The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(79)

“Damn it, Adam. That’s not the point, either. The point is — just tell me it’s not going to happen again.”

“What’s ‘it’? Someone doing something you didn’t ask for? If you wanted someone you could control, you picked the wrong person.”

There was a pause, full of the distant ringing of silverware and glasses. Someone laughed, high and delighted.

Gansey just sighed.

And that sigh was the final straw. Because it didn’t whisper of pity. It drowned in it.

“Oh, don’t even,” snapped Adam. “Don’t you dare.”

There was no switch this time. No flip from ordinary to angry. Because he’d already been angry. It was already dark, and now it was black.

“Look at you, Adam.” Gansey held up a hand, demonstrating. Exhibit A, Adam Parrish, impostor. “Just look.”

Adam felt stuffed full of the partygoers, their false civility, the glittering lights, the fakery of everything. He struggled for words. “That’s right. ‘There’s Adam, what a mess. What do you reckon he was trying to say when he woke the ley line by himself? I don’t know, Ronan. Let’s not ask him.’ How about this, Gansey? It wasn’t about you. I was doing what needed to be done.”

“Oh, don’t lie to me. There were so many other ways.”

“You weren’t doing them. Either you want to find this thing or you don’t.” There was something brutally freeing about being able to say it out loud, everything he’d been thinking. He shouted, “And you don’t need him. I do. I’m not going to sit back and let someone else take my shot out of this.”

Gansey’s eyes darted down the hall and back to Adam. That’s right, Gansey, don’t wake the baby. His voice was very low. “Glendower was not yours, Adam. This was mine first.”

“You asked us. Either you meant it or you didn’t. You did this.”

Gansey lightly pressed a finger into Adam’s chest. “This? I don’t think so.”

Adam seized Gansey’s wrist. He wasn’t nice about it. The suit was slippery as blood under his fingers. “I’m not going to be your minion, Gansey. Was that what you wanted? You want me to help you find him, you let me look my way.”

Gansey jerked his arm out of Adam’s grasp. Again his eyes darted down the hall and back. “You should look at yourself in the mirror.”

Adam didn’t.

“We do this, we do it as equals,” Adam said.

Gansey glanced over his shoulder, furtive. His mouth made the shh shape, but not the sound.

“Oh, what?” Adam demanded. “You’re afraid someone will hear? They’ll know everything isn’t perfect in the land of Dick Gansey? A dose of reality could only help those people!”

With a sudden twist, he swept all of the figurines from the Queen Anne table. Foxes in breeches and terriers seized in midflight. They all plunged to the floor with a satisfying and diseased smash. He raised his voice. “World’s ending, folks!”

“Adam —”

“I don’t need your wisdom, Gansey,” he said. “I don’t need you to babysit me. I got into Aglionby without you. I got Blue without you. I woke the ley line without you. I won’t take your pity.”

Now, finally, Gansey was silenced. There was something very remote about his eyes, or the set of his lips, or the lift of his chin.

He didn’t say anything else. He just gave a tiny shake to the sleeve Adam had grabbed, letting the wrinkles fall out. His eyebrows were pulled together as if the action required most of his attention. Then he left Adam standing in the hall.

Next to Adam, the mirror reflected both him and the flickering form of a ghost no one but Adam could see. She was screaming, but there was no sound.





This was the dream: sitting in the passenger seat of Joseph Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi, the odor of a crash clinging to Ronan’s clothing, the white dash lights carving Kavinsky a gaunt and wild face, foully seductive lyrics spitting from the speakers, the vein-covered peaks of Kavinsky’s knuckles on the gearshift between them. The smell in the car was sweet and unfamiliar, toxic and pleasant in the way Ronan had always thought marijuana would be before he came to Aglionby. Even the feel of the racing seats was unfamiliar; they held Ronan’s shoulders and sucked his legs into the very depths of the car like a trap. Every bump in the road transferred directly to Ronan’s bones, sharp and immediate. A touch of the wheel and they darted one way or another. It was like a car built to both feed on and produce anxiety.

Ronan didn’t know if he loved it or hated it.

They didn’t speak. Ronan didn’t know what he would say anyway. It felt like anything could happen. All of his secrets felt dangerously close to the surface.

Kavinsky drove out of Henrietta, past Deering, into nowhere. The road turned from four lanes to two, and pure black trees pressed out the dull black sky overhead. Ronan’s palms sweated. He watched Kavinsky change gears as he snaked along the back roads. Every time he shifted into the fourth gear, he missed the sweet spot. Couldn’t he feel the car hanging when he did?

“My eyes are up here, sweetheart,” Kavinsky said.

With a dismissive noise, Ronan lay his head back in the seat and looked out into the night. He could tell where they were now; they were nearly to the fairground where the substance party had been. Tonight the great floodlights were dark; the only evidence of the fairground was when the headlights swept over the bunting. They were only in the light for a moment, like colorless ghosts of flags, and then there was nothing but brush as Kavinsky pulled onto an overgrown gravel track before the fairground.