The Dream Thieves (24 page)

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.”

W
ould 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 to 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 bronze 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 — goddamn it, Ronan, that made the screen go black.”

He was beginning to think he
had
bought a sixty-five-hundred-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.”

Thank goodness Adam had agreed to go. There was plenty of opportunity to be had at a fund-raiser like this one. Internships, future positions, sponsors. An impressive-sounding name on the bottom of a college recommendation letter. So many pearls to be had, if you were in the mood to open oysters.

Gansey so hated oysters.

Ronan aggressively jerked a cable on the back of the laptop. The sonar device appeared on the laptop screen, shaped like a tiny submarine.

“You brilliant bastard!” Gansey said. “You’ve done it. What did you do?”

“Got tired of sweating is what I did. Let’s look under this damn lake and get back into air-conditioning. Oh, don’t even, Parrish.”

Adam, on the other end of the boat, looked extremely unimpressed with Ronan’s lack of heat tolerance. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Whatever, man,” Ronan replied. “I know that face. You were born in hell, you’re used to it.”

“Ronan,” Gansey said, “Lynch.”

For quite a few minutes, they were all quiet as they puttered slowly through the water, watching the unspecific elements on the screen. Gansey felt the unpleasant and distinct sensation of a single drop of sweat rolling between his shoulder blades.

Orla declared, “I’m having a psychic moment.”

“Pshaw!” Blue replied.

“No, really.” Orla opened her eyes. “Is there something on the screen now?”

There was. On the laptop screen, the images tantalized him. One was a disc of some sort and the other was an indistinct raven. In reality, it could be any sort of bird. But for the group in this particular boat, a suggestion was all they needed. They needed it to be a raven. It was going to be a raven.

Gansey contemplated whether he could dive for the object. The first thing that occurred to him was his teal polo shirt — it would have to be removed. The next thing that occurred to him was his chinos — could they be removed in the presence of all these females? Dubious. And finally he considered his contact lenses. They rebelled even in pool water, and this was certainly not a swimming pool.

Blue peered over the edge into the brown water. “How deep is the water here?”

“It should say.” Gansey squinted at the laptop. “Ten feet.”

“Well, then.” Blue flipped her sandals onto Orla’s bare belly, ignoring Orla’s vague protests.

Gansey said, “What! You can’t go in.”

“I actually can,” she replied, twisting her vestigial ponytail into a tiny knot on the back of her skull. “I really, really can.”

“But!” he tried. “You won’t be able to open your eyes in that. Without irritating them.”

“Your highly cultured eyes, maybe,” Blue replied. Pulling off her topmost tank top, she tossed it on top of Orla as well. Bare skin flashed through the tears in the remaining tank. “My swamp eyes’ll be great.”

Gansey was stung, but before he could protest, he was forced to snatch the laptop as it toppled. Orla had suddenly and swiftly stood, sending the boat crazily off-kilter. Everyone in the boat braced themselves and gazed at the bell-bottomed giantess.

“Stop, Blue. I’ll do it,” Orla ordered. Her pierced belly button was precisely at Gansey’s eye level. The silver ball winked at him. It said,
Watch this, boys!
“You’re wearing clothing. I have a bikini.”

Blue replied ferociously, “None of us can forget.” If not for the sun, her voice would’ve iced the lake.

Orla tossed her head, her magnificently large nose describing a circle in the air. Then she tore off her bell-bottoms so fast that all the boys in the boat just stared at her, dazzled and stunned. Gansey couldn’t understand the speed of it. One moment, she was wearing clothing, and the next moment, she was wearing a bikini. Fifty percent of the world was browned skin and fifty percent was orange nylon. From the Mona Lisa smile on Orla’s lips, it was clear she was pleased to finally be allowed to demonstrate her true talents.

A tiny part of Gansey’s brain said:
You have been staring for too long.

The larger part of his brain said:
ORANGE.

“Oh, for the love of God,” Blue said, and jumped out of the boat.

Ronan began to laugh, and it was so unexpected that the spell was broken. He laughed as Chainsaw hurled herself into the air to circle where Blue had gone in, and he laughed as Orla let out a honking sound and cannonballed into the water. He laughed as the image on the laptop distorted with the rollicking water. He laughed as he stretched out his arm for Chainsaw to return to him, and then he sealed his lips with an expression that indicated he still found them all hilarious on the inside.

The boat, previously stuffed to capacity, now contained only three boys and a small, discarded pile of girls’ shoes and clothing. Adam looked at Gansey, expression dazed. “Is this really happening?”

It
was
really happening, because the side-scan sonar showed two forms below the surface. One of them was nowhere near the objects and seemed to be moving in rather aimless circles. The other shot purposefully toward the vicinity of the raven, moving in brief surges that suggested a breaststroke. Gansey, former captain of the Aglionby crew team and a not untalented swimmer, approved.

“I feel rather ashamed,” Gansey admitted.

Ronan ran a hand over his shaved head. “I didn’t want to mess up my hair.”

Adam just watched the ripples spread across the water.

Only a second later, Orla reemerged. Like her dive, her reappearance was dramatic: a great frothy breach that ended with her floating idly on her back, hands behind her head.

“It’s too dark,” she said, eyes closed against the sun. She seemed in no hurry to try again or get back into the boat. “But it’s nice and cool. Y’all should come in.”

Gansey had no desire to join her. He peered anxiously over the edge of the boat. One more second and he was going to —

Blue burst up beside them. Dark hair plastered her cheeks. With one white-knuckled hand, she clutched the edge of the boat, pulling herself half out of the water.

“Good God,” Gansey said.

Blue cheerfully spit a mouthful of brown water on his boat shoes. It pooled in the canvas over his toes.

“Good
God
,” he said.

“Now they’re
really
boat shoes,” she replied. Swinging her free arm, she tossed her prize in; it landed on the boards with a dense thud. Chainsaw immediately leapt down from Ronan’s shoulder to investigate. “There’s something else down there. I’m going back for it.”

Before Gansey had time to say anything to her, the murky water closed over her head. He was struck by what a glorious and fearless animal Blue Sargent was, and he made a mental note to tell her that very thing, if she didn’t drown getting whatever the second thing was.

She was only gone for a moment this time. The boat surged as she emerged again, gasping and triumphant. She hooked an elbow over the side. “Help me in!”

Adam hauled Blue in as if she were the catch of the day, stretched out on the base of the boat. Although she wore much more clothing than Orla, Gansey still felt he ought to avert his eyes. Everything was wet and clinging in ways that seemed more titillating than he’d come to expect from Blue’s wardrobe.

Out of breath, Blue asked, “What’s the first thing? Do you know?”

He accepted the first object from Ronan. Yes, he knew. Gansey rubbed his fingers over the slimy surface. It was a scarred metal disc about seven inches in diameter. There were three ravens embossed on it. The others must’ve been too buried in the silt to show on the sonar display. It was incredible that they’d seen even one of them. It would have been so easy for the disc to be completely obscured. Even easier for the identifying bird to be crusted and hidden by algae.