Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

A year before, she’d chopped her golden hair to chin length so it wouldn’t get in her way, and a month before, she’d done the same to her past.

They would intend to dream of, say, money, and instead wake up with, say, handfuls of sticky notes with the words pound and dollar printed on them.

Art crime used to be funny. Not ha-ha funny, but strange funny.

This Declan, on the other hand, razored into memory. Behind those blue eyes was now something coiled and barely restrained.

Adam Parrish was the person Ronan cared about more than anyone else in the world. If Ronan wasn’t calling him, he wasn’t calling anybody.

“Can I join the D&D club at school?” Declan struggled to remember what D&D was. He had half a mind it involved whips and leather, but that didn’t sound like Matthew, even in his new rebellious phase. He said, “Wizards?”

Declan pulled into the school drop-off line, where every other car was driven by someone in their forties or fifties, by a parent who hadn’t been beaten to death with a tire iron in their own driveway before their kids reached the age of majority.

Do you know who is the easiest to control? Nathan had asked her once. People who are still running away from their last controlling relationship.

She ate things and then threw them back up and then ate other things. She ran with scissors, and when they sometimes sliced her open as she fell, just peered inside her broken skin with curiosity instead of horror. She laughed so hard sometimes that Liliana would start to cry in sympathy.

These people seemed to be attracted to him, too. They peered at him intently. They leaned in close enough for him to see the tears caught in their eyelashes or hear the intake of their breath. He was held in the palm of this hand. He was kissed chastely by those lips. This cheek leaned against him appreciatively. That heart beat against him. He was watched, he was embraced, he was carried, he was bartered, he was strung around necks and wrists, he was worn, he was put in drawers, he was hidden in boxes, he was dropped in growing pools of warm blood, he was gifted, he was stolen, he was wanted, he was wanted, he was wanted.

“I’m crafting a denial in my head,” said Hennessy. “It’s very witty and convincing. Give me a just a second.”

“That’s one way to get out of finishing that Leighton sketch,” Hennessy had said when Farrah killed herself. She was being extra mean about it because June wouldn’t stop crying. June felt responsible, because she’d been the Hennessy who’d first met the married man who broke Farrah’s heart. “You cow,” June told Hennessy, only she used a different c word. “Go dream yourself a fucking heart.”

She was jealous of Farrah for dying. She was jealous of Farrah for getting June to cry over her. She was jealous of Farrah for getting Jordan to speak up for her.

“You look fit,” Hennessy said as the gallery door swung shut behind her. “What are you doing here?” “No hello? No kiss? No tongue? After all this time, and you don’t even notice my hair looks fabulous?”

Maybe those weren’t really phone calls at all. Maybe they’d just been flowers at the grave of a friend she used to love a lot.

“You think you spared me the memories of Jay because you hated her, but you know what I think? Deep down, you didn’t give me your memories of Jay because you didn’t want me to know that you were a lot like her.”

Look at that poor asshole lying on that packed dirt, look how lovingly tattooed his skin was, each mark a small confirmation that even though it felt like he hated his life and his body, deep down, he wanted to keep it, to redecorate the place to his own liking.

The flashlight swung to point at the second speaker. His features were gaunt and exaggerated, like a drawing of a young man rather than an actual young man. His long, knobby fingers touched one of his ears, an unconscious gesture. He was dressed very stylishly for a dusty cubby hole, in pressed cotton and smooth wool, but his dusty hair was cut jaggedly.

Elation overtook Ronan. Even before he put a name to the face, he was overwhelmed with a single thought: It is going to be okay. The second voice belonged to Adam Parrish.

screaming cryibg thriwibg up passing out

Aglionby Academy, an unloved trailer, a bare apartment, an abandoned Virginia warehouse, the slanting, long fields of the Barns. Midnight drives, anxious journeys into pitch-black caves, charged glances over school desks, knuckles pressed against mouths, tight hugs goodbye.

Adam still wasn’t really looking at Ronan. “Where is Chainsaw, by the way?” “Farooq-Lane didn’t mention a bird,” Declan replied. “Ronan will be pissed if something happened to her.” Declan retorted something about how Ronan wasn’t in a position to make further demands on his time,

Gently, out of the view of Declan, Adam subtly traced his fingers over Ronan’s scarred wrist, the back of his hand. He swallowed. This was goodbye. Ronan felt a new emotion: misery.

Adam suddenly leaned in very close to Ronan’s slumped body. His lips were right on Ronan’s ear. In this close space, even a whisper was audible to Declan, but his words were just for Ronan. “Post tenebras lux,” he whispered. Light follows darkness.

They were married by corporations who gave a dowry of suffering; mankind is meant to be like a leopard, lying in a tree all day except for the—” From the kitchen, Liliana called in her crackling, sweet voice, “I’ve made some broth for us to take with us, Carmen! I think you will enjoy it, Hennessy.”

Ah, there she is, your beautiful smile.” She touched Farooq-Lane’s mouth. Farooq-Lane kissed Liliana’s thumb lightly. “I didn’t know you could be funny.”

Please. Ronan didn’t dare hope. Adam Parrish quietly closed the door behind him.

Even the shape of his hands was comfortingly familiar. The backs were badly chapped. The palms of them had numbers jotted on them, half-smeared from washing or age.

“Look who else is here. Chainsaw. Look who else is here: Kerah.” At that word—Kerah—the bird returned in an instant, diving from the darkness. Adam’s voice was soft; he pointed. “Look.” Chainsaw’s neck feathers ruffled into a cartoonish collar. With a rippling purr, she careened into Ronan’s unmoving chest. How he longed to hold her. He couldn’t feel any physical sensations now, but he could remember them. The cool, dry texture of her feathers. The weight of her on his shoulder.

But he could not hold her, of course, and as soon as she realized this, she began to caterwaul. At first she simply clucked and rocked. Then she plucked at the seams of his shirt, and when that did not rouse him, she began to peck at his fingers. When she began to properly bite them, Adam hastily leaned forward to capture her, shushing.

Now that her panic had gone, there was just joy at the reunification; Ronan could hear her making a complicated, vaguely disgusting gurgling as she played. She busied herself stalking back and forth in front of Ronan, plucking at his bootlaces, jumping on his chest, crabbing down his arm, and then pecking the dirt around him.

She perched on Ronan’s boot and cocked her head at Adam. “Atom,” Chainsaw remarked in her deep, strange bird voice. Adam laughed a little. “Hi.”

Adam repositioned himself more comfortably, leaning his back between the framing on the opposite wall. His legs mingled with Ronan’s long legs, a chaos of young men.

He drifted off again, and now Ronan was suddenly and fiercely reminded of praying. Not praying in a church, with a congregation, out loud, or reciting a memorized prayer. But instead the kind of praying he’d done when he was alone. Exhausted. Confused. Those prayers often faded into ellipses as he wondered if there was anyone on the other side of the line.

That copy exists. I made him. I am him. There’s a real version of me that stayed with you, I guess, that went out to Lindenmere every day and just learned everything he could about the ley line, about the something else.

But this Adam killed those Adams so this one could win, this one who came to Harvard to go to class and write papers and buy waffles with the Crying Club and pretend like nothing bad ever happened to him and like he has all the answers.”

You were, like, the place I stored all the reality in. Then I had to start lying about you, too, and it just all, it just all …”

We’re both liars. I don’t know what to do. I miss …” He closed his eyes. “I miss knowing where I was going.”

Tamquam, Ronan thought, furious that Adam was upset, euphoric that he’d come back. It hadn’t been that long before this that he’d been wanting to know what emotions felt like, and now he had all of them at once. Just before the door closed behind him, Adam said to the dark, “Alter idem.”

He was not very good at bringing them back when he woke. More often than not, he came back empty-handed, or with a cow-shaped potholder or other cow knickknack.

“She asked me how old I was the other day,” Liliana said. “And if I thought you were looking for a ‘hot young sidepiece.’

“And then,” Declan continued, as if she had not interjected, “I want to make an enormous scene proposing very publicly to you at the afterparty, so it completely overshadows his opening.”

They embraced, Jordan’s fingers tightly entwined in Declan’s hair, his fingers pressed tightly into her back. After a few seconds, they began to sway to the music. Then, spontaneously, they took a few proper dance steps together. Declan dipped her, and Jordan struck a pose. Declan smiled, turning his face quickly away from her, hiding this from her, of all the things to hide. But Ronan could see his smile, and he could see it was one he’d never seen his brother wear before, not in all the years he’d known him. This smile wasn’t for Jordan, it was because of Jordan.

“And where is Jordan?” “Sandwiched right between Israel and Saudi Arabia, with Syria as a jaunty li’l hat.”

“That man has a gun.” “Neat,” said Hennessy. Walking directly up to him, she put an arm around his neck and kissed him on the mouth.

When the elevator door opened at their destination, Jo Fisher pointed to a spot on the floor just outside it and he went there and stood, like a trained dog. “Stay,” Hennessy told him. “Good boy. Who’s a good boy?”

I hate to be discreet for free. Speaking of free, are you this evening, do you want to go someplace, do you want to do someone? I’m working the long game on someone, but it might be decades before it comes to fruition.”

It wasn’t about a hypothetical end of the world. Her world had already ended.

Have you eaten anything? I need to get you up to speed on the school interface so we can maximize your time awake today.” That was when Matthew punched him.

Bryde looked pained. “What a strange world this is, that gods are being raised by children.” “Sure,” Matthew agreed.

The Lace retreated slightly, but Ronan didn’t relent. Again he exploded, and again, and again, as that scent of Adam continued to grow. He drove the Lace deep, deeper, deepest into the blackness. “Stay away from him,” he snarled, and then, because he was angry enough to risk trying the other language for it, he added, in the Lace’s way of speaking: Stay away from him!