The Dream Thieves (18 page)

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? Revulsion 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.”

J
ane, 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 was certain 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.

Ronan wasn’t a fan of lamps.

And he had other things on his mind. Nerves tingled in his fingers.

Gansey shrugged. “No helicopters. This time.”

“Is this about Cabeswater?”

“No,” Gansey said sadly.

She looked past them to the BMW. “Why is there a bungee cord around the trunk?”

Although Ronan reckoned the Pig deserved it, Gansey had refused to put the corpse in the Camaro. “It’s a long story. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I guess I’ve never seen you in a T-shirt before. Or jeans.”

Because Blue had been staring at Gansey in a way that was more conspicuous for the fact that she was trying to be inconspicuous about it. It was equal parts startled and impressed. It was true that Gansey rarely wore jeans and a T-shirt, preferring collared shirts and cargo pants if he wasn’t in a tie. And it was true he wore them well; the T-shirt hung on his shoulders in a way that revealed all kinds of pleasant nooks and corners that a button-down usually hid. But Ronan suspected that Blue was most shocked by how it made Gansey look like a boy, for once, something like one of them.

“It’s for the distasteful thing,” Gansey said. He plucked at the T-shirt with deprecating fingers. “I’m rather slovenly at the moment, I know.”

Blue concurred, “Yes, slovenly, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Ronan, I see that you’re dressed slovenly as well.”

This was meant to be mocking, as Ronan was in a fairly typical Ronan getup of jeans and black tank.

“Shall I get into something more slovenly, too?” she asked.

“At least put shoes on,” Gansey replied somberly. “And a hat, if you must. It looks like rain.”

“Tut tut,” Blue said, glancing up to verify. But the sky was hidden by the leafy trees of her neighborhood. “Where’s Adam?”

“Picking him up next.”

“Where’s Noah?”

Ronan said, “Same place Cabeswater is.”

Gansey winced.

“Nice, Ronan,” Blue said, annoyed. She left the door hanging open as she retreated into the house, calling,
“Mom! I’m going with the boys to … do … something!”

As they waited, Gansey turned to Ronan. “Let me be very clear: If there was any other place we could bury this thing without fear of it being discovered, we’d be going there instead. I don’t think it’s a good idea to go to the Barns, and I wish you wouldn’t come with us in any case. I want it to be on record.”

“WHAT SORT OF SOMETHING?”
This was Maura, from inside the house.

“Great, man,” Ronan replied. Even the admonishment was electrifying. Proof that this was indeed happening. “I’m glad you got it out.”

There was never a chance Ronan wasn’t coming with.

“SOMETHING DISTASTEFUL!”
Blue roared back. She reappeared at the door, her wardrobe essentially unchanged but for the addition of crochet tights and green rubber boots. “What
are
we doing, by the way?”

Home
, Ronan thought.
I’m going home.

“Well,” Gansey said slowly, as thunder rumbled once more, “the illegal part is that we’re going to Ronan’s family’s property, which he’s not allowed to do.”

Ronan flashed his teeth at her. “And the distasteful part is that we’re burying a body.”

Ronan had not been to the Barns in over a year, even in his dreams.

It was as he remembered it from countless summer afternoons: the two stone pillars half-hidden in ivy, tangled banks like a wall around the property, the oaks huddled close on either side of the pitted gravel driveway. The gray sky above made everything greens and blacks, forest and shade, growing and mysterious. The effect was to give the entrance to the Barns a sort of privacy. A reclusiveness.

As they ascended the drive, rain spattered on the BMW’s windshield. Thunder rumbled. Ronan navigated the car up over a crest through the oak trees, around a tight turn, and there — a great sloping expanse, pure green, sheltered by trees on all sides. Once upon a time, cattle had grazed in these front pastures, cattle of every color. That herd, lovely as fairy animals, still populated Ronan’s dreams, though in stranger fields. He wondered what had happened to the real cattle.

In the backseat, Blue and Adam craned their necks, looking at the approaching house. It was homely, unimpressive, a farmhouse that had been added on to every few decades. It was the namesake barns scattered through the saturated hills that were memorable, most of them chalk-white and tin-roofed, some of them still standing, some of them collapsing. Some were long and skinny livestock barns, others broad hay barns topped with pointy-hatted cupolas. There were ancient stone outbuildings and new, flat-roofed equipment sheds, still-rank goat houses and long-empty dog kennels. They dotted the fields as if they’d grown from them: smaller ones clustered like mushrooms, larger ones standing apart.

Over them all was the troubled sky, huge and purple with rain. Every color was deeper, truer, better. This was the reality, and last year had been the dream.

There was one light on in the farmhouse, the light to the sitting room. It was always on.

Am I really here?
Ronan wondered.

Surely he would wake up soon and find himself again exiled in Monmouth Manufacturing or in the backseat of his car or lying on the floor beside Adam’s bed at St. Agnes. In the oppressive light, the Barns was so green and beautiful that he felt sick.

In the rearview mirror, he caught a glimpse of Adam, his expression dreamy and ill, and then of Blue, her fingertips pressed to the glass as if she wanted to touch the damp grass.

The gravel parking area was empty, the home nurse nowhere in evidence. Ronan parked beside a plum tree laden with unpicked fruit. Once, he’d had a dream that he’d bitten into one of the fruits, and juice and seeds had exploded from inside. Another where the fruit bled and creatures came to lap it up before they burrowed under his skin, sweet-scented parasites.

When Ronan opened the door, the car was immediately filled with the damp-earth, green-walled, mold-stone scent of
home.

“It looks like another country,” Blue said.

It was another country. It was a country for the young, a country where you died before you got old. Climbing out, their feet sank into the summer-soft turf beside the gravel. Fine rain caught in their hair. The drops murmured on the leaves of the surrounding trees, an ascending hum.

The loveliness of the place couldn’t even be marred by the knowledge that this was the place Ronan had found his father’s body, and this was the car Ronan had found him lying near. Like Monmouth Manufacturing, the Barns was transformed utterly by the changing light. The body had been found on a cool, dark morning, and this was a shaggy, gray afternoon. So the memory became only a briefly noted thought, analytical rather than emotional.

The only reality was this: He was home.

How badly he wanted to stay.