The Dream Thieves Read Online Free PDF

first bedroom, he unzipped the duffel he’d left there. He sorted through slacks and cosmetics and stolen artifacts wrapped in boxer briefs until he got to the smaller devices he’d been using to detect the Greywaren. On the small, high window beside the bed, he set an EMF detector, an old radio, and a geophone, and then he unpacked a seismograph, a measuring receiver, and a laptop from the suitcase. All of it was provided by the professor. Left to his own devices, the Gray Man used more primitive location tools.
    At the moment, the dials and read-outs twitched crazily. He’d been told the Greywaren caused energy abnormalities, but this was just … noise. He reset the instruments that had reset buttons and shook the ones without. The readings remained nonsensical. Perhaps it was the town itself — the entire place seemed charged. It was possible, he thought without much dismay, that the instruments would be useless.
    I have time, though . The first time the professor had put him onto this job, it had sounded impossible: a relic that allowed the owner to take objects out of dreams? Of course, he’d wanted to believe in it. Magic and intrigue — the stuff of sagas. And in the time since that first meeting, the professor had acquired countless other artifacts that shouldn’t have existed.
    The Gray Man tugged a folder out of his duffel and opened it on the bedspread. A course syllabus lay on top: Medieval History, Part I. Required reading: Fraternity in Anglo-Saxon Verse . Sliding on a set of headphones, he queued up a playlist of The Flaming Lips. He felt essentially happy.
    Beside him, the phone rang. The Gray Man’s burst of joy fizzled. The number on the screen was not a Boston number and therefore not his older brother. So he picked it up.
    “Good evening,” he said.
    “Is it? I suppose.” It was Dr. Colin Greenmantle, the professor who paid his rent. The only man with eyes more intense than the Gray Man’s. “Do you know what would make calling you easier? If I knew your name, so I could say it.”
    The Gray Man didn’t reply. Greenmantle had lasted five years without his name; he could last another five without it. Eventually, the Gray Man thought, if he resisted using it for long enough, he himself might forget his own name, and become someone else entirely.
    “Did you find it?” Greenmantle asked.
    “I’ve just arrived,” the Gray Man reminded him.
    “You could have just answered the question. You could have just said no .”
    “ No isn’t the same as not yet .”
    Now Greenmantle was silent. A cricket chirruped on the ground just outside the tiny window. Finally, he said, “I want you to move fast on this one.”
    For quite a long time now, the Gray Man had been hunting for things that couldn’t be found, couldn’t be bought, couldn’t be acquired, and his instincts were telling him that the Greywaren was not a piece that was going to come quickly. He reminded Greenmantle that it had already been five years since they’d first begun looking for it.
    “Irrelevant.”
    “Why the sudden hurry?”
    “There are other people looking for it.”
    The Gray Man cast his eyes to the instruments. He was not eager to allow Greenmantle to ruin his leisurely exploration of Henrietta.
    He said what Declan Lynch had already known. “There have always been other people looking for it.”
    “They haven’t always been in Henrietta.”

L ater that night, back in Monmouth Manufacturing, Ronan woke up. He woke like a sailor scuttles a ship on rocks, plunging, heedless, with as much speed as he could muster, braced for the impact.
    Ronan had dreamt he’d driven home. The way to the Barns was twisted as a lightbulb’s filament, all corkscrew turns and breathless lifts through broken terrain. These were not Gansey’s tamed mountains and foothills. These eastern hills of Singer’s Falls were hasty green folds, sudden rises, and precipitous hatchet marks in the rock-strewn forests. Mist rose from them and