The Dream Thieves (3 page)

He wondered if Declan Lynch had good teeth.

There was no sound coming from behind the door. He tried the doorknob, softly. Locked.
Good boy
, he thought.

Down the hall, the music pounded like the apocalypse. The Gray Man checked his watch. The rental-car place closed in an hour, and if he despised anything, it was public transportation. This would have to be brief.

He kicked in the door.

Declan Lynch sat on one of the two beds inside. He was very handsome, with a lot of dark hair and a rather distinguished Roman nose.

He had excellent teeth.

“What’s this?” he said.

By way of answer, the Gray Man picked Declan up off his bed and slammed him against the adjacent window. The sound was curiously muffled; the loudest part of it was the boy’s breath bursting from him as his spine railed against the sill. But then he was back up and fighting. He wasn’t a shoddy boxer, and the Gray Man could tell that he expected this surprise to give him an advantage.

But the Gray Man had known before he arrived that Niall Lynch had taught his sons to box. The only thing the Gray Man’s father had taught him was how to pronounce
trebuchet.

For a moment they fought. Declan was skilled, but the Gray Man was more so. He tossed the boy about his dorm room and used Declan’s shoulder to sweep awards and credit cards and car keys from the dresser. The thump of his head against a drawer was indistinguishable from the bass down the hall. Declan swung, missed. The Gray Man kicked Declan’s legs from beneath him, hurled him to the wall next to the piece of furniture, and then approached for another round, pausing only to pick up a motorcycle helmet that had rolled into the middle of the floor.

With a sudden burst of speed, Declan used the dresser to haul himself up, then pulled a handgun from a drawer.

He pointed it at the Gray Man.

“Stop,” he said simply. He flicked off the safety.

The Gray Man had not expected this.

He stopped.

Several different emotions battled for precedence on Declan’s face, but shock was not one of them. It was clear the gun was not for the possibility of an attack; it was for the eventuality of one.

The Gray Man considered what it must’ve been like to live like that, always waiting for your door to be kicked in.
Not pleasant
, he thought.
Probably not pleasant at all.

He didn’t think Declan Lynch would balk at shooting him. There was no hesitation in his stance. His hand trembled a bit, but the Gray Man thought that was from injury, not fear.

The Gray Man considered for a moment, then he hurled the helmet. The boy fired a shot, but it was nothing but noise. The helmet crashed into his fingers, and while he was still stunned, the Gray Man stepped forward and plucked the gun from his numb hand. He took a moment to put the safety back on.

Then the Gray Man smashed the gun against Declan’s cheek. He did it a few times, just to get his point across.

Finally, he allowed Declan to sink to his knees. The boy was holding on to consciousness quite valiantly. With his shoe, the Gray Man pressed him the rest of the way to the ground, and then eased him onto his back. Declan’s eyes were focused on the ceiling fan. Blood ran out of his nose.

The Gray Man knelt and pressed the barrel of the gun to Declan’s stomach, which rose and fell calamitously as he gasped for air. Tracing the gun over the boy’s right kidney, he said conversationally, “If I shot you here, it would take you twenty minutes to die, and you’d be done no matter what the medics did for you. Where is the Greywaren?”

Declan said nothing. The Gray Man gave him some time to consider his reply. Head wounds tended to make thoughts slower.

When Declan remained quiet, he dragged the muzzle down to Declan’s thigh. He pressed hard enough that the boy gasped. “Here, you’d die in five minutes. Of course, I don’t need to shoot you for that. The point of your umbrella over there would do it just as well. You’d be gone in five minutes and wishing for it in three.”

Declan closed his eyes. One of them, anyway. The left eye was already swollen most of the way shut.

“I don’t know,” he said eventually. His voice sounded full of sleep. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Lies are for your politicians,” the Gray Man said, without vehemence. He just wanted Declan to know that he knew about his life, his internship. He wanted him to know that he’d done his research. “I know where your brothers are right now. I know where your mother lives. I know the name of your girlfriend. Are we clear?”

“I don’t know where it is.” Declan hesitated. “That’s the truth. I don’t know where it is. I just know it
is
.”

“Here is the plan.” The Gray Man stood up. “You’re going to find that thing for me, and when you do, you’re going to give it to me. And then I will be gone.”

“How do I find you to give it to you?”

“I don’t think you understand. I am your shadow. I’m the spit you swallow. I’m the cough that keeps you up at night.”

Declan asked, “Did you kill my father?”

“Niall Lynch.” The Gray Man tried the words out in his mouth. In his opinion, Niall Lynch was a pretty lousy father, getting himself killed and then allowing his sons to live in a place where they propped the security doors open. The world, he felt, was full of bad fathers. “He asked me that question, too.”

Declan Lynch exhaled unevenly: half a breath, and then the other half. Now, the Gray Man could see, he was finally afraid.

“Okay,” Declan said. “I’ll find it. Then you’ll leave us alone. All of you.”

The Gray Man set the pistol back in its drawer and pushed it closed. He checked his watch. He had twenty minutes to pick up his rental car. He might upgrade to a midsize. He hated compact cars nearly as much as he hated public transportation. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Declan said again.

The Gray Man withdrew from the room, shutting the door partway. It wouldn’t quite close right; he had messed up one of the hinges when he’d entered. He was sure there was an endowment somewhere that would cover the damages.

He paused, watching through the crack of the door.

There was still more to learn from Declan Lynch today.

For several minutes, nothing happened. Declan lay there bleeding and crooked. Then the fingers of his right hand crabbed across the ground to where his cell phone had fallen. He didn’t immediately dial 911, though. With agonizing slowness — his shoulder was almost certainly dislocated — he punched in another number. Immediately, a phone rang on the opposite bed. It was, the Gray Man knew already, the bed that belonged to Declan’s youngest brother, Matthew. The ringtone was an Iglu & Hartly song that the Gray Man knew but couldn’t condone. The Gray Man already knew where Matthew Lynch was: floating in a boat on the river with some local boys. Like his older brother, never content to be alone.

Declan let his youngest brother’s phone ring for longer than it needed to, his eyes closed. Finally, he pressed end and dialed another number. It still wasn’t 911. Whoever it was didn’t pick up. And whoever it was made Declan’s already strained expression even tighter. The Gray Man could hear the tinny sound of the phone ringing and ringing, then a brief voicemail that he couldn’t catch.

Declan Lynch closed his eyes and breathed, “Ronan, where the hell are you?”

T
he problem is exposure,” Gansey told the phone, half-shouting to be heard over the engine. “If Glendower really could be found just walking along the ley line, I don’t see how he wouldn’t have already been found in the past few hundred years.”

They were headed back to Henrietta in the Pig, Gansey’s furiously orange-red ancient Camaro. Gansey drove, because when it was the Camaro, he always drove. And the conversation was about Glendower, because when you were with Gansey, the conversation was almost always about Glendower.

In the backseat, Adam’s head was tipped back in a way that gave equal attention to the phone conversation and his fatigue. In the middle, Blue leaned forward to better eavesdrop as she picked grass seed off her crochet leggings. Noah was on her other side, although one could never be sure he’d stay corporeal the farther they got from the ley line. It was a tight fit, even tighter in this heat, with the air-conditioning straining, escaping through every crevice in the crevice-filled vehicle. The Camaro’s air-conditioning had only two settings: on and broken.

To the phone, Gansey said, “That’s the
only
thing.”

Ronan leaned on the cracked black vinyl of the passenger-side door and chewed on the leather bands on his wrist. They tasted like gasoline, a flavor that struck Ronan as both sexy and summery.

For him, it was only sometimes about Glendower. Gansey needed to find Glendower because he wanted proof of the impossible. Ronan already knew the impossible existed. His father had been impossible.
He
was impossible. Mostly, Ronan wanted to find Glendower because Gansey wanted to find Glendower. Only sometimes did he think about what would happen if they actually discovered him. He thought it might be a lot like dying. When Ronan had been smaller and more forgiving of miracles, he’d considered the moment of death with rhapsodic delight. His mother had told him that when you looked into the eyes of God at the pearly gates, all the questions you ever had were answered.

Ronan had a lot of questions.

Waking Glendower might be like that. Fewer angels attending, and maybe a heavier Welsh accent. Slightly less judgment.

“No, I understand that.” Gansey was using his Mr. Gansey professorial voice, the one that exuded certainty and commanded rats and small children to
get up, get up, follow me!
It had worked on Ronan, anyway. “But if we assume Glendower was brought over between 1412 and 1420, and if we assume his tomb was left untended, natural soil accumulation would have hidden him. Starkman suggests that medieval layers of occupation might be under a sediment accumulation of five to seventeen feet…. Well, I
know
I’m not on a floodplain. But Starkman was working under the assumption that … right, sure. What do you think about GPR?”

Blue looked at Adam. He didn’t lift his head as he translated in a low voice, “Ground-penetrating radar.”

The person on the other end of the phone was Roger Malory, a stunningly old British professor Gansey had worked with back in Wales. Like Gansey, he had studied the ley lines for years. Unlike Gansey, he was not using them as a means to find an ancient king. Rather, he seemed to study them for a weekend diversion when there were no parades to attend. Ronan hadn’t met him in person and didn’t care to. The elderly made Ronan anxious.

“Fluxgrate gradiometry?” Gansey suggested. “We’ve already taken a plane up a few times. I just don’t know if we’ll see much more until winter when the leaves are gone.”

Ronan shifted restlessly. The successful demonstration of the plane had left him hyper-alive. He felt like burning something to the ground. He pressed his hand directly over the air-conditioning vent to prevent heat exhaustion. “You’re driving like an old woman.”

Gansey waved a hand, the universal symbol for
Shut up
. Beside the interstate, four black cows lifted their heads to watch the Camaro go by.

If I was driving …
Ronan thought about that set of Camaro keys he had dreamt into existence, shoved in a drawer in his room. He let the possibilities unwind slowly in his mind. He checked his phone. Fourteen missed calls. He dropped it back into the door pouch.

“What about a proton magnetometer?” Gansey asked Malory. Then he added crossly, “I know that’s for underwater detection. I would want it
for
underwater detection.”

It was water that had ended their work today. Gansey had decided that the next step in their search was to establish Cabeswater’s boundaries. They’d only ever entered the forest from its eastern side and never made it to any of the other edges. This time, they’d approached the forest from well north of their previous entry points, devices trained to the ground to alert them to when they found the northern electromagnetic boundary of the forest. After a several-hour walk, the group had instead come to a lake.

Gansey had stopped dead in his tracks. It wasn’t that the lake had been uncrossable: It only covered a few acres and the path around lacked treachery. And it wasn’t that the lake had stunned him with its beauty. In fact, it was quite unlovely as far as lakes went: an unnaturally square pool sunk into a drowned field. Cattle or sheep had worn a mud path along one edge.

The thing that stopped Gansey cold was the obvious fact that the lake was man-made. The possibility that parts of the ley line might be flooded should have occurred to him before. But it hadn’t. And for some reason, although it was not impossible to believe that Glendower was still somehow alive after hundreds of years, it was impossible to believe he was able to pull off this feat beneath tons of water.

Gansey had declared, “We have to find a way to look under it.”

Adam had replied, “Oh, Gansey,
come on
. The odds —”