left his only help outside in the kitchen.

“Beware of anyone promising you help now,” Persephone said. “Inside yourself, it’s only you who can help you.”

They began.

At first he was aware only of the candles. The thin, high flicker of the true candles, and the twisted, circuitous burning of the candles in the mirrored glass. Then, a drop of water seemed to plunge from the darkness above him. It should have splashed on the glass, but instead it pierced the surface easily.

It landed in a tumbler of water. One of the chunky, cheap ones that used to fill his mother’s cabinets. This one was in Adam’s hand. Just as he was about to drink, he caught a flash of movement. He had no time to brace himself before light — sound —

His father hit him.

“Wait —!” Adam said, explaining, always about to explain, as he struck the faded counter of their kitchen.

It should have been done by now, the punch, but he seemed to be trapped inside it. He was the boy, the blow, the counter, the flaring anger that drove it all.

This lived in him. This punch, the first time his father had ever hit him, was always being thrown somewhere in his head.

Cabeswater, Adam thought.

He was released from the punch. As the tumbler crashed on the floor, too sturdy to smash, the drop of water slid out and began to fall again. This time it plummeted into a still, mirrored pool surrounded by trees. Blackness crept between the trees, lush and dark and living.

Adam had been here before.

Cabeswater.

Was he really here, or was it a dream? Did it make a difference to Cabeswater?

This place — he smelled the damp earth beneath fallen branches, heard the sound of insects working themselves under rotting bark, felt the same breeze touch his hair that breathed on the leaves overhead.

In the night water at Adam’s feet, red fish circled. They mouthed the ripples where the droplet had broken the surface. The movement drew his eye to the dreaming tree on the opposite shore. It looked just as it had before: a massive old oak with a rotted cavern inside it, big enough to admit a person. Months ago, Adam had stood inside the tree and had a terrible vision of the future. Gansey, dying because of him.

Adam heard a groan. It was the woman he’d seen in his apartment, the very first spirit. She wore a pale, old-fashioned dress.

“Do you know what Cabeswater wants?” he asked.

Leaning against the rugged bark of the dreaming tree, the woman pressed the back of her hand against her forehead in distress. “Auli! Greywaren furis al. Lovi ne . . .”

It wasn’t Latin. Adam said, “I don’t understand.”

Beside her, suddenly, was the man with the bowler hat, the one Adam had glimpsed at the Gansey mansion. The man begged, “E me! Greywaren furis al.”

“I’m sorry,” Adam said.

Another spirit appeared, hand outstretched to him. And another. And another. All of the flashes he had seen, a dozen figures. Incomprehensible.

A small voice at his elbow said, “I will translate for you.”

He turned to see a small girl in a black frock. She was not unlike a miniature Persephone: mountainous white hair spun like cotton candy, narrow face, black eyes. She took his hand. Hers was very cold, and a little damp.

He shivered warily. “Will you translate truthfully?”

Her tiny fingers were tight on his. He had not seen her before, he was certain. Of all of the flashes and visions he’d had since making the sacrifice, she’d not been one of them. She was so like Persephone, but twisted.

“No,” he said. “I can only help myself.”

She tipped her head back, angry. “You’re already dead in here.” Before he could pull away, she clawed her other hand down his wrist. Three sharp lines of blood welled up. He could taste it, like she had torn his tongue instead.

It was like a bad dream.

No. If this was like a dream, if Cabeswater was like a dream, it meant it was all in his control, if he chose it. Adam shook himself free. He wasn’t going to give his mind away.

“Cabeswater,” he said out loud. “Tell me what you need.”

He reached into the pool. It was cold and insubstantial, like sliding his hand against sheets. Carefully, he scooped out the the single drop of water he’d followed into the vision. It tipped back and forth in his palm, rolling along his life line.

He hesitated. On the other side of this moment, he knew, there was something that would separate him from the others forever. How much, he didn’t know. But he would have been somewhere they hadn’t. He would be something they weren’t.

But he already was.

And then he was in the drop of water. No longer did Cabeswater need to reach out to him through apparitions. He didn’t need the clumsy flickers in his vision. No desperate pleas for his attention.

He was Cabeswater, and he was the dreaming tree, and he was every oak with roots digging through rocks, looking for energy and hope. He felt the suck and pulse of the ley line through him — what a crass, mundane term for it, ley line, now that he’d felt it. He could remember every other name for it now, and they all seemed more fitting. Fairy roads. Spirit paths. Song lines. The old tracks. Dragon lines. Dream paths.

The corpse roads.

The energy flickered and sputtered through him, less like electricity and more like remembering a secret. It was strong, allencompassing, and then fading, waiting. Sometimes he was nothing but it, and sometimes, it was nearly forgotten.

And beneath it all, he felt the oldness of Cabeswater. The strangeness. There was something true and inhuman at its core. It had been there so many centuries before him, and it would exist for centuries after. In the relative scheme of things, Adam Parrish was irrelevant. He was such a small thing, just a whorl in the fingerprint of a massive being —