The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(32)

Maura said, “That’s not very funny.”

“No, it’s not,” the Gray Man agreed.

Everyone in the room was waiting for Maura’s response. She asked, “And does work bring you here tonight?”

“Just research.”

“For work?”

Unperturbed, Mr. Gray said, “Everything is research for work. In its way.”

He did absolutely nothing to make his words easier to accept. It was impossible to tell if he was asking them to believe him or to humor him or to fear him. He merely laid out this confession and waited.

Finally, Maura said, “Might be nice to have someone deadlier than Calla in the room for a change.”

She glanced at him. He glanced back. There was a wordless, tacit agreement in it.

They all had another drink. The Gray Man asked knowledgeable questions full of wry humor. Some time later, he stood, took everyone’s empty glasses to the kitchen, and excused himself with a glance at his watch. “Not that I wouldn’t like to stay.”

Then he asked if he could return later in the week.

And Maura said yes.

After he had gone, Calla looked through his wallet, which she had stolen as he left. “The ID is fake,” she remarked, closing the billfold and stuffing it into the couch cushions where he had been sitting. “But he’ll miss his credit cards. Why ever did you say yes?”

“Something like that,” Maura replied, “makes me feel better if I can keep my eye on it.”

“Oh,” Persephone said, “I think we all know what you’re keeping your eye on.”





Adam remembered how cruel he had thought Gansey would be. There wasn’t a day during his first month at Aglionby Academy when he hadn’t doubted his decision to come there. The other boys were so alien and daunting; he would never be able to look like one of them. How incredibly naive he’d been to think he would ever possess a room like one of the other Aglionby students did. And Gansey was the worst of them. The other boys attended Aglionby and fit in life around the edge. But Gansey — it was impossible to forget that he had arrived with a life intact, and instead fit Aglionby into it. He was the boy all eyes turned to when he strode into the gym. He was the student with the easiest smile when called on in Latin. He was forever loitering behind after classes to chat with the teachers like equals — Mr. Gansey, would you hold up a moment? I found an article I think you’d be interested in — and he was the boy with the most beautifully interesting car and the most savagely handsome of friends, Ronan Lynch. He was the opposite of Adam in every possible way.

They didn’t speak. Why would they speak? Adam slid into class and kept his head down and listened, trying to learn how to clip his accent. Gansey, a furious sun, glowed from the other side of the universe, his gravitational pull too distant to affect Adam. Although Gansey seemed to be friends with the entire school, it was Ronan who was always with him. And it was this friendship, all wordless glances and wry twists of the mouth, that made Adam think that Gansey must be cruel. Ronan and Gansey were laughing, he thought, at a joke where the rest of the world was the punch line.

No, Adam and Gansey didn’t speak.

They didn’t exchange a word until six weeks into the year, when Adam bicycled past the Camaro on the way to school. Dark tire tracks pointed its path to the side of the road; its hood stood open. It wasn’t an unusual sight: Adam had seen the Camaro behind a tow truck at least twice already. There was no reason at all to think that Gansey, hovering by the engine, would want Adam’s help. Probably he’d already called a mechanic he had at the ready.

But Adam stopped. He remembered how afraid he’d been right then. Of all of the agonizing days at Aglionby, that had been the worst moment so far: knocking down his old bike’s kickstand next to Richard C. Gansey III’s glorious burning-orange Camaro and waiting for him to turn. His stomach had been a ruin of fear.

Gansey had pivoted and in his slow, lovely accent, said, “Adam Parrish, right?”

“Yeah. Di — Richard Gansey?”

“Just Gansey.”

Already Adam had spotted what had stopped the Camaro in its tracks. With daring, he’d asked, “Do you want me to fix it? I know a little about cars.”

“No,” Gansey had replied curtly.

Adam remembered how his ears had burned, how he’d wished he’d never stopped, how he hated Aglionby. He was nothing, he knew, and of course Gansey, of all of them, could see it on him. The worthlessness of him. His secondhand uniform, his shitty bike, his stupid accent. He didn’t know what had possessed him to stop.

Then Gansey, his eyes full of the real Gansey, had said, “I’d like you to show me how to fix it myself, if you could. There’s no point having this car if I can’t speak its language. Speaking of languages, you school me at Latin every day. You’re as good as Ronan.”

It shouldn’t have happened at all, but their friendship had been cemented in only the time it took to get to school that morning — Adam demonstrating how to fasten the Camaro’s ground wire more securely, Gansey lifting Adam’s bike halfway into the trunk so they could ride to school together, Adam confessing he worked at a mechanic’s to put himself through Aglionby, and Gansey turning to the passenger seat and asking, “What do you know about Welsh kings?”