“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 stories 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.”
21
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?”