The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(10)

Including their mother.

It will never stand up in court, Ronan had said. We should fight it.

Declan had said, It doesn’t matter. Mom is nothing without him. We might as well go.

We have to fight, Ronan had insisted.

Declan had already turned away. She’s not fighting.

Ronan could move his fingers. His body was his again. He felt the cool wooden surface of the box in his hands, his ever-present leather wristbands sliding toward his palms. He felt the ridges and valleys of the letters carved into the box. The crevices of the drawers and movable pieces. His pulse surged in him, the thrill of creation. The ragged awe of making something from nothing. It was not the easiest thing to take something from a dream.

It was not the easiest thing to take only one thing from a dream.

To bring even a pencil back was a small miracle. To bring any of the things from his nightmares — no one but Ronan knew the terrors that lived in his mind. Plagues and devils, conquerors and beasts.

Ronan had no secret more dangerous than this.

The night churned inside him. He tangled himself around the box, getting ahold of his thoughts again. Now he was beginning to shake a little. He remembered what Gansey had said: You incredible creature!

Creature was a good word for him, Ronan thought. What the hell am I?

Maybe Gansey was awake.



Ronan and Gansey both suffered from insomnia, though they had very different solutions for it. When Ronan couldn’t — or wouldn’t — sleep, he listened to music or drank or went out into the streets looking for vehicular trouble. Or all three. When Gansey couldn’t sleep, he studied the bristling journal he’d compiled of all things Glendower or, when he was too tired to read, used a cereal box and a bin of paints to add another building to the waist-high model of Henrietta he’d constructed. Neither could really help the other find sleep. But sometimes it was better just to know you weren’t the only one awake.

Ronan padded out of his room with Chainsaw scooped in his arm. Sure enough, Gansey sat cross-legged on Main Street, slowly waving a newly painted piece of cardboard in the direction of the single window airconditioner. At night, he looked particularly small or the warehouse looked particularly large. Lit only by the small lamp he’d set on the floor beside his journal, the room yawned above, a wizard’s cave full of books and maps and three-legged surveying devices. The night was flat black against the hundreds of windowpanes, making them just another wall.

Ronan placed the wooden box he’d just dreamt next to Gansey and then retreated to the other end of the tiny street.

Gansey was quaint and scholarly with his nighttime wireframes slid down his nose. He looked from Ronan to the box and back again and said nothing. But he did take one of his earbuds out as he continued running a line of glue along a miniature seam.

Popping a bone in his neck, Ronan let Chainsaw down to entertain herself. She proceeded to turn over the wastebasket and go through the contents. It was a noisy process, rustling like a secretary at work.

The scenario felt familiar and timeworn. The two of them had lived together at Monmouth for nearly as long as Gansey had been in Henrietta — almost two years. Of course, the building hadn’t looked like this in the beginning. It had been just one of the many abandoned factories and warehouses in the valley. They never got torn down. They just got forgotten. Monmouth Manufacturing was no different.

But then Gansey had come to town with his crazy dream and his ridiculous Camaro, and he’d bought the building for cash. No one else noticed it, even though they drove by every day. It was on its knees in the rye grass and the creeper, and he saved it.

The fall after Ronan and Gansey had become friends, the summer before Adam, they’d spent half their free time hunting for Glendower and the other half hauling junk out of the second floor. The floor was furred with flaked curls of paint. Wires trailed from the ceiling like jungle vines. Chipped plywood made lean-tos against hideous desks from a nuclear age. The boys burned crap in the overgrown lot until the cops asked them to stop, and then Gansey had explained his situation and the cops had gotten out of their cars to help finish the job. Back then, it had surprised Ronan; he hadn’t realized yet that Gansey could persuade even the sun to pause and give him the time.

They worked on Glendower and Monmouth Manufacturing for months. The first week of June, Gansey found a headless statue of a bird with king carved on its belly in Welsh. The second week, they wired a refrigerator in the upstairs bathroom, right next to the toilet. The third week, someone killed Niall Lynch. The fourth week, Ronan moved in.

Fixing a cereal-box front porch into place, Gansey asked, “What was the first thing you took out? Did you always know?”

Ronan found himself pleased to be quizzed. “No. It was a bunch of flowers. The first time.”

He remembered that dream — a haunted old wood, blue, blousey flowers growing in the dapples. He’d walked through the whispering trees with an often-present dream companion, and then a huge presence had blown through the canopy, sudden as a storm cloud. Ronan, bereft with terror and the certainty that this alien force wanted him, only him, had snatched at anything he could before being ripped aloft.

When he’d woken, he’d clutched a pulpy handful of blue flowers of a sort no one had seen before. Ronan tried, now, to explain them to Gansey, the wrongness of the stamen, the furriness of the petals. The impossibility of them.

Even to Gansey, he couldn’t admit the joy and terror of the moment. The heart-pounding thought: I’m just like my father.