Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(65)

And then the memory skipped to him plucking something from the grass to show to Aurora. It was a book like the one she’d been reading, but much smaller, sized for his child palms.

“What do we have here?” she asked him, putting hers away.

“Open it.”

Aurora let the tiny volume fall open. Inside there were not pages, but a summer sky graced with towering white clouds. She poked her fingers into the book and watched the clouds part around them. The sky was in the book but it was also over the book, a page and a sky, two-dimensional and three-dimensional at once as it towered upward.

“Look at you, Mr. Impossible,” Aurora whispered fondly. She opened and closed it several times to see if the sky would change. It did. From day to night to day again. Sun to stars to sun. “Now let’s bury it.”

“Bury it,” echoed Ronan. He wanted to show it to Declan. To Niall. He wanted to put it on his shelf.

Aurora stood up and brushed the grass off her skirt. “Little things like this are best as secrets. It’s very important to remember that.”

It didn’t feel important to remember that. It felt important to show it to someone. Ronan tried to understand. “For how long?”

She kissed the top of his head. “Forever.”

Forever?



“This seems like a really nice place,” Hennessy said. “Are we here to destroy it?”

Burrito had just driven past acres of dried, unharvested cornfields to arrive at a house old enough to have a name on a brick pillar by the drive: Barnhill. The cornfields went right up to a neat little yard, and then there was the square white house, and beyond that was dried marsh grass, and then, presumably, were marshes, and eventually the sea. The entire property had a haunted, lonely loveliness. One would not find it by accident.

Ronan agreed with Hennessy. It did seem like a really nice place. It reminded him of the Barns, and he did not want to destroy it.

Bryde didn’t answer, just gazed at the house as they pulled the invisible car up to the separate garage. He had not been quite the same since the server farm, although Ronan couldn’t put his finger on what had changed. He wanted to say that it was something like an additional gravity, an investment in the task, but no one had ever been as invested in this as Bryde. He seemed withdrawn from them. Introspective. It was, Ronan thought, as if he were angry or disappointed with Ronan or Hennessy, although he couldn’t think of what they might have done to vex him.

“Get your things,” he said finally, already opening his door. “No, not just your sword. Your bags.”

“We’re staying here?” Ronan asked in surprise. The lights were on inside the house and it had a decidedly lived-in look to it. Not Bryde’s style. Not his style at all.

“If we’re murdering people and taking their house,” Hennessy said, “can I eat first? Actually, I guess I could eat them. I’m hungry enough to eat a baby. Are there going to be babies?”

But Bryde was already off and nearly to the porch of the house, even more disinterested in her banter than he had been at the beginning of all this. With a growl, Ronan shouldered his bag and the scabbard with vexed to nightmare and followed after. By the time Hennessy climbed the two steps to the front door to join them, they could already hear footsteps from inside the house, lots of them.

Ronan and Hennessy exchanged a look behind Bryde’s back. She looked as bemused as he did.

Then the door opened and a short woman with light brown skin and dark brown hair clipped back from her face stood there. Even though her appearance had little in common with Hennessy’s, she nonetheless reminded Ronan of what Hennessy had looked like when he first met her: exhausted and frightened. Just like Hennessy, she hid the exhaustion and fright away beneath a very different expression, but it still leaked out around the eyes, the tight smile. When she saw them, a little bit of the exhaustion and fright went away, replaced with curiosity and wariness.

Good, thought Ronan. That was the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

She looked Bryde up and down and then she looked over her shoulder. “Is this him?”

Behind her, several voices rose in a chorus of youthful excitement.

“He’s here!”

“Is it him?”

“I said he was here? I said that already.”

“It’s Bryde!”

“What about Jordan Hennessy?”

“Yes! I see her! I see her!”

“And Ronan Lynch?”

“He’s tall and bald! He has the sword!”

The children had rushed up behind their mother like a wave blustering to shore, stopping just short of breaking out onto the porch. Five happy faces in five different heights. They hissed and poked at each other and pointed at Hennessy and Ronan standing behind Bryde.

Ronan and Hennessy exchanged another look.

This was not what Ronan would have considered the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

But he kind of liked it.

“You might as well come in so they can paw at you,” said the woman. “Not that you’re here for me, but I’m—”

“Angelica,” Bryde said as he stepped past her into the cramped hallway. “Angelica Aldana-Leon. Yes. I know. They told me.” As her mouth dropped open, he lifted a closed fist and said to the five children, “Presents, but not until you tell me what they are.”