The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(43)

Blue protested wordlessly.

Gansey looked to Adam.

“I’m fine with anything,” Adam replied, his Henrietta accent snaking out, betraying his fatigue. It wasn’t quite his usual tiredness. It was something deeper. It wasn’t at all impossible for Ronan to imagine that bargain nesting in Adam’s bones.

Gansey looked at Ronan.

Ronan rubbed a studious thumb beneath one of the leather straps, wiping away the grime and sweat. He wondered when he’d ever be back. Softly, just for Gansey, he asked, “Can I go and see Mom?”





Inside the farmhouse, everything was in black and white. The air was stained permanently with the pleasant odor of Ronan’s childhood: hickory smoke and boxwood, grass seed and lemon cleaner.

“I remember,” Gansey said thoughtfully to Ronan, “when you used to smell like this.”

Gansey clucked at his bedraggled reflection in the dark-framed mirror hanging in the front hallway. Chainsaw eyed herself briefly before hiding on the other side of Ronan’s neck; Adam did the same, but without the hiding-in-Ronan’s-neck bit. Even Blue looked less fanciful than usual, the lighting rendering her lampshade dress and spiky hair as a melancholy Pierrot.

“It feels the same as when you guys lived here,” Gansey said finally. “It seems like it should be different.”

“Did you come here a lot?” Blue asked.

He exchanged a glance with Ronan. “Often enough.”

He didn’t say what Ronan was thinking, which was that Gansey was far more of a brother to Ronan than Declan had ever been.

Voice faded, Adam asked, “Could we get some water?”

Ronan led them to the kitchen. It was a farmhouse kitchen, no frills, worn smooth by use. Nothing had ever been repaired or updated until it had stopped working, and so the room was an amalgam of decades and styles: plain white cabinets decorated with a combination of old glass knobs and brass handles, counters that were half new butcher block and half dingy laminate, appliances a mixture of snowy white and polished stainless steel.

With Blue and Adam there, Ronan saw the Barns with fresh eyes. This was not the pretentious, beautiful old money of Gansey’s family. This house was shabby rich, betraying its wealth not with culture or airs but because no comfort was wanting: mismatched antiques and copper pots, real hand-painted art on the walls and real hand-knotted rugs on the floors. Where Gansey’s ancestral home was a no-touch museum of elegant, remote things, the Barns was a warren of pool tables and quilts, video game cords and shoddily expensive leather couches.

Ronan loved it so much. He nearly couldn’t bear it. He wanted to destroy something.

Instead, he said, “Remember how I told you that Dad — that my father was like me?” He pointed to the toaster. It was an ordinary stainless-steel toaster, room for two slices of toast.

Gansey raised an eyebrow. “That? Is a toaster.”

“Dream toaster.”

Adam laughed soundlessly.

“How can you tell?” asked Gansey.

Ronan slid the toaster out from the wall. There was no wall plug, no battery panel. Yet when he pressed down on the lever, the filaments inside began to glow. For how many years had he used this toaster before he’d realized that it was impossible?

“What’s it run on, then?” Adam asked.

“Dream energy,” Ronan said. Chainsaw hopped untidily from Ronan’s shoulder to the counter and had to be smacked away from the appliance. “Cleanest there is.”

Adam’s dusty eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. He replied, “Politicians wouldn’t be pleased. No offense to your mother, Gansey.”

“None taken,” Gansey said cordially.

“Oh, and that,” Ronan said, pointing at the calendar on the front of the fridge.

Blue paged through it. No one had been here to change over the month, but it didn’t matter. Every page was the same — twelve pages of April, every photo displaying three black birds sitting on a fence. There had been a time when Ronan had thought it was merely a gag gift. Now he could readily recognize the artifact of a frustration dream. Blue peered at the birds, her nose nearly touching the image. “Are these vultures or crows?”

At the same time that Ronan said, “Crows,” Adam said, “Vultures.”

“What else is here?” Gansey asked. He was using his deeply curious voice and his deeply curious face, the ones he normally reserved for all things Glendower. “Dream things, I mean?”

“Damned if I know,” Ronan replied. “Never made a study.”

Gansey said, “Then let’s make a study.”

The four of them pushed out from the fridge, pulling open cabinets and shifting through items on the countertop.

“Phone doesn’t plug into the wall,” Adam noted, turning an old-fashioned rotary dial phone upside down to look at it. “But there’s still a dial tone.”

In the age of cell phones, Ronan found this discovery profoundly disinteresting. He had just found a pencil that was really a pen; even though an exploratory scratch of a fingernail on the side of lead revealed that it was a leaded pencil, the tip released a perfect line of blue ink when dragged across the notepad beside the pencil can.

“Microwave’s not plugged in, either,” Adam said.

“Here’s a spoon with two ends,” Gansey added.