The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(106)

It was against Ronan’s nature to appear overly interested in anything, but he couldn’t help staring at the Gray Man. It was the man from the Barns, the man who’d taken the puzzle box. He would have never put the words hit man to him. To him, a hit man was something else. A bouncer. A bodybuilder. An action hero. This wary predator was none of those things. His build was unassuming, all sly kinetics, but his eyes — Ronan was suddenly afraid of him. He was afraid of him in the same way that he was afraid of the night horrors. Because they had killed him before, and they would kill him again, and he precisely remembered the pain of each death. He felt the fear in his chest, and in his face, and in the back of his head. Sharp and stinging, like a tire iron.

Chainsaw scrambled to Ronan’s shoulder and ducked low, eyes on the Gray Man. She cawed stridently, just once.

For his part, the Gray Man stared back, his expression guarded. The longer he looked at Ronan and Chainsaw, the more his eyebrows furrowed. And the longer he looked, the closer Gansey edged to Ronan, nearly imperceptible. At some point it became the Gray Man watching the space between the two of them instead of Ronan.

Finally, the Gray Man said, “If I don’t return with the Greywaren on the Fourth of July, they’re telling my brother where I am, and he will kill me. He will do it very slowly.”

Ronan believed him in a way that he didn’t believe most things in life. It was real like a memory: This strange man would be tormented in the bathroom of one of the Henrietta motels and then he would be discarded and no one would ever look for him.

The Gray Man didn’t have to tell any of them how much easier it would be to merely take Ronan to his employer. He also didn’t have to tell any of them how simple it would be to do it against Ronan’s will. Though Calla stood beside the gun of his that she’d retrieved from the cabinet — now Ronan saw why — Ronan didn’t believe in it. If it came down to them versus Mr. Gray, he thought Mr. Gray would win.

It was like hearing the night horrors coming in his dreams. The inevitability of it.

Gansey, very softly, said, “Please.”

Maura sighed.

“Brothers,” said the Gray Man. He did not mean Declan or Matthew. At once the power went out of him. “I don’t care for birds.”

Then, after a moment, “I’m not a kidnapper.”

Maura shot a rather meaningful look at Calla, who pretended not to see it.

“Are you sure your brother will be able to find you?” Gansey asked.

“I’m certain I won’t be able to go home again,” the Gray Man said. “I don’t have many things there, but my books…. I would have to stay on the move for quite a while. It took me years to lose him before. And even if I leave, it won’t stop the others. They’re tracking the energy abnormalities, above and beyond what runs through Henrietta, and right now, they point right at him.” He looked at Ronan.

Gansey, who had looked aghast at the idea of the Gray Man having to abandon his books, frowned even deeper.

“Could you dream a Greywaren?” Blue asked Ronan.

“I’m not giving this to anyone else,” Ronan growled. He knew he should be kinder; they were trying to help him, after all. “It’s killing the ley line as it is. You want to see Noah again? I’m stopping.”

But Kavinsky’s not. It would be like standing next to a giant bull’s-eye.

“You could lie,” Calla suggested. “Give them something and tell them it’s the Greywaren and let them think they aren’t clever enough to figure out how to work it.”

“My employer,” said the Gray Man, “is not an understanding man. If he ever discovered or suspected a ruse, it would be very ugly for all of us.”

“What would they do to me?” Ronan asked. To Kavinsky? “If you turned me in?”

“No,” Gansey said, as if replying to an entirely different question.

“No,” the Gray Man agreed.

“Don’t say no,” Ronan insisted. “Fucking tell me. I didn’t say I’d do it. I just want to know.”

The Gray Man took his suitcase to the table, opened it, and laid the gun inside on top of the neatly folded slacks. He closed it. “He is not interested in people. He is interested in things. He will find the thing that makes you work, and he will remove it. He will put it in a glass box with a label and when his guests have had enough wine, he will take them down to where you are and show them that thing that was inside you. And then they will admire the other things in the other cases beside you.”

When Ronan didn’t flinch — the Gray Man couldn’t know that Ronan would rather do most anything than flinch — he continued, “It’s possible he would make an exception for you. But it would only be that he’d put all of you in the glass box. He is a curator. He will do what he needs to do for his collection.”

Ronan still didn’t flinch.

The Gray Man said, “He told me to kill your father as messily as I could and leave the body where your older brother would find it. So that he would confess to where the Greywaren was.”

For one moment, Ronan didn’t move. It took him that long to realize that the Gray Man was saying he had killed Niall Lynch. Ronan’s mind went perfectly blank. Then he did what had to be done: He hurled himself at the Gray Man. Chainsaw blasted into the air.