The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(27)

And this was how it started: Nose up to the light. Meet the driver’s eyes. Shut off the air-co to give the car a few extra horsepower. Rev the engine. Smile like danger.

This was how Ronan found trouble, except for when the trouble was Kavinsky. Because then it found him.

After church, Ronan and Noah headed in the general direction of the hellish affluent subdivision where Kavinsky lived with his mother. Ronan had half a thought that he might put the dream pair of sunglasses in Kavinksy’s mailbox, or tuck them in the windshield wipers of the Mitsubishi. The BMW’s air-conditioning was on full blast beneath the furious midday glare. Cicadas shrilled at one another. There were no shadows anywhere.

“Company,” said Noah.

Kavinsky rolled up beside the BMW at an intersection. Above them, the traffic light turned green, but the street behind them was empty and neither car moved. Ronan’s palms were suddenly sweaty. Kavinsky rolled down his window. Ronan followed suit.

“Fag,” Kavinsky said, stepping on his gas pedal. The Mitsubishi wailed and shuddered a bit. It was a glorious and hideous piece of work.

“Russian,” Ronan replied. He stepped on his gas pedal, too. The BMW growled, a little lower.

“Hey now, let’s not make this ugly.”

Opening the center console, Ronan pulled out the sunglasses he’d dreamt the night before. He tossed them through his open window onto Kavinsky’s passenger seat.

The light turned yellow, and then red. Kavinsky picked up the glasses and studied them. He knocked his own sunglasses halfway down his nose and studied them some more. Ronan was gratified to note how closely the new pair resembled them. The only thing he’d gotten wrong was that he’d made the tint a bit darker. Surely Kavinsky, master forger, should appreciate them.

Finally, Kavinsky slid his gaze over to Ronan. His smile was sly. Pleased that Ronan recognized the game. “Well done, Lynch. Where’d you find them?”

Ronan smiled thinly. He turned off the air-conditioning.

“That’s how it’s gonna be? Hard to get?”

The opposing light turned yellow.

“Yes,” said Ronan.

The traffic light above them turned green. Without any particular prelude, both cars exploded off the mark. For two seconds, the Mitsubishi snarled ahead, but then Kavinsky screwed the shift from third to fourth.

Ronan did not.

He blew by.

Just as Ronan tore around a corner, Kavinsky honked his horn twice and made a rude gesture. Then Ronan was out of sight and speeding on his way back to Monmouth Manufacturing.

In the rearview mirror, he allowed himself the slightest of smiles.

This was what it felt like to be happy.





Blue very much liked having the boys over to her house.

Their presence at the house was agreeable for several different reasons. The absolute simplest one was that Blue sometimes got tired of being 100 percent of the non-psychic population of 300 Fox Way — more and more often, these days — and that percentage improved dramatically when the boys were over. The second reason was that Blue saw all the boys, particularly Richard Campbell Gansey III, in a very different light when they were there. Rather than the glossy, self-assured boy he’d been when she’d first met him, 300 Fox Way Gansey was a self-deprecating onlooker, at once eager and unsuited for all of the intuitive arts. He was a privileged tourist in a primitive country: flatteringly curious, unknowingly insulting, quite certainly unable to survive if left to his own devices.

And the third reason was that it suggested permanence. Blue had acquaintances at school, people she liked. But they weren’t forever. While she was friendly with a lot of them, there was no one that she wanted to commit to for a lifetime. And she knew this was her fault. She’d never been any good at having casual friends. For Blue, there was family — which had never been about blood relation at 300 Fox Way — and then there was everyone else.

When the boys came to her house, they stopped being everyone else.

Currently, both Adam and Gansey were situated in the narrow bowels of the house. It was a wide open, promising sort of sunny day; it invaded through every window. Without any particular discussion, Gansey and Blue had come to the decision that today was a day for exploring, once Ronan arrived.

Gansey sat at the kitchen table in an aggressively green polo shirt. By his left hand was a glass bottle of a fancy coffee beverage he had brought with him. By his right hand was one of Maura’s healing teas. For several months now, Blue’s mother had been working on a line of healthful teas to augment their income. Blue had learned early on that healthful was not a synonym for delicious, and had very vocally removed herself from the test group.

Gansey didn’t know any better, so he accepted what he was given.

“I don’t think I can wait any longer. But I would like to minimize the risk,” he said as Blue rummaged in the fridge. Someone had filled an entire shelf with disgusting store-brand pudding. “I don’t think we can ever make it completely safe, but surely there is a way to be more cautious.”

For a moment Blue thought he was talking about the process of drinking one of Maura’s teas. Then she realized he was talking about Cabeswater. Blue loved it in a way that was hard to hold inside herself. She’d always loved the big beech tree in their backyard and the oaks that lined Fox Way, and forests in general, but nothing had prepared her for Cabeswater’s trees. Ancient and twisted and sentient. And — they’d known her name.