The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(45)

And there, in the middle of it, was his beautiful mother. She had a silent audience of catheters and IVs and feeding tubes — all of the things that home nurses always felt she would need. But she required nothing. She was a sedentary queen from an old epic: golden hair swept away from her pale face, cheeks flushed, lips red as the devil, eyes gently closed. She looked nothing like her charismatic husband, her troubled sons.

Ronan walked directly up to her, close enough to see that she had not changed a bit since the last time he had seen her, months and months ago. Though his breath moved the fine hairs around her temples, she didn’t react to her son’s presence.

Her chest rose and fell. Her eyes stayed closed.

Non mortem, somni fratrem. Not death, but his brother, sleep.

Blue whispered, “Just like the other animals.”

The truth — he’d known it all along, really, if he thought about it — burrowed into him. Blue was right.

His home was populated by things and creatures from Niall Lynch’s dreams, and his mother was just another one of them.





Blue thought it was well past time they took Ronan to her family for a consultation. Dream monsters were one thing. Dream mothers were another. The following morning, she biked down to Monmouth Manufacturing and proposed her idea. There was silence, and then: “No,” Ronan said.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “I’m not going.”

Gansey, lying on the floor beside his long aerial printout of the ley line, didn’t look up. “Ronan, don’t be difficult.”

“I’m not being difficult. I’m just telling you I’m not going.”

Blue said, “It’s not the dentist.”

Ronan, leaning against the doorway to his room, replied, “Exactly.”

Gansey made a note on the printout. “That doesn’t make sense.”

But it did. Blue thought she knew precisely what was going on. Icily, she said, “This is a religion thing, isn’t it?”

Ronan scoffed, “You don’t have to say it like that.”

“Actually, I do. Is this the part where you tell me my mom and I are going to hell?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” he said. “But I don’t really have the inside line on that knowledge.”

At this, Gansey rolled over onto his back and folded his hands on his chest. He wore a salmon polo shirt, which, in Blue’s opinion, was far more hellish than anything they’d discussed to this point. “What’s this all about now?”

Blue couldn’t believe he didn’t already know what the conflict was. Either he was incredibly oblivious or astonishingly enlightened. Knowing Gansey, it was undoubtedly the former.

“This is the part where Ronan starts using the word occult,” Blue snapped. She’d heard versions of this conversation countless times in her life; it had become too commonplace to needle her anymore. But she hadn’t expected it from her inner circle.

“I’m not using any word,” Ronan said. The annoying thing about Ronan was always that he was angry when everyone else was calm, and calm when everyone else was angry. Because Blue was ready to bust a vein, his voice was utterly pacific. “I’m just telling you I’m not going. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s not. My soul’s in enough peril as it is.”

At this, Gansey’s face turned to a genuine frown and he looked as if he was about to say something. Then he just shook his head a little.

“Do you think we’re in league with the devil, Ronan?” Blue asked. The question would’ve had a better effect if she’d asked it with sickly sweetness — she could just imagine Calla pulling it off — but she was too irritated to manage it. “They’re evil soothsayers?”

He rolled his eyes luxuriously at her. It was like he merely absorbed her anger, saving it all up for when he needed it for himself.

“My mom first knew she was psychic because she saw the future in a dream,” Blue said. “A dream, Ronan. It wasn’t like she sacrificed a goat in the backyard to see it. She didn’t try to see the future. It’s not something she became; it’s something she is. I could just as easily say that you’re evil because you can take things from your dreams!”

Ronan said, “Yeah, you could.”

Gansey’s frown deepened. Again he opened his mouth and closed it.

Blue couldn’t drop it. She said, “So even if it could help you understand you and your dad, you won’t go talk to them.”

He shrugged, as dismissive as Kavinsky. “Nope.”

“Why, you close-minded —”

“Jane,” Gansey rumbled. Oblivious! He cut his eyes to her, looking as stately as one could look lying on their back in a salmon polo shirt. “Ronan.”

Ronan said, “I am being perfectly f*cking civil.”

“You’re being medieval,” Gansey replied. “Multiple studies have suggested that clairvoyance lies in the realm of science, not magic.”

Oh. Enlightened.

“Come on, man,” Ronan said.

Gansey sat up. “Come on, man, yourself. We’re all aware here that Cabeswater bends time. You yourself somehow managed to write on that rock in Cabeswater before any of us ever got there. Time’s not a line. It’s a circle or a figure eight or a goddamn Slinky. If you can believe that, I don’t know why you can’t believe that someone might be able to glimpse something farther along the Slinky.”