“Goddamn it,” said Gansey, dropping a knife onto the counter. He shook his hand out. “It’s red-hot.” Only it wasn’t. The blade was ordinary stainless steel, its heat only evident by the faint scent of the counter finish melting beneath it. He tapped the handle a few times to verify that it was the entire knife that was hot, not just the blade, and then used a dish towel to replace it in the knife block.
Ronan had stopped searching in earnest and was merely opening and slamming drawers for the pleasure of hearing them crash. He wasn’t sure what was worse: leaving or the anticipation of leaving.
“Well, this isn’t frustrating at all,” Adam remarked, demonstrating a tape measure he’d found. The tape tugged out to two feet, six inches, and no more. “I would’ve thrown this out the morning after.”
“Perfect for measuring bread boxes,” Gansey observed. “Maybe it has nostalgic value.”
“How about this?” Blue, out in the hall, touched the petal of a perfect blue lily. It was one of a dozen gathered into a bouquet on the hall table. Ronan had never given much thought to the flowers, but when he did, he’d always assumed they were fake, as the vase they were displayed in had never contained water. The white and blue lilies were oversized and spidery with frothy golden stamen, blossoms like nothing he’d seen elsewhere. He should’ve known, in retrospect. Adam pinched off a bud and turned the moist end of the stem to the other two boys. “They’re alive.”
This was the sort of thing that Gansey couldn’t resist, and so Adam and Ronan moved farther down the hall toward the dining room while Gansey lingered over the flowers. When Ronan glanced over his shoulder, Gansey stood with one of the blossoms cupped in his hand. There was something humble and awed in the way he stood, something grateful and wistful in his face as he gazed at the flower. It was a strangely deferential expression.
Somehow this made Ronan even angrier. He turned quickly away before Gansey could catch his eye. In the pale gray dining room, Adam was taking a wooden mask from a hook on the wall.
It was carved of a smooth, dark wood and looked like a cheap tourist souvenir. The eyeholes were round and surprised, the mouth parted in an easy smile big enough for lots of teeth.
Ronan hurled himself through the air.
“No.”
The mask clattered to the floor. Adam, startled, stared at where Ronan’s hand gripped his wrist. Ronan could feel his own heart pounding and, in Adam’s wrist, Adam’s.
At once, he released him and fell back. He snatched up the mask instead. He hung it back on the wall, but his pulse didn’t calm. He didn’t look at Adam.
“Don’t,” he said. But he didn’t know what he was telling Adam not to do. It was possible that his father’s version of the mask was entirely harmless. It was possible that it only became deadly in Ronan’s head.
Suddenly, he couldn’t stand it, any of it, his father’s dreams, his childhood home, his own skin.
He punched the wall. His knuckles bit plaster, and the plaster bit back. He felt the moment his skin split. He’d left a faint impression of his anger in the wall, but it hadn’t cracked.
“Oh, come on, Lynch,” Adam said. “Are you trying to break your hand?”
“What was that?” Gansey called from the other room.
Ronan had no idea what it was, but he did it again. And then he kicked one of the dining room chairs. He hurled a tall basket full of recorders and pennywhistles against the wall. Tore a handful of small frames from their hangers. He’d been angry before, but now he was nothing. Just knuckles and sparks of pain.
Abruptly, his arm stopped in midflight.
Gansey’s grip was tight on it, and his expression, two inches away from Ronan’s, was unamused. His countenance was at once young and old. More old than young.
“Ronan Lynch,” he said. It was the voice Ronan couldn’t not listen to. It was sure in every way that Ronan was not. “Stop this right now. Go see your mother. And then we’re leaving.”
Gansey held Ronan’s arm a second longer to make sure he hadn’t mistaken his meaning, and then he dropped it and turned to Adam. “Were you just going to stand there?”
“Yeah,” replied Adam.
“Decent of you,” Gansey said.
There was no heat in Adam’s reply. “I can’t kill his demons.”
Blue said nothing at all, but she waited at the doorway until Ronan joined her. And then, as the other two began to tidy the dining room, she accompanied Ronan into the sitting room.
It was not really a sitting room; no one needed a sitting room anymore. Instead it had become a repository for everything that didn’t seem to belong anywhere else. Three mismatched leather chairs faced one another on the uneven wood floor — that was the sitting part. Tall, thin crockery held umbrellas and dull swords. Rubber boots and pogo sticks lined the walls. Rugs made tight upholstery scrolls in a corner; one of them was marked with a sticky note that said not this one in Niall’s handwriting. A strange iron chandelier, reminiscent of planetary orbits, hung in the center of the room. Niall had probably dreamt it. Certainly the other two chandeliers that hung in the corners, half light fixture, half potted plants, were dream things. Probably everything here was. Only now that Ronan had been away from home could he see how full of dreams it was.
And there, in the middle of it, was his beautiful mother. She had a silent audience of catheters and IVs and feeding tubes — all of the things that home nurses always felt she would need. But she required nothing. She was a sedentary queen from an old epic: golden hair swept away from her pale face, cheeks flushed, lips red as the devil, eyes gently closed. She looked nothing like her charismatic husband, her troubled sons.
Ronan walked directly up to her, close enough to see that she had not changed a bit since the last time he had seen her, months and months ago. Though his breath moved the fine hairs around her temples, she didn’t react to her son’s presence.
Her chest rose and fell. Her eyes stayed closed.
Non mortem, somni fratrem. Not death, but his brother, sleep.
Blue whispered, “Just like the other animals.”
The truth — he’d known it all along, really, if he thought about it — burrowed into him. Blue was right.
His home was populated by things and creatures from Niall Lynch’s dreams, and his mother was just another one of them.
Blue thought it was well past time they took Ronan to her family for a consultation. Dream monsters were one thing. Dream mothers were another. The following morning, she biked down to Monmouth Manufacturing and proposed her idea. There was silence, and then: “No,” Ronan said.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “I’m not going.”
Gansey, lying on the floor beside his long aerial printout of the ley line, didn’t look up. “Ronan, don’t be difficult.”
“I’m not being difficult. I’m just telling you I’m not going.”
Blue said, “It’s not the dentist.”
Ronan, leaning against the doorway to his room, replied, “Exactly.”
Gansey made a note on the printout. “That doesn’t make sense.”
But it did. Blue thought she knew precisely what was going on. Icily, she said, “This is a religion thing, isn’t it?”
Ronan scoffed, “You don’t have to say it like that.”
“Actually, I do. Is this the part where you tell me my mom and I are going to hell?”
“I wouldn’t rule it out,” he said. “But I don’t really have the inside line on that knowledge.”
At this, Gansey rolled over onto his back and folded his hands on his chest. He wore a salmon polo shirt, which, in Blue’s opinion, was far more hellish than anything they’d discussed to this point. “What’s this all about now?”
Blue couldn’t believe he didn’t already know what the conflict was. Either he was incredibly oblivious or astonishingly enlightened. Knowing Gansey, it was undoubtedly the former.
“This is the part where Ronan starts using the word occult,” Blue snapped. She’d heard versions of this conversation countless times in her life; it had become too commonplace to needle her anymore. But she hadn’t expected it from her inner circle.
“I’m not using any word,” Ronan said. The annoying thing about Ronan was always that he was angry when everyone else was calm, and calm when everyone else was angry. Because Blue was ready to bust a vein, his voice was utterly pacific. “I’m just telling you I’m not going. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s not. My soul’s in enough peril as it is.”