The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(77)

Noah vanished.

Ronan craned his neck, looking.

With a tremendous crack, the bottom right corner of the windshield collapsed onto the dash. A claw snaked in.

Noah shouted, “Brake!”

Ronan slammed on the brakes. He had too much speed, too much brakes, too little steering. The Camaro swept from side to side as it hurtled on. The steering wheel did nothing.

Noah and a flash of black tumbled over the left side of the hood, leaving the windshield suddenly clear. The car kicked up as one of the tires ran over the bundle.

There was no time to see where the two of them went, because the jolt had unsettled the car — Noah’s already dead, he’s all right, Ronan thought frantically — and the Camaro was running out of road fast.

The smell of rubber and brake filled the car. It was an accident without a collision. The road went left but the car kept going straight.

No.

In agonizing detail, Ronan saw the telephone pole just as the passenger door made contact.

There was nothing gentle about this sound. It was not at all like the cars colliding at Kavinsky’s substance party. This was metal rending. Glass shrieking. It was a five-finger metallic punch in Ronan’s side.

Then it was over.

The car was utterly silent. Ronan didn’t know if it had stalled or if he had killed it. The passenger-side door was buckled in halfway to the gearshift. The glove-box door had burst off entirely and the contents, including Gansey’s EpiPen, had exploded throughout the front seat.

The realization was slowly dawning that everything had gone to shit.

Tck-tck-tck-tck.

The second night horror looked at Ronan, upside down. It was on the roof, staring through the windshield at him. Close enough for Ronan to see each individual scale around its sullen red pupil. With an experimental shove, the creature drummed nails on the windshield. What remained of the glass groaned where it met the car. With just a bit more weight it would all collapse.

“Do something.” Noah was a voice, but nothing more, his energy expended.

But the impact had frozen Ronan. His ears rang.

The bird man hissed.

Ronan knew. He knew what he always did: It wanted him dead.

In his dreams, it didn’t matter.

But he wasn’t dreaming.

The night horror’s head jerked up as a car slid by the Camaro. It was a sexy, messy, stylish slide, and the car performing it was a white Mitsubishi. The car spun round so the driver’s side was illuminated by the Pig’s headlights.

The night horror clambered down the windshield. Crouching on the hood, it hissed at the newcomer.

The driver’s side window of the Mitsubishi slid down. Behind it was Kavinsky, his expression impossible to determine behind his white sunglasses. He leaned to get something from beneath his seat, and then he pointed it at the night horror. It took a moment for Ronan to realize what it was. It was a small, imaginary-looking gun, shiny as chrome.

Ronan dove down beneath the dash, curled small as he could.

Outside of the car, Kavinsky fired the gun. At the first shot, the bird man’s hiss stopped abruptly. At the second, its weight slumped audibly against the hood. It didn’t move after that, but Kavinsky fired four more times, until splatter appeared on the upper few inches of the Camaro’s windshield.

There was no sound except for the sly growl of the Mitsubishi’s engine. Ronan slowly sat up.

Kavinsky still leaned out his window, chrome gun hanging casually from his hand. He seemed to be enjoying himself, or at least seemed to be untroubled.

Ronan had to keep reminding himself he was awake. Not because he didn’t feel awake, but because everything that had just happened felt so acutely like something he would dream. He opened the door — it seemed pointless to stay where he was, as the Camaro was clearly headed nowhere — and got out.

Standing on the asphalt, he stared at the dead night horror draped over the front of the ruined Camaro, and then he stared at Kavinsky.

“Try to keep up, Lynch,” Kavinsky said. He withdrew into the car, and for a moment, Ronan was worried that he was leaving. Kavinsky was no ally, but he was human, and he was alive, and he had just saved Ronan’s life, and that was something. But Kavinsky was just returning the gun to wherever he’d got it from and backing the Mitsubishi farther onto the shoulder.

He rejoined Ronan beside the Camaro, shoes crunching on grains of glass.

“Well, that’s f*cked,” Kavinsky said approvingly.

And it was. The smooth line Ronan had run his hand along only hours before was now torqued, the metal hugged around the telephone pole. One of the wheels had come free and lay in the ditch several feet away. Even the smell in the air was disaster: chemicals spilling and substances melting.

Ronan scraped a hand over the back of his head. He felt like his heart was collapsing inside him. Each wall came down individually, crushing the one before it. “He’s going to kill me. Goddamn it. He’s going to kill me.”

Kavinsky pointed to the night horror. “No, that was going to kill you, man. Gansey’ll forgive you, man. He doesn’t want to sleep alone.”

All at once, Ronan was done. He seized the straps of Kavinsky’s tank top and shoved him. “Enough, already! This isn’t your f*cking Mitsu. I can’t go out and buy another one tomorrow morning.”

With a knowing look, Kavinsky unhooked Ronan’s fingers. He watched as Ronan pushed off, pacing, hands behind his head, eyes darting down the road to see if any other cars were coming. But there was no fixing this, no matter how Ronan looked at it.