The Dream Thieves (53 page)

He got off the interstate.

He was going to stay. Or he was going to die trying.

In the rearview mirror, he saw two cars get off the interstate behind him. Up ahead were two bleary-eyed truck stops — nothing said exhaustion like the wide-awake lights of a truck stop. He chose the larger one.

Already he could recognize his brother’s silhouette behind the wheel of the farther car. Age had not changed the set of his chin nor the shape of his ears. Age, the Gray Man guessed, had not changed much about his brother. Fear tickled in his gut.

Through the speakers, the Kinks confessed that they no longer wanted to wander.

The Gray Man pulled up to a pump.

Here is the thing the Gray Man knew about gas stations after dark: They were the best and worst place in the world to kill someone. Because here, between the pumps, in this insomnia light show, the Gray Man was well-nigh invincible. Even if there were no other cars getting gas, he had two different cameras pointed at him. And the cashier monitoring those cameras was only a panic away from an emergency button. Only the most casual of killers would strike between these gas pumps. Too kill someone here was to be caught.

The Gray Man’s brother would not get caught. He was dangerous not because he was reckless, but because of the opposite.

And the treasure hunters — they probably were not killers at all. Just specialized thugs with a skill for breaking and entering and enough tact to not break something valuable once they had it.

Sure enough, the Gray Man’s brother didn’t even pull close to the pumps but instead pulled into the darkness beside a trash bin to wait.

The other car hesitated as well, but the Gray Man rolled down his window and waved them over. After a pause, they pulled up the other direction, driver’s window to driver’s window.

They were just a pair of young roughs, both looking tired and frustrated. The one in the passenger seat held a bank of devices on his lap. The Gray Man glimpsed a sea of candy wrappers and soda bottles, a blanket balled in the backseat. So they’d been living out of this car for at least a few days. The Gray Man didn’t really begrudge them trashing his rooms back at the bed and breakfast. Probably how he would’ve done it, before he knew any better. Well, probably not. But still, they weren’t as bad as the two he’d left in the woods.

This is why you’re the best
, Greenmantle had said.

It was true. The Gray Man really was the best.

It was quite clear they hadn’t expected the Gray Man to stop, and if they had, they hadn’t expected him to be leaning easily on the window with the Kinks shouting,
Silly boy, you self-destroyer!

“Good evening,” the Gray Man said pleasantly. The station smelled like very old fried food.

“Hey, man,” said the driver, an uneasy cast to his voice.

“I see you’re following me,” the Gray Man said.

“Hey, man —” protested the driver.

The Gray Man gently held up a hand. “Let’s not waste time. I don’t have what you’re looking for. I lied to my employer. I pretended the unusual readings were because of the object so he’d keep paying for my room and board while I looked for it. And then I told him I took it to try and get more cash out of him. Which didn’t work, as you can tell.”

They stared at him, too bewildered at first to immediately reply.

“Hey, man,” said the driver, a third time. The passenger scrubbed a hand over his face and then pensively thumbed the still-glowing meters in his lap. “How do we know you aren’t lying to
us
?”

“For what purpose?” the Gray Man asked. He gestured toward the Mitsubishi. “Let’s be honest. I could easily lose you guys in this.”

He thought, anyway. Probably. It looked fast.

The two of them seemed to think so, though, because they both frowned.

“Look, I’m only stopping out of professional courtesy,” the Gray Man added. “I can see you guys haven’t been in this business as long as I have, but I’d hope you’d do the same for someone else in my position.” He wanted to tell them they could search his car, but that would sound too eager. Too guilty. They’d think he’d dumped it.

More frowning. The guy in the passenger seat said, “What about the readings?”

“I told you. I lied about the readings because I knew I could get away with it for a while. They’re only from the fault line. You can drive up and down the mountains if you want to see for yourself. Follows them pretty perfectly.”

They wanted so badly to believe him. He could see it in their bloodshot eyes, their flattened lips. They’d been sent in pursuit of a ghost, and not many besides the Gray Man had the patience for that. They wanted to be done, to go after more concrete spoils.

“But what do we tell our man?”

“Hey, what do I know?” the Gray Man asked. “I’m the one who’s on the run ’cause mine didn’t believe me.”

“True point,” commented the guy from the passenger seat. There was a pause, and then he added, “I’ve got to piss.”

The Gray Man had won.

“Here. Put my number in your phone,” the Gray Man said. “We can keep in touch.”

They exchanged numbers. Passenger Seat went into the station to pee. Driver said, “Well,
hell
. Do you have a cigarette?”

The Gray Man somberly shook his head. “Gave them up a year ago.” He had never smoked.

Driver jerked his chin back toward where the Gray Man’s brother waited in the shadows. Rain streaked through the pale beam of his headlights. “What about him?”

“Cagey Guy, you mean? I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to talk to him out of the cameras.”

The driver looked up sharply to where the Gray Man pointed. “Oh, man. I never even thought of them.”

The Gray Man tapped the end of his nose. He said, “That’s a tip. Okay, let’s stay in touch.”

“Yeah,” the driver said. “Oh, hey —”

The Gray Man stopped rolling up the window. He tried not to hold his breath. “Yeah?”

The driver cracked a grin. “I like the license plate.”

It took the Gray Man a moment to remember what it was.

“Thanks,” he said. “I like to tell the truth when I can.”

He rolled up the window and pulled forward. As he did, his brother eased forward in his car, too. It was a slithering little coupe, something that probably looked elegant back in Boston. The lights striped over the top of it as it pulled forward to follow the Gray Man.

A truck stop was the best and the worst place to kill someone. Because outside of the camera-laden gas pumps there was often a parking lot for weary truck drivers to snatch some sleep. Sometimes it was only room for ten or fifteen semitrucks. Sometimes it was twenty or forty. They were rarely lit, never filmed. It was only trailers and fatigue-drugged drivers.

This truck stop had a massive parking area, and the Gray Man led his brother’s car to the very farthest edge of it. He stopped behind the grubbiest of the semitrucks.

This was it.

This was really it.

The Gray Man felt every point of those ten swords piercing him.

Every gray day wanted him. It would be easiest to just give in.

The Kinks sang,
Night is as dark as you feel it ought to be.

The coupe pulled alongside the white Mitsubishi, driver’s side to driver’s side. And there he was, unassuming and soft looking. He’d grown a tidy beard that somehow emphasized the sympathetic curve of his thick eyebrows. People always thought he had a friendly face. There was a lot of talk about sociopaths having frightening eyes, but not the Gray Man’s brother. When he needed to blend in, he was as warm and as intimate as you could hope for. Even now, sitting there in the coupe with that curled smile, he looked like a hero.

Dean, we’re just going to try this one thing.

“Well, little brother,” said the Gray Man’s brother. He knew from long experience that his voice alone would paralyze the Gray Man. Like a snake, it gave him plenty of time to digest his victim. “Looks like it’s you and me again.”

And the voice had the effect it always did: a poisonous venom of memories. A decade flashed in the Gray Man’s head.

blade

cut

slice

burn

pick

smear

scream

The Gray Man took the gun from the passenger seat and shot his brother. Twice.

“Really,” he said, “it’s just me.”

He put on a glove from his suitcase and transferred the Post-it note from his steering wheel to the inside of his brother’s car.

Then he turned up the music, rolled up the window, and got back on the interstate.

He was going home.

A
secret is a strange thing.

There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words:
I am afraid.

And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.

Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.

All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or kept-from, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.

Ronan Lynch lived with every sort of secret.

His first secret was himself. He was brother to a liar and brother to an angel, son of a dream and son of a dreamer. He was a warring star full of endless possibilities, but in the end, as he dreamt in the backseat on the way to the Barns that night, he created only this:

A
RTICLE 7

F
URTHER
C
ONDITION

U
PON MY DEATH, MY CHILDREN SHALL BE ALLOWED FREE ACCESS TO “THE
B
ARNS,” ALTHOUGH THEY MAY NOT ONCE AGAIN TAKE RESIDENCE THERE UNTIL ALL HAVE REACHED THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN.

Then, when he woke, they all helped to put Aurora Lynch in the car. And in silence, they drove her to the GPS coordinates marked in Gansey’s journal.

There was Cabeswater fully restored. It was spreading and mysterious, familiar and eerie, dreamer and dreamt. Every tree, Ronan thought, was a voice he might have heard before. And there was Noah, shoulders slumped, hand lifted in an apologetic wave. On one side of him, Adam stood, hands in pockets, and on the other side was Persephone, her fingers twisted together.

When they carried Aurora over the border, she woke like a rose blooms. And when she smiled at Ronan, he thought,
Matthew does look a little like her.

She hugged him and said, “Flowers and ravens,” because she wanted him to know she remembered.

Then she hugged Matthew and said, “My love,” because he was her favorite.

She said nothing at all to Declan, because he wasn’t there.

Ronan’s second secret was Adam Parrish. Adam was different since making the bargain with Cabeswater. Stronger, stranger, farther away. It was hard not to stare at the odd and elegant lines of his face. He stood to one side while the Lynch brothers revived their mother, and then he told them all, “I have something to show you.”

As dawn began to pink the bark of the trees, they followed him deeper into Cabeswater.

“The pool is gone,” he said. “Where the fish changed color for Gansey. But now —”

Next to the dreaming tree, the pool had been replaced by a slanted and sheered rock surface. It was striated and cleaved with deep scratches, and the deepest of them cut all the way through the rock and into the ground. Cool blackness beckoned.

“A cave?” asked Gansey. “How deep does it go?”

Adam said, “I haven’t gone in. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“What’s the next step, then?” Gansey asked warily. It was hard to tell if he was wary of Adam or wary of the cavern.

Adam said, “Make it safer.”

He glanced at Ronan, eyebrows furrowed, as if sensing Ronan’s eyes on him.

Ronan looked away.

The third secret was the cavern itself. When they finally returned to 300 Fox Way, the sun was well up. To Ronan’s shock, a white Mitsubishi sat on the curb. For a moment, he thought — but then he saw the Gray Man waiting on the front step with Calla. His presence here instead of hundreds of miles away was not probable, but it was not impossible.

As Persephone climbed the stairs, Calla said accusingly, “This is your fault. Did you know this was going to happen?”

Persephone blinked her black eyes.

“Mr. Gray?” Blue asked. “How —”

“No,” Calla interrupted. “Later. Come with me.”

She led them upstairs to Maura’s bedroom. Pushing open the door, she let them take in the sight.

A candle was melted on the carpet. Beside it, in a square of strong daylight, a scrying bowl was knocked askew.