The Dream Thieves

This truck stop had a massive parking area, and the Gray Man led his brother’s car to the very farthest edge of it. He stopped behind the grubbiest of the semitrucks.

This was it.

This was really it.

The Gray Man felt every point of those ten swords piercing him.

Every gray day wanted him. It would be easiest to just give in.

The Kinks sang, Night is as dark as you feel it ought to be.

The coupe pulled alongside the white Mitsubishi, driver’s side to driver’s side. And there he was, unassuming and soft looking. He’d grown a tidy beard that somehow emphasized the sympathetic curve of his thick eyebrows. People always thought he had a friendly face. There was a lot of talk about sociopaths having frightening eyes, but not the Gray Man’s brother. When he needed to blend in, he was as warm and as intimate as you could hope for. Even now, sitting there in the coupe with that curled smile, he looked like a hero.

Dean, we’re just going to try this one thing.

“Well, little brother,” said the Gray Man’s brother. He knew from long experience that his voice alone would paralyze the Gray Man. Like a snake, it gave him plenty of time to digest his victim. “Looks like it’s you and me again.”

And the voice had the effect it always did: a poisonous venom of memories. A decade flashed in the Gray Man’s head blade cut slice burn pick smear scream The Gray Man took the gun from the passenger seat and shot his brother. Twice.

“Really,” he said, “it’s just me.”

He put on a glove from his suitcase and transferred the Post-it note from his steering wheel to the inside of his brother’s car.

Then he turned up the music, rolled up the window, and got back on the interstate.

He was going home.

EPILOGUE

Asecret is a strange thing.

There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two

people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.

And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.

Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.

All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.

Ronan Lynch lived with every sort of secret.

His first secret was himself. He was brother to a liar and brother to an angel, son of a dream and son of a dreamer. He was a warring star full of endless possibilities, but in the end, as he dreamt in the backseat on the way to the Barns that night, he created only this:

Article 7

Further Condition

Upon my death, my children shall be allowed free access to “the Barns,” although they may not once again take residence there until all have reached the age of eighteen.

Then, when he woke, they all helped to put Aurora Lynch in the car. And in silence, they drove her to the GPS coordinates marked in Gansey’s journal.

There was Cabeswater fully restored. It was spreading and mysterious, familiar and eerie, dreamer and dreamt. Every tree, Ronan thought, was a voice he might have heard before. And there was Noah, shoulders slumped, hand lifted in an apologetic wave. On one side of him, Adam stood, hands in pockets, and on the other side was Persephone, her fingers twisted together.

When they carried Aurora over the border, she woke like a rose blooms. And when she smiled at Ronan, he thought, Matthew does look a little like her.

She hugged him and said, “Flowers and ravens,” because she wanted him to know she remembered.

Then she hugged Matthew and said, “My love,” because he was her favorite.

She said nothing at all to Declan, because he wasn’t there.

Ronan’s second secret was Adam Parrish. Adam was different since making the bargain with Cabeswater. Stronger, stranger, farther away. It was hard not to stare at the odd and elegant lines of his face. He stood to one side while the Lynch brothers revived their mother, and then he told them all, “I have something to show you.”

As dawn began to pink the bark of the trees, they followed him deeper into Cabeswater.

“The pool is gone,” he said. “Where the fish changed color for Gansey. But now —”

Next to the dreaming tree, the pool had been replaced by a slanted and sheered rock surface. It was striated and cleaved with deep scratches, and the deepest of them cut all the way through the rock and into the ground. Cool blackness beckoned.

“A cave?” asked Gansey. “How deep does it go?”

Adam said, “I haven’t gone in. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“What’s the next step, then?” Gansey asked warily. It was hard to tell if he was wary of Adam or wary of the cavern.

Adam said, “Make it safer.”

He glanced at Ronan, eyebrows furrowed, as if sensing Ronan’s eyes on him.

Ronan looked away.

The third secret was the cavern itself. When they finally returned to 300 Fox Way, the sun was well up. To Ronan’s shock, a white Mitsubishi sat on the curb. For a moment, he thought — but then he saw the Gray Man waiting on the front step with Calla. His presence here instead of hundreds of miles away was not probable, but it was not impossible.

As Persephone climbed the stairs, Calla said accusingly, “This is your fault. Did you know this was going to happen?”

Persephone blinked her black eyes.

“Mr. Gray?” Blue asked. “How —”

“No,” Calla interrupted. “Later. Come with me.”

She led them upstairs to Maura’s bedroom. Pushing open the door, she let them take in the sight.

A candle was melted on the carpet. Beside it, in a square of strong daylight, a scrying bowl was knocked askew.

“Who did this? Where is Mom?” Blue demanded.

Calla wordlessly handed her a note. They all read it over Blue’s shoulder.

In a hasty, water-stained scrawl, it said, Glendower is underground. So am I.