The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(84)

“You always this talkative after you drink?” Kavinsky asked.

“What were you doing with my phone?”

“Calling your mother.”

“Say something else about my mother,” Ronan said easily, “and I’ll smash your face in. How do you do it?”

He expected Kavinsky to crack another lewd joke about his mom, but instead, he just fixed a gaze on Ronan, his pupils cocaine-huge.

“So violent. Such a PTSD poster boy. You know how to do it,” Kavinsky said. “I saw you do it.”

Ronan’s heart twitched convulsively. It couldn’t seem to get used to this secret being the opposite of one. “What are you talking about?”

Kavinsky leapt to his feet. “Your ‘suicide attempt,’ man. I saw it happen. The gate’s right by Proko’s window. I saw you wake up and the blood appear. I knew what you were.”

That had been months and months and months ago. Before the street racing had even begun. All this time. Kavinsky had known all this time.

“You don’t know a damn thing about me,” Ronan said.

Kavinsky jumped to stand on one of the theater seats. As the furniture rocked beneath him, it sang a little — just a little scrap of a pop song that had been overplayed two years before — and Ronan realized it must be a dream thing, too. “Come on, man.”

“Tell me how you do it,” Ronan said. “I don’t mean just the dreaming. The cars. The IDs. The —” He lifted his wrist to indicate the bracelets. The list could’ve gone on and on. The fireworks. The drugs.

“You have to go after what you want,” Kavinsky said. “You have to know what you want.”

Ronan said nothing. Under those parameters, it would be impossible for him. What he wanted was to know what he wanted.

Kavinsky’s smile was wide. “I’ll teach you.”





Adam was gone.

At two p.m., Gansey thought he’d waited long enough for Adam. Bracing himself, he knocked on the bedroom door. Then he pushed it open and found the room empty and sterile. Afternoon sun washed over the unfinished silhouettes of old models. He leaned toward the bathroom and called Adam’s name, but it was clear there was no one in either room.

Gansey’s first thought was only mild irritation; he didn’t blame Adam for avoiding everything having to do with the tea party, nor was he surprised he was lying low after last night’s argument. But now he needed him. If he didn’t tell someone about Ronan breaking parts off the car, he was going to self-immolate.

But Adam wasn’t there. It turned out that Adam wasn’t anywhere.

He was not in the onion-scented kitchen or the brick-floored library or the small, moldy mudroom. Not stretched on the stiff sofas in the formal living room, nor the voluminous corner couches in the casual family room. He was not holed up in the basement bar nor wandering in the humid garden outside.

Gansey replayed the argument from the night before. It felt worse this time around.

“I can’t find Adam,” Gansey told Helen. She’d been dozing in an armchair in the upstairs study, but when she saw his face, she sat up without complaint.

“Does he have a cell phone?” Helen asked.

Gansey shook his head and said, in a smaller voice, “We fought.” He didn’t want to have to explain further.

Helen nodded. He didn’t say anything else.

She helped him look in the trickier places: the cars in the garage, the attic crawl space, the rooftop patio on the east wing.

There was no place for him to have gone. This wasn’t a walking neighborhood; the closest coffee shop or retail area or congregation of women in yoga pants was three miles away, accessed by busy four-and six-lane northern Virginia streets. They were two hours from Henrietta by car.

He had to be here, but he wasn’t.

The entire day felt imaginary: the Camaro news this morning, Adam lost this afternoon. This wasn’t happening.

“Dick,” Helen said, “do you have any ideas?”

“He doesn’t disappear,” Gansey replied.

“Don’t panic.”

“I’m not panicking.”

Helen looked at her brother. “Yes, you are.”

He called Ronan (Pick up, pick up, for once pick up) and he called 300 Fox Way (Is Blue there? No? Has Adam — Coca-Cola T-shirt — called?).

After that, it was no longer only Gansey and Helen. It was Gansey and Helen, Mr. Gansey and Mrs. Gansey, Margo the housekeeper and Delano the neighborhood gateman. It was a discreet call placed to Richard Gansey II’s friend at the police department. It was evening plans silently shunted aside. It was a small force of private vehicles canvassing the nearby shaded streets and crowded shopping districts.

His father drove a ’59 Tatra, a Czech specimen rumored to have once belonged to Fidel Castro, while Gansey cradled his phone in the passenger seat. Despite the air-conditioning, his palms sweated. The true Gansey huddled deep inside his body so that he could keep his face composed.

He left. He left. He left.

At seven p.m., as the thunderheads began to build over the suburbs and as Richard Gansey II once more circled the beautiful, green streets of Georgetown, Gansey’s phone rang — an unfamiliar northern Virginia number.

He snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Gansey?”