The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(90)

He might have imagined it. What was real?

Again the Camaro was parked in the dreaming trees. Again Orphan Girl crouched on the other side of it, eyes sad. The leaves quivered and faded.

He felt this place’s power dissipating.

He crept toward the car.

In Out “Ronan,” whispered Orphan Girl. “Quid furantur a nos?”

(Why do you steal from us?)

She was faded as Noah, smudgy as the dead.

Ronan whispered, “Just one more. Please.” She stared at him. “Unum. Amabo te. It’s not for me.”

In Out But he didn’t hide this time. He wasn’t a thief. Instead, he stood, rising from his hiding place. The dream, suddenly aware, shuddered around him. Flickered. The trees leaned away.

He hadn’t stolen Chainsaw, the truest thing he’d ever taken from a dream.

He wasn’t going to steal the car. Not this time.

“Please,” Ronan said again. “Let me take it.”

He ran his hand across the elegant line of the roof. When he lifted his palm, it was dusted green. His heart thudded as he rubbed pollen-covered fingertips against one another. The air was suddenly hot, sweat sticky in the crease of his elbows, gasoline pricking his nostrils. This was a memory, not a dream.

He pulled open the door. When he got in, the seat burned his bare skin. He was aware of everything around him, down to the scuffed vinyl beneath the improperly restored window cranks.

He was lost in time. Was he sleeping?

“Call it by name,” said Orphan Girl.

“Camaro,” Ronan said. “Pig. Gansey’s. Cabeswater, please.”

He turned the key. The engine turned, turned, turned, finicky as it had always been. It was as real as anything had ever been.

When it caught, he woke up.

Kavinsky grinned in the windshield at him. Ronan sat in the driver’s seat of the Pig.

Air sputtered in the air-conditioning vents, scented with gasoline and exhaust. Ronan didn’t have to look under the hood to know that the thundering he felt in his feet came from a proper engine.

Yes-yes-yes.

Also, he thought he knew why Cabeswater had disappeared. Which meant he might know how to get it back. Which meant he might get his mother back. Which meant he might make Matthew smile for a little while longer. Which meant he had something besides a restored car to bring back to Gansey.

He rolled down the window. “I’m going.”

For a moment, Kavinsky’s face was perfectly blank, and then Kavinsky flickered back onto it. He said, “You’re shitting me.”

“I’ll send flowers.” Ronan revved the engine. Exhaust and dust swirled in a wild torment behind the Camaro. It coughed at twenty-eight-hundred rpm. Just like the Pig. Everything was back the way it was.

“Running back to your master?”

“This was fun,” Ronan said. “Time for big-boy games now, though.”

“You’re a player in his life, Lynch.”

The difference between us and Kavinsky, Gansey whispered in Ronan’s head, is we matter.

“You don’t f*cking need him,” Kavinsky said.

Ronan released the parking brake.

Kavinsky threw up a hand like he was going to hit something, but there was nothing but air. “You are shitting me.”

“I never lie,” Ronan said. He frowned disbelievingly. This felt like a more bizarre scenario than anything that had happened to this point. “Wait. You thought — it was never gonna be you and me. Is that what you thought?”

Kavinsky’s expression was scorched. “There’s only with me or against me.”

Which was ludicrous. It had always been Ronan against Kavinsky. There was never any possibility of with. “It was never going to be you and me.”

“I will burn you down,” Kavinsky said.

Ronan’s smile was sharp as a knife. He had already been burned to nothing. “You wish.”

Kavinsky made a gun of his thumb and finger and put it to Ronan’s temple.

“Bang,” he said softly, withdrawing the fake gun. “See you on the streets.”





So now Adam had a car.

The vehicle was but one of three objects Adam had acquired that morning. As each of the other Ganseys had gone out the door, they’d all bestowed a gift, eccentric fairy godmothers. Richard Gansey II checked his tie in a hallway mirror and handed Adam a checked vest.

“I’m not as thin as I used to be,” he told Adam. “I was going to give this to Dick, but it will suit you better, I think. Here, put it on.”

It was not even a gift; it was an order.

Next was Mrs. Gansey, peering out the window to verify that her driver was out front before saying, “Dick, I’ve gotten you another mint plant to take back. Don’t forget it. Adam, I picked you up a rubber plant, too. You boys never think about feng shui.”

He knew it was because they had retrieved him pathetically from the side of an interstate, but he didn’t feel he could refuse. It was a plant. And he had ruined their Saturday.

Gone, he thought. He’d ruined their Saturday, but he’d entirely lost his Saturday. Whatever made him Adam had just vanished while his body shambled on.

If he let himself think about it, the terror just — It wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t.