The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(100)

Why couldn’t I have fallen in love with him?

He was sleeping now, thrown across the couch, lips parted in unselfconscious exhaustion. Persephone had informed Blue that she expected him to sleep for sixteen to eighteen hours after the ritual, and that he might experience light nausea or vomiting once he woke. Maura, Persephone, and Calla sat at the kitchen table, heads together, debating. Every so often, Blue heard snatches of conversation: should have done it sooner and but he needed to accept it!

She looked at him again. He was handsome and he liked her and if she hadn’t told him the truth, she could have dated him like a normal girl and even kissed him without worrying about killing him.

Blue stood by the front door, her head leaning against the wall.

But she didn’t want that. She wanted something more.

Maybe there is nothing else!

Maybe she’d go for a walk, just her and the pink switchblade. They were a good pair. Both incapable of opening up without cutting someone. She didn’t know where she’d go, though.

She crept up to the reading room, quietly, so that she wouldn’t wake Adam or alert Orla. Picking up the phone, she listened to make sure no one was having a psychic experience on the other end. Dial tone.

She called Gansey.

“Blue?” he said.

Just his voice. Her heart tethered itself. Not completely, but enough to stop quivering so much. She closed her eyes.

“Take me somewhere?”



They took the newly minted Pig, which indeed seemed identical to the last one, down to the odor of gasoline and the coughing start of the engine. The passenger seat was the same busted vinyl bucket it had been before. And the headlights on the road ahead were the same twin beams of weak golden light.

But Gansey was different. Though he wore his usual khakis and stupid Top-Siders, he was wearing a white, collarless T-shirt and his wireframe glasses. This was her favorite Gansey, the scholar Gansey, not a hint of Aglionby about him. There was something terrible about how this Gansey made her feel at the moment, though.

When she got in, he asked, “What happened, Jane?”

“Adam and I fought,” she said. “I told him. I don’t want to talk about it.”

He put the car in gear. “Do you want to talk at all?”

“Only if it isn’t about him.”

“Do you know where you want to go?”

“Someplace that isn’t here.”

So he drove them out of town and he told her about Ronan and Kavinsky. When he’d done with that, he kept driving into the mountains, onto ever more narrow roads, and he told her about the party and the book club and organic cucumber sandwiches.

The Camaro’s engine growled, echoing up the steep bank beside the road. The headlights only illuminated as far as the next turn. Blue pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. Resting her cheek on her knees, she watched Gansey switch gears and glance in his rearview mirror and then at her.

He told her about the pigeons and he told her about Helen. He told her about everything except for Adam. It was like describing a circle without ever saying the word.

“Okay,” she said finally. “You can talk about him now.”

There was silence in the car — well, less sound. The engine roared and the anemic air-conditioning blew fitful breaths over them both.

“Oh, Jane,” he said suddenly. “If you’d been there when we got the call about him walking on the interstate, you would’ve …” He trailed off before she found out what she would’ve done. And then, all of a sudden, he pulled himself together. “Ha! Adam’s communing with trees and Noah keeps reenacting being murdered and Ronan’s wrecking and then making me new cars. What’s new with you? Something terrible, I trust?”

“You know me,” Blue said. “Ever sensible.”

“Like myself,” Gansey agreed grandly, and she laughed delightedly. “A creature of simple delights.”

Blue touched the radio knob, but she didn’t turn it. She dropped her fingers. “I feel terrible about what I said to him.”

Gansey guided the Pig up an even more narrow road. It might have been someone’s driveway. It was difficult to tell in these mountains, especially after dark. The insects in the close-pressed trees trilled even louder than the engine.

“Adam has killed himself for Aglionby,” he said suddenly. “And for what? Education?”

No one went to Aglionby for education. “Not just that,” she said. “Prestige? Opportunity?”

“But maybe he never had a chance. Maybe success is in your genes.”

Something more. “This really isn’t a conversation I feel like having right now.”

“What? Oh — that is not what I meant. I mean that I’m rich —”

“Not helping.”

“I’m rich in support. So are you. You grew up loved, didn’t you?”

She didn’t even have to think before she nodded.

“Me too,” Gansey said. “I never doubted it. I never even thought to doubt it. And even Ronan grew up with that, too, back when it mattered, when he was becoming the person he was. The age of reason, or whatever. I wish you could have met him before. But growing up being told you can do anything … I used to think, before I met you, that it was about the money. Like, I thought Adam’s family was too poor for love.”