Inside, the light was dull and brown, filtered through dirt-covered skylights in the far-above roof. It smelled warm, alive, familiar, like fur and crap and humidity. Who dreamt a herd of cattle? No wonder Cabeswater had been unable to appear until Ronan’s father died. Even Ronan’s and Kavinsky’s careless dreaming had drained the ley line of enough energy to make the forest disappear. That had been trinkets, drugs, cars.
Not fields full of living creatures. Not an invented valley.
This was why Greenmantle could not have even a forged Greywaren. Ferocious Cabeswater was also strangely fragile.
Ronan had come to a door inside the barn; behind it was a tattered office. Everywhere was dust thick enough to be dirt. Vet records and feed receipts yellowed on the desktop. A garbage can held ancient Coke cans. Unframed prints were tacked to the walls — a flier for some Irish folk band playing in New York; a vintage print of some children running on a faraway, older pier in a faraway, older country. It was so different from what Adam’s father had pinned to his workspace walls that again Adam considered Ronan’s admiration of him. Someone like him treating someone like Adam as someone worthy —
Ronan swore as he tripped. He found the light switch, and a benevolent fluorescent came on overhead. It was full of dead flies.
In the slightly improved light, Adam saw dustless trails leading from the desk to an office chair by the wall. A blanket — not dusty — nested on the chair, and it was not difficult to imagine the shape of a young man sleeping in it. There was something unexpectedly lonely about the image.
Ronan dragged a metal tack box out from the wall and flipped up the lid with a terrific crash. “I’ve been trying to wake my father’s dreams.”
“What?”
“They aren’t dead. They’re sleeping. If I dragged them all to Cabeswater, they’d get up and walk away. So I began to think, what if I brought Cabeswater to them?”
Adam wasn’t sure what he’d expected as a reveal, but it wasn’t this. “To the cows.”
“Some of us have family, Parrish.”
Aurora was trapped in Cabeswater. Of course Ronan would want her to be able to come and go. Shamed, Adam replied, “Sorry. Got it.”
“It’s not just that. It’s Matthew —” Ronan broke off, very completely, and Adam understood. This was another secret, one Ronan wasn’t ready to tell.
After a moment of rummaging in the box, Ronan turned around, a clear glass ball in his hand. The air inside it shimmered mistily. It was pretty, something you’d hang in a garden or in an old lady’s kitchen. It struck Adam as safe. Not very Ronan-like.
Ronan held it up to the light. The air inside rolled from one side to the other. Maybe not air at all. Maybe a liquid. Adam could see it reflected in his blue eyes. Ronan said, “This was my first attempt.”
“You dreamed it.”
“Of course.”
“Mm. And Cabeswater?”
Ronan sounded offended. “I asked.”
He asked. So easy. As if it was a simple thing for him to communicate with this entity that could only make itself known to Adam through grand and violent gestures.
“In the dream, it had some of Cabeswater inside it,” Ronan continued, and intoned, “If it works in the dream, it works in real life.”
“Does it work? Give me the short version.”
“Asshole. No. It doesn’t. It does, in fact, jack shit.” Ronan dug back through the tack box, lifting out various other failed attempts, all of them puzzling. A shimmering ribbon, a tuft of grass still growing from a lump of dirt, a forked branch. He let Adam hold some of them; they all felt strange. Too heavy, like gravity weighted them more than it should. And they smelled vaguely familiar, like Ronan, or like Cabeswater.
If Adam thought about it — or rather, if he didn’t think about it — he could feel the pulse of the ley line in each.
“I had a bag of sand, too,” Ronan said, “but I spilled it.”
Hours of dreaming. He had driven an hour each day to park his car and curl in this chair and sleep alone.
“Why here? Why do you come here to do it?”
Voice toneless, Ronan said, “Sometimes I dream of wasps.”
Adam imagined it then: Ronan waking in Monmouth Manufacturing, a dream object clutched in his hands, wasps crawling in his bedsheets, Gansey unaware in the other room.
No, he could not dream wildly in Monmouth.
Lonesome.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get hurt out here by yourself?” Adam asked.
Ronan scoffed. Him, fear for his own life. But there was something in his eyes, still. He studied his hands and admitted, “I’ve dreamt him a box of EpiPens. I dream cures for stings all the time. I carry one. I put them in the Pig. I have them all over Monmouth.”
Adam felt a ferocious and cruel hope. “Do they work?”
“I don’t know. And there’s no way to find out before it actually happens. There won’t be a rematch.” Ronan took two objects from the tack box and stood. “Here. Field trip time. Let’s go to the lab.”
With one arm he braced a bright blue polar fleece blanket against his body. On the other he draped a slab of moss like a waiter’s towel.
“Do you want me to carry one?” Adam asked.
“Fuck, no.”
Adam got the door for him.
In the main room of the barn, Ronan took his time walking among the cows, pausing to look into their faces or cocking his head to observe their markings. Finally, he stopped by a chocolate-brown cow with a jagged stripe down her friendly face. He shoved her motionless side with the toe of his boot and explained, “It works better if they seem more … I don’t know. Particular. If it looks like something I might have dreamt myself.”
It looked like a cow to Adam. “So what is it about this one?”
“Looks fucking friendly. Bovine the boy wizard.” He set the blue blanket on the floor. Carefully. Then he ordered, “Feel its pulse. Don’t just stare at it. Pulse. On its face. There. There, Parrish, God. There.”
Adam gingerly trailed his fingers across the cow’s short facial hair until he felt the animal’s slow pulse.
Ronan hefted the blanket of moss across the cow’s withers. “And now?”
Adam wasn’t sure what he was supposed to see. He felt nothing, nothing, nothing — ah, but there it was. The cow’s pulse had accelerated fractionally. Again, he imagined Ronan here on his own, so hopeful for a change that he would have noted such a subtle difference. It was far more dedication than he had thought Ronan Lynch capable of.
Lonesome.
He asked, “Is this the closest you’ve gotten?”
Ronan scoffed. “Did you think I would bother showing you just this? There’s one more. Do you need to piss first?”
“Ha.”
“No, seriously.”
“I’m good.”
Ronan turned to the other object he’d brought out. It was not the blue blanket, as Adam had expected, but rather something wrapped inside the blanket. Whatever was inside couldn’t be larger than a shoe box or a large book. It didn’t seem very heavy.
And if Adam’s eyes didn’t deceive him, Ronan Lynch was afraid of it.
Ronan took a deep breath. “Okay, Parrish.”
He unwrapped it.
Adam looked.
Then he looked away.
Then he looked back.
It was a book, he thought. And then he didn’t know why he thought it was a book; it was a bird. No, a planet. A mirror.
It was none of those things. It was a word. It was a cupped word in Ronan’s hand that wanted to be said out loud, but he didn’t want to, but actually he did —
Then Adam looked away again, because he couldn’t keep his eyes on it anymore. He could feel himself going mad trying to name it.
“What is it?” he asked.
Ronan eyed it, but sideways, with his chin tilted away from it. He looked younger than he usually did, his face softened by uncertainty and caution. Sometimes Gansey would tell sto
ries of the Ronan he had known before Niall had died; now, looking at this fallible Ronan, Adam thought he might be able to believe them.
Ronan said, “A piece of Cabeswater. A piece of a dream. It’s what I asked for. And this is … this is what I think it should look like, probably.”
Adam felt the truth of it. This awful and impossible and lovely object was what a dream was when it had nothing to inhabit. Who was this person who could dream a dream into a concrete shape? No wonder Aglionby bored Ronan.
Adam looked at it. He looked away.
He asked, “Does it work?”
Ronan’s expression sharpened. He held the dream thing beside the cow’s face. Light, or something like light, reflected off it onto Ronan’s chin and cheeks, rendering him stark and handsome and terrifying and someone else. Then he blew on it. His breath passed through the word, the mirror, the unwritten line.
Adam heard a whisper in his ear. Something moved and stirred inside him. Ronan’s eyelashes fluttered darkly.
What are we doing —
The cow shifted.
Not a lot. But her head tilted; one ear flicked. Like she was sleepily jostling a fly from it. A muscle shivered near her spine.
Ronan’s eyes were open; fires burned in them. He breathed again, and again the cow twitched her ear. Tensed her lips.
But she did not wake, and she did not rise.
He retreated, hiding the dream from Adam’s maddened sight.
“I’m missing something still,” Ronan said. “Tell me what I’m missing.”
“Maybe you just can’t wake someone else’s dream.”
Ronan shook his head. He didn’t care if it was impossible. He was going to do it anyway.
Adam gave in. “Power. It takes a lot of power. Most of what I’m doing when I repair the ley line is making better connections so the energy can run more efficiently. Maybe you could find a way to direct a stub of the line out here.”
“Already thought of it. Not interested. I don’t want to make a bigger cage. I want to open the door.”
They regarded each other. Adam fair and cautious, Ronan dark and incendiary. This was Ronan at his most truthful.
Adam asked, “Why? Tell me the real reason.”
“Matthew —” Ronan began again, and stopped again.
Adam waited.
Ronan said, “Matthew’s mine. He’s one of mine.”
Adam didn’t understand.
“I dreamt him, Adam!” Ronan was angry — every one of his emotions that wasn’t happiness was anger. “That means that when — if something happens to me, he becomes just like them. Just like Mom.”
Every memory Adam possessed of Ronan and his younger brother reframed itself. Ronan’s tireless devotion. Matthew’s similarity to Aurora, a dream creature herself. Declan’s eternal position as an outsider, neither a dreamer nor a dream.
Only half of Ronan’s surviving family was real.
“Declan told me,” Ronan said. “A few Sundays ago.” Declan had left for college in D.C., but he still made the four-hour drive each Sunday to attend church with his brothers, a gesture so extravagant that even Ronan seemed forced to admit that it was kindness.
“You didn’t know?”
“I was three. What did I know?” Ronan turned away, lashes low over his eyes, expression hidden, burdened by being born, not made.
Lonesome.
Adam sighed and sat down beside the cow, leaning against her warm body, letting her slow breaths lift him. After a moment, Ronan slipped down beside him and the two of them looked out over the sleepers. Adam felt Ronan glance at him and away. Their shoulders were close. Overhead, rain began to tap on the roof again, another sudden storm. Possibly their fault. Possibly not.
“Greenmantle,” Ronan said abruptly. “His web. I want to wrap it around his neck.”
“Mr. Gray’s right, though. You can’t kill him.”
“I don’t want to kill him. I want to do to him what he’s threatening to do to Mr. Gray. To show him how I could make his life hell. If I can dream that” — Ronan jerked his chin toward the blanket that held his dream object — “surely I can dream something to blackmail him with.”
Adam considered this. How difficult would it be to frame someone if you could create any kind of evidence you needed? Could it be done in such a way that Greenmantle couldn’t undo it and come after them twice as dangerous?
“You’re smarter than I am,” Ronan said. “Figure it out.”
Adam made a noise of disbelief. “Didn’t you just ask me to research Greenmantle in all my spare time?”
“Yeah, and now I’m telling you why I asked you.”
“Why me?”
Ronan laughed suddenly. That sound, as crooked and joyful and terrible as the dream in his hand, should have woken these cattle if nothing else did.
“I hear if you want magic done,” he said, “you ask a magician.”
It was quite late when Blue called that night, long after Malory had returned in the Suburban, long after Ronan had returned in the BMW.
No one else was awake.
“Gansey?” Blue asked.
Something anxious in him stilled.
“Tell me a story,” she said. “About the ley line.”
He went at once to the kitchen-bathroom-laundry, moving as quietly as he could, thinking of something to tell her. As he sat on the floor, he said in a low voice, “When I was in Poland, I met this guy who had sung his way across Europe. He said as long as he was singing he could always find his way back to ‘the road.’ ”
Blue’s voice was quiet, too, on the other end of the phone. “I assume you mean a corpse road, not an interstate.”
“Mystical interstate.” Gansey scrubbed a hand through his hair, remembering. “I hiked with him for about twenty miles. I had a GPS. He had the song. He was right, too. I could turn him around a million times and lead him astray two million times and he could always head back to the ley line. Like he was magnetized. So long as he was singing.”
“Was it always the same song? Was it the murder squash song?”
“Oh, God.” The floorboards felt cool on the bottoms of his bare feet. For some reason, the feeling was sensuous and distracting, a reminder of Blue’s skin. Gansey closed his eyes. “This was a simpler time, before that had been unleashed on the world. I cannot believe how obsessed Ronan and Noah are with that song. Ronan was talking about getting the T-shirt. Can you imagine him in it?”
Blue snickered. “What happened to the Polish guy?”
“I assume he’s singing his way across Russia now. He was going left to right. West-to-east, I mean.”
“What was Poland like?”
“Prettier than you’re thinking. So pretty.”
She paused. “I’d like to go, one day.”
He didn’t give himself time to doubt the wisdom of saying it out loud before he replied, “I know how to get there, if you want company.”
After a long pause, Blue said, in a different voice, “I’m going to go sing myself to sleep. See you tomorrow. If you want company.”
The phone went quiet. It was never enough, but it was something. Gansey opened his eyes.
Noah sat against the doorjamb of the kitchen-bathroom-laundry. When Gansey thought about it, he thought that possibly he had been sitting there for a long time.
There was nothing inherently guilty about the moment except that Gansey burned with guilt and thrill and desire and the nebulous feeling of being truly known. It was on the inside of him, and the inside was all Noah ever really paid attention to.
The other boy wore a knowing expression.
“Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said.
“I’m dead,” Noah replied. “Not stupid.”
I’m very angry at you,” Piper said, voice very close. Greenmantle was lying on top of the replacement rental, his arms crossed over his chest and his knees close together, thinking about early medieval burial positions.
“I know,” Greenmantle replied, openi
ng his eyes. The sky overhead was jeeringly blue. “What about now?”
“The blood draw people were here today and you weren’t. I told you to be here.”
“I was here.” He had spent the first hour after coming home lying on his face. A small percentage of medieval bodies were buried such; historians thought they were the graves of suicides or witches, though really, historians were such Guesser McGuessers, him the biggest of them all.
“You didn’t answer when I called!”
“It doesn’t change the fact that I was here.”
“Was I supposed to come look for you on the car? Why are you even out here?”
“I’m having a creative block,” Greenmantle said.
“About what?”
He rolled over to face her. She stood beside the car, wearing a dress that looked like it would take a wearying number of steps to remove. She was also holding a small animal with a jeweled collar. It had no hair apart from a long, silky tuft that grew from its head, the precise same shade of blond that Piper sported.
“What is that?” Greenmantle asked. He deeply suspected it was the physical manifestation of his bad mood.
“Otho.”
He sat up. The rental car sighed noisily. “Is it a cat? A rodent? What species, pray?”
“Otho is a Chinese crested.”
“Chinese crested what?”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Because Greenmantle had humans to pant and follow him around with mindless fidelity, he had never felt the urge to get a dog, but when he was younger, he had sometimes imagined acquiring a canine with a fringey tail and legs. The kind that picked up ducks, whatever kind that was. Otho looked as if ducks might pick him up instead. “Is it going to get bigger? Or grow hair? Where did it come from?”
“I ordered it.”
“From the Internet?”
Piper rolled her eyes at his innocence. “Why is it you’re having a creative block again?”
“I need to find Mr. Gray’s psychic girlfriend, but it turns out no one knows where she is. She disappeared right when he screwed me over.” Greenmantle slid off the car. Carefully. He was stiff from his aerial burial. “How am I supposed to destroy what he needs when it’s already gone? They reported her missing and everything. I stole the report and it said that apparently she told her family she was ‘underground.’ ”