It was a jarring interruption. Declan belonged to another world, a different timeline, but with a glance at Bryde, Ronan tapped his finger against his ear to answer it. “Deklo.”
“Good, it worked.”
Ronan said, “How did you do it?”
“I had to get back the car I was in when you called before and find your call in the previous calls in its log. I couldn’t type in that gibberish, of course, that showed up as your number, but I could just ask it to return your call.”
“Wait, what car were you in before?”
Declan didn’t bother answering this. “I want you to come to Mass this weekend.”
It took Ronan a moment to parse the request. It was a quite ordinary one, one Declan had made countless times over the past several years, resulting in Ronan rolling his eyes and leaving very early in the morning in order to make it to eleven o’clock Mass with his brothers on the other side of the state. Now it felt like someone else’s memories. A dream.
It occurred to Ronan that something bad might have happened. “What’s going on? Is Matthew okay?”
“Family meeting,” Declan said, a Declanism that never failed to rankle. Family meeting meant Declan shaking his finger at one of the other Lynch brothers.
“About what?”
“About the future.”
“Are you fucking serious about Mass? That’s in two days.”
“I have faith in you.”
“A lot of people are on our tail.”
“You tell us the church, the location, we’ll be there.”
Bryde was waiting, eyebrow raised.
“My brothers want to see me,” Ronan told him. It was making his pulse jack up for some reason, the thought of it, or the thought of telling Bryde about it. He couldn’t tell which. “This weekend.”
Declan asked, “Who are you talking to? Is that Bryde?”
“We have a date with Ilidorin,” Bryde said in a low voice.
“I have to think about it,” Ronan told the phone. “I’m not close to Boston.”
“What’s important to you?” Declan asked. “I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”
Bryde was still looking with his same expectant expression, hand on the doorknob to go to the dreamers they’d come to see.
“I have to go,” Ronan said. “I’ll call you back.”
He hung up.
He thought he grasped what Bryde had just been talking about before the call, because he, too, felt somewhat torn between the possibility of seeing his brothers again for a few minutes, and the knowledge that the dreamers were nearly to the end of the first part of this endeavor and whatever would change once the final obstacle to Ilidorin’s line was removed.
“I won’t tell you what to do,” Bryde said. “But I need to go on after this. I can’t stop this close to the end.”
“I know,” Ronan replied.
It was complicated to be a hero.
Matthew was walking.
Not wandering, this time, but walking determinedly. Declan had told him he’d talked to Ronan and to stay put while he went out to take care of errands. He hadn’t said the two things were connected, but Matthew guessed they were. He’d had to guess, because no matter what Matthew said, Declan still failed to have real conversations with him. He confided in Jordan if he confided in anyone, and just kept pointing out dogs to Matthew. This filled Matthew with bad feeling, and the bad feeling, on top of all his previous bad feeling, set him to walking.
Not wandering.
Walking.
Like a human, not a dream.
He marched, hands stuffed in the pockets of his bright blue puffer jacket, head down. Watching his sneakers slap one in front of the other just made him walk faster and harder, dark pavement and sidewalk disappearing beneath them. Declan thought these big white sneakers were ridiculous. Matthew knew that now. He hadn’t when he’d bought them, all excited about having put away enough money. Aren’t they super? he’d said, and Declan had murmured, They are the most memorable pair of shoes I’ve ever seen, and at the time Matthew had thought that meant Declan loved them as much as he did.
How stupid he’d been, he thought, his ears burning red. How stupid he’d always been about everything.
Even the idea that Matthew had been excited about finally acquiring enough money to get the shoes was ridiculous. The money was from a weekly allowance that came from doing chores, a system started by Aurora back at the Barns and continued by Declan, even after they moved to the town house. Matthew had never questioned the correctness of this. Yes, of course he received an allowance for cleaning his room, vacuuming, unloading the dishwasher, spraying pine cleaner on the town house’s front door to get the pollen off, cleaning the trash out of Declan’s Volvo after school.
God, he couldn’t bear thinking about it. He just couldn’t bear it. It had just been Declan’s money, just an older brother giving pocket money to a stupid little kid who stayed stupid even once he got big. All Matthew’s friends at school got jobs bussing tables and working cash registers and Matthew got bills in a mug on the kitchen counter. And now it was no different, he just collected the allowance from gallery owners who gave him odd jobs as a favor to Declan, because they thought Declan Lynch’s kid brother was cute and his love of ugly sneakers was funny.
Matthew kept walking, walking. Stomping. He walked right out of their neighborhood, past restaurants bustling with diners and comely brick row houses bright in the evening, by a little convenience store that reminded him of the one Declan had sometimes stopped at back at home when he forgot to get milk during the week. He thought about the times they’d just sat there for several long minutes with Declan staring off at nothing with the receipt for the milk pressed between his hand and the steering wheel. Aren’t we going home? Matthew would ask. Play your game, Declan would reply, and Matthew did, he just played whatever stupid game he had on his phone while his older brother sat there at a gas station five minutes from home for sometimes nearly an hour rather than going back to the town house, and Matthew had never once asked him why they were sitting there or what Declan was thinking about or if he hated everything about his life.
And now this thing about sweetmetals—this thing they were supposedly pursuing to keep Matthew safe while not talking to him about any of it?
Everyone still acted like he was just a pet.
Matthew’s feet kept on marching him along, farther from home. “Home.” With quotation marks, because home without quotation marks was either the Barns or the DC town house. “Home” was a Fenway apartment Matthew thought of as Old Man Eyebrows, because of how the detail work over the windows looked like fat, frowning eyebrows. It had seven rooms, which Matthew had mentally named. Twice. Once after the Seven Dwarves, and once after the seven vices. Happy Gluttony was the kitchen. Bashful Sloth, the living room. Grumpy Lust, Declan’s bedroom. So on. So forth. Declan liked the apartment. Matthew could tell Declan liked it. He liked everything about his life here, even though Matthew wasn’t exactly sure what his life here even entailed. He didn’t talk to Matthew about it. Declan didn’t say he was happier, but he clearly was happier. It made Matthew feel kind of bad inside.
Enormously bad inside.