The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(52)

“Who is?” the Gray Man prompted.

“We didn’t get his name. He’s French.”

The Gray Man licked his lips. He wondered if Maura Sargent’s thing was environmental issues. She hadn’t been wearing shoes, and that, to him, possibly was the sort of thing that someone interested in the environment might do. “French living in France or French living over here?”

“I don’t know, man, what does it matter? He’s got an accent!”

It would’ve mattered to the Gray Man. It occurred to him that he was going to have to change clothing before he went to 300 Fox Way for his wallet. He had intestinal matter on his slacks.

“Do you have a contact number? Of course you do not. What was this antique?”

“A, uh, box. He said it was probably a box. Called the Greywaren. That we’d know it when we saw it.”

The Gray Man doubted that highly. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven; the day was racing by and he had so many plans. He said, “Do I kill you or let you go?”

“Please —”

The Gray Man shook his head. “It was a rhetorical question.”





Would you like to explain, now, why we’re in the middle of this puddle?” Adam asked.

“Godforsaken puddle,” Ronan corrected from beside Gansey. As a pale-skinned, dark-haired Celtic sort, he didn’t care for the heat.

The five of them — plus Chainsaw, minus Noah (he had been present, but feebly, when they’d left) — floated in the boat in the middle of the belligerently ugly man-made lake they had found before. It was relentlessly sunny. The smell of the field — warm dirt — reminded Gansey of all the mornings he’d picked up Adam from his parents’ double-wide.

From shore, crows hollered apocalyptically at them. Chainsaw hollered back.

It really was some of the worst Henrietta had to offer.

“We’re looking under it.” Gansey eyed his laptop. He couldn’t get the sonar device to communicate with it, despite a cursory examination of the instructional manual. Vexation was beginning to bead at his temples and on the back of his neck.

Blue, perched at the other end of the boat, asked, “Are we going to sonar every lake on the ley line? Or just the ones that piss you off?”

She was still angry about the couch and the pool table and Orla’s bare midriff. Orla, tanning idly, wasn’t helping. She took up most of the boat, her legs trailing up one side of it and her long bronze torso draped up the other. Every so often she opened her eyes to smile widely at one of the boys, twisting herself this way and that as if she were merely readjusting her spine.

“This is a pilot mission,” said Gansey. He was more profoundly uncomfortable with Blue being angry at him than he cared to admit to anyone, least of all himself. “Odds suggest that Glendower’s not under this lake. But I want to have recourse should we find a body of water we suspect he’s under.”

“Recourse,” echoed Ronan, but without real force. The water reflected the sun at his face from beneath, rendering him a translucent and fretful god. “Shitdamn, it’s hot.”

Gansey’s explanation was not precisely true. He occasionally had hunches, always about finding things, always about Glendower. They were a result of poring over maps and sorting through historical records and recalling the historical finds he’d made before. When you’d found impossible things before, it made the location of another impossible thing more predictable.

The hunch about this lake had something to do with this wide field looking like one of the only easy passes through this section of challenging mountains. Something to do with the name of the tiny lane at the bottom of the hill — Hanmer Road, Hanmer being the last name of Glendower’s wife. Something to do with where it sat on the line, the look of the field, the prickling of stop and look closer.

“Is it possible that you’ve bought a sixty-five-hundred-dollar piece of junk?” Ronan pulled a cord out of the back of the laptop and hooked it up in a different way. The laptop pretended it couldn’t tell the difference. Gansey hit some keys. The laptop pretended he hadn’t. The entire process had looked a lot more straightforward on the instructional video online.

From the deck of the boat, Orla said, “I’m having a psychic moment. It involves you and me.”

Distracted, Gansey glanced up from the computer screen. “Were you talking to me or Ronan?”

“Either. I’m flexible.”

Blue made a small, terrible noise.

“I would appreciate if you’d turn your inner eye toward the water,” Gansey said. “Because — goddamn it, Ronan, that made the screen go black.”

He was beginning to think he had bought a sixty-five-hundred-dollar piece of junk. He hoped the pool table worked better.

“How long are we in D.C. for?” Adam asked suddenly.

Gansey said, “Three days.”

Thank goodness Adam had agreed to go. There was plenty of opportunity to be had at a fund-raiser like this one. Internships, future positions, sponsors. An impressive-sounding name on the bottom of a college recommendation letter. So many pearls to be had, if you were in the mood to open oysters.

Gansey so hated oysters.

Ronan aggressively jerked a cable on the back of the laptop. The sonar device appeared on the laptop screen, shaped like a tiny submarine.