The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(110)

He was exhausted and awake, euphoric and anxious.

Hurry.

What was it that made these stones special? He didn’t know. Not yet. Somehow, they were like the rocks at Stonehenge and Castlerigg. Something about them conducted the ley line’s force and dragged the energy out of line.

“Adam,” Persephone said again. There was no sign of a car, but she frowned at the road. Her fingers were as dirty as his; her delicate gray frock was stained. She looked like a doll dug from a landfill. “Hurry.”

This stone was larger than he expected. Twelve inches across, maybe, and who knew how deep. There was no way to get to it without digging up the rose. Hurriedly, he snatched a spade lying beside him. He spiked the dirt, twisted out the deformed rose, tossed it aside. His palms sweated.

“Sorry,” Persephone suggested.

“Pardon?”

She murmured, “You should say sorry when you kill something.”

It took him a moment to realize she meant the rose. “It was dying anyway.”

“Dying and dead are different words.”

Shamed, Adam muttered an apology before sticking the tip of the spade beneath the stone. It came free. Persephone turned a questioning look to him.

“We take this one,” he said immediately. She nodded. It went in the backseat with the others.

They had only just headed back down the street when another car pulled into the driveway they’d just abandoned.

Close.

Multiple stones were stacked in the tri-colored car now, but this latest one pressed into Adam’s consciousness more than the others. It would be useful, with the lightning, he thought. For … something. For concentrating the ley line into Cabeswater. For … making a gate.

Hurry.

“Why now?” he asked her. “Why are all these parts frayed?”

She didn’t look up from her task, which was laying cards on the dashboard. The smudgy, inked art looked like thoughts instead of images. “It’s not just fraying now. It’s only that it’s more obvious with the greater current running through it. Like a wire. In the past, priestesses would’ve taken care of the line. Maintained it. Just like we’re doing now.”

“Like Stonehenge,” he said.

“That’s a very large and cliché example, yes,” she answered softly. She glanced up at the sky. The clouds at the horizon had gotten just a little closer since he’d last looked; they were still white, but they were beginning to pile on top of one another.

“I wonder,” he said, more to himself than to her, “what it would be like if all the ley lines were repaired.”

She replied, “I expect that would be a very different world with very different priorities.”

“Bad?” he asked. “A bad world?”

She looked at him.

“Different isn’t bad, right?” he asked.

Persephone turned back to her cards. Swick. She turned over a second one.

I should call work, Adam thought. He was supposed to come in tonight. He hadn’t called in sick before. I should call Gansey.

But there was no time. They had so many more places to go before — before — Hurry.

As they pulled onto the interstate, Adam’s attention was snagged by a white Mitsubishi screaming in the opposite direction on the other side of the median. Kavinsky.

But was that Kavinsky behind the wheel? Adam craned his head to look in the mirror, but the other car was already a diminishing speck on the horizon.

Persephone turned over a card. The Devil.

All of a sudden, Adam was quite certain of why they were hurrying. He’d known since the night before that he needed to hone the line’s energy in order for Cabeswater to reappear. An important task, certainly, but not life-or-death.

But now, he knew all at once what he was hurrying for. They were restoring the ley line for Cabeswater. They were restoring it now because Ronan was going to need it. Tonight.

Hurry.





The first thing Ronan noticed at church on the Fourth was that the priest had a black eye. The second thing he noticed was that Matthew wasn’t there. The third thing he noticed was that there was space for two people on the pew beside Declan. Everyone at St. Agnes knew the Lynch brothers didn’t come to church alone.

It was an oddly discomfiting image. For the first few weeks after Niall had died, the boys had always left room for their mother, as if she would magically arrive partway through the service.

I’m working on that, Ronan thought, and then pushed it out of his head.

He was quite late to the special Mass; it looked like insolence. By the time he slid into the pew beside Declan, a small crumpled woman had already begun to intone the first reading. It was a passage Ronan used to love as a child — of this one I am proud. Really, Ronan’s tardiness was because he had gone with Gansey to pick up the Gray Man from the car rental office. The boys had given him the Mitsubishi and, in return, Ronan had gotten the puzzle box back. It seemed a fair trade. A dream thing for a dream thing.

Declan looked sharply to Ronan. He hissed, “Where’s Matthew?”

“You tell me.”

The churchgoers in the pew behind them rustled meaningfully.

“You weren’t here on Sunday.” Declan’s voice held the weight of an accusation. “And Matthew says you didn’t ever explain.”