The Dream Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page B

clouds descended into them. Night, when it came to the Barns, was several shades darker than it was in Henrietta.
    Ronan had dreamt this drive, again and again, more times than he’d ever driven it in real life. The pitch-black roads, the old farmhouse suddenly looming, the single, eternal light in the room with his silent mother. But in his sleep he never made it home.
    He hadn’t this time, either. But he had dreamt something he wanted to bring back.
    In his bed, he struggled to move. Just after waking, after dreaming, his body belonged to no one. He looked at it from above, like a mourner at a funeral. The exterior of this early-morning Ronan didn’t look at all like how he felt on the inside. Anything that didn’t impale itself on the sharp line of this sleeping boy’s cruel mouth would be tangled in the merciless hooks of his tattoo, pulled beneath his skin to drown.
    Sometimes, Ronan thought he would be trapped like this, floating outside his body.
    When he was awake, Ronan was not permitted to go to the Barns. When Niall Lynch had died — been killed, not died, beaten to death with a tire iron that was still lying beside him when Ronan had found him, a weapon still coated in his blood and his brains and the better part of his face, a face that had been alive maybe only an hour before, two hours before, while Ronan was dreaming only yards away, a full night’s sleep, a feat never again to be performed — a lawyer had explained the details of their father’s will to them. The Lynch brothers were wealthy, princes of Virginia, but they were exiles. All of the money was theirs, but on one condition: The boys were never to set foot on the property again. They were to disturb neither the house nor its contents.
    Including their mother.
    It will never stand up in court , Ronan had said. We should fight it.
    Declan had said, It doesn’t matter. Mom is nothing without him. We might as well go.
    We have to fight , Ronan had insisted.
    Declan had already turned away. She’s not fighting.
    Ronan could move his fingers. His body was his again. He felt the cool wooden surface of the box in his hands, his ever-present leather wristbands sliding toward his palms. He felt the ridges and valleys of the letters carved into the box. The crevices of the drawers and movable pieces. His pulse surged in him, the thrill of creation. The ragged awe of making something from nothing. It was not the easiest thing to take something from a dream.
    It was not the easiest thing to take only one thing from a dream.
    To bring even a pencil back was a small miracle. To bring any of the things from his nightmares — no one but Ronan knew the terrors that lived in his mind. Plagues and devils, conquerors and beasts.
    Ronan had no secret more dangerous than this.
    The night churned inside him. He tangled himself around the box, getting ahold of his thoughts again. Now he was beginning to shake a little. He remembered what Gansey had said:
    You incredible creature!
    Creature was a good word for him, Ronan thought. What the hell am I?
    Maybe Gansey was awake.

    Ronan and Gansey both suffered from insomnia, though they had very different solutions for it. When Ronan couldn’t — or wouldn’t — sleep, he listened to music or drank or went out into the streets looking for vehicular trouble. Or all three. When Gansey couldn’t sleep, he studied the bristling journal he’d compiled of all things Glendower or, when he was too tired to read, used a cereal box and a bin of paints to add another building to the waist-high model of Henrietta he’d constructed. Neither could really help the other find sleep. But sometimes it was better just to know you weren’t the only one awake.
    Ronan padded out of his room with Chainsaw scooped in his arm. Sure enough, Gansey sat cross-legged on Main Street, slowly waving a newly painted piece of cardboard in the direction of the single window airconditioner. At night, he looked particularly small or the warehouse