The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(118)

A few feet away, the fire dragon careened into the dirt, limp.

Non mortem, somni fratrem.

Across the dirt track, one of the Mitsubishis, still smoldering, crashed resoundingly into one of the buildings. Ronan didn’t have to see the driver to know it was Prokopenko. Asleep.

Which meant that Kavinsky was dead.

But he had been dying since Ronan met him. They both had been.

Dying’s a boring side effect.

The pair of white sunglasses lay in the dust beside Ronan’s toe. He didn’t take them. He just held Matthew tightly, unwilling to let him go yet. His brain kept replaying the image of Matthew climbing out of the trunk, fire hitting the car, Kavinsky falling — He’d had so many nightmares of something happening to him.

Overhead, the albino night horror flapped. Both Matthew and Ronan looked up at it.

Tck-tck-tck-tck.

Both beaks chattered. It was a dreadful thing, this night horror, impossible to understand, but Ronan was done being afraid. There was no fear left.

With a shudder, Matthew pressed his face into his older brother’s shoulder, trusting as a child. He whispered, voice slurred, “What is it?”

The night horror barely checked itself as it regarded its creator. It flapped upward, spinning two or three times as it did. It was headed into the night — where, it was impossible to say.

“It’s all right,” Ronan said.

Matthew believed him; why shouldn’t he? Ronan had never lied. He looked up over Matthew’s head as Gansey and Blue began to head toward them. Sirens wailed from close by; blue and red lights strobed through the dust like lights at a club. Ronan was suddenly unbearably glad to see Gansey and Blue joining him. For some reason, although he had arrived with them, he felt as if he had been alone for a very long time, and now no longer was.

“That thing. Is it one of Dad’s secrets?” Matthew whispered.

“You’ll see,” Ronan replied. “Because I’m going to tell you all of them.”





The Gray Man couldn’t think of a way to get rid of the other treasure hunters without having to confront his brother.

But that was unthinkable.

The Gray Man thought about the card Maura had drawn for him. The ten of swords. The absolute worst it could get. He had thought that it meant leaving behind Henrietta, but now he knew that although that was terrible, it wasn’t really the worst thing that could happen to him.

The worst thing had always been his brother.

You’re going to have to be brave, Maura had said.

I’m always brave.

Braver than that.

For so long his brother had haunted him. Taunted and teased him from hundreds of miles away, even as the Gray Man studied and trained and became ever more dangerous in his own right. He’d let him take everything from him.

And what, really, was keeping him from facing his brother now? Fear? Could he be any more deadly than the Gray Man? Could he really take anything more from him?

The Gray Man thought of Maura’s smile again. And he thought of the fuss and noise of 300 Fox Way, of Blue’s bright banter, of the tuna fish sandwich at the deli counter, the haunted blue mountains calling him home.

He wanted to stay.

Persephone had patted his knee. I know you’ll do the right thing, Mr. Gray.

As he drove, the Gray Man stretched one hand into the backseat and dragged his gray suitcase onto Greenmantle’s meters. Driving one-handed, glancing from the rain-slicked road to the case every so often, he first found his favorite Kinks album.

He put the disc in the CD player.

Then he fetched out the gun he had hidden in the kitchen cabinets at Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast. He checked to make certain that Calla had not cleverly removed all the bullets. She had not.

He got off the interstate.

He was going to stay. Or he was going to die trying.

In the rearview mirror, he saw two cars get off the interstate behind him. Up ahead were two bleary-eyed truck stops — nothing said exhaustion like the wide-awake lights of a truck stop. He chose the larger one.

Already he could recognize his brother’s silhouette behind the wheel of the farther car. Age had not changed the set of his chin nor the shape of his ears. Age, the Gray Man guessed, had not changed much about his brother. Fear tickled in his gut.

Through the speakers, the Kinks confessed that they no longer wanted to wander.

The Gray Man pulled up to a pump.

Here is the thing the Gray Man knew about gas stations after dark: They were the best and worst place in the world to kill someone. Because here, between the pumps, in this insomnia light show, the Gray Man was well-nigh invincible. Even if there were no other cars getting gas, he had two different cameras pointed at him. And the cashier monitoring those cameras was only a panic away from an emergency button. Only the most casual of killers would strike between these gas pumps. Too kill someone here was to be caught.

The Gray Man’s brother would not get caught. He was dangerous not because he was reckless, but because of the opposite.

And the treasure hunters — they probably were not killers at all. Just specialized thugs with a skill for breaking and entering and enough tact to not break something valuable once they had it.

Sure enough, the Gray Man’s brother didn’t even pull close to the pumps but instead pulled into the darkness beside a trash bin to wait.

The other car hesitated as well, but the Gray Man rolled down his window and waved them over. After a pause, they pulled up the other direction, driver’s window to driver’s window.