Jordan’s arms hung by her sides. She didn’t look mad or hurt, she just stared, standing there in the middle of all the cars pointed helter skelter.
“You came here to tell me that?”
Hennessy didn’t know what she’d come here to do, but she’d done this now. She understood that she wanted Jordan to hate her. She didn’t know why that would be better than anything else, but she knew with certainty in this moment, that was the goal.
“I wanted to see your face to make sure it was true,” Hennessy said.
She shrugged.
She could feel her shoulders shrugging even though she hadn’t thought about it.
It was like she had manifested something from a dream and was paralyzed, watching herself from above. The thing she had manifested was this awful Hennessy trying her best to make Jordan break and scream for her to leave.
“This is what you came from,” Hennessy said, gesturing to herself, “and you’re using it to become a craft painter and make babies with that white bro? Guess I should’ve given my mother’s memories some credit. They were a safeguard against suburbia.”
Quietly, Jordan asked, “Why do you always do this?”
Because Hennessy always dreamt of the Lace, that was why, because it was always the same dream, always the same.
“Enjoy your nightmare,” she said.
Declan remembered the worst dream he’d ever had.
It was his last year at Aglionby. He was passing his classes. He had dragged Ronan through his classes with the help of Ronan’s friend Gansey. He had bought Christmas gifts for Matthew. He had his internships lined up and the move planned to the town house his dead father had left him. He had done the math on the money left in the will and had worked out how much he needed to make and how much he was allowed to spend each year in order to continue to live in the way he thought would be all right to live. He was dating a girl named Ashleigh, after breaking up with a girl named Ashley. Ashleigh was thinking of going to school in DC to be closer to him. Declan was eyeing a less attentive Ashlee to replace her. He was doing his best to keep the noose of malevolent business associates his father had made for them from tightening before he graduated.
That was not the worst dream. That was the waking world.
The worst dream was this: It was nearly Christmas. There was frost on the colorless grass around the farmhouse at the Barns. Niall had just come back from a December business trip and now he was presenting gifts to his sons, just as he did in real life.
He gave Matthew a puppy that was only alive when Matthew was holding it (“I’m never gonna put it down,” declared dream Matthew).
He gave Ronan a textbook with no words in it (“My favorite kind,” Ronan had said).
He gave Declan a box … and in the box was the ability to dream things into life.
“Your mother said you’d been asking for this,” Niall told him.
Declan woke with a rush of electric adrenaline. Horror pulsed in time with his heart.
He looked around in dread but his dorm room was just as he’d left it when he slept. There was nothing in it that hadn’t been carried with ordinary human hands, that hadn’t been crafted with ordinary human labor. There were no miracles or wonders. Just his unmagical room with the things he needed for his unmagical life.
He had never been so relieved.
Declan was looking at El Jaleo. He was standing there, arms crossed, head tilted to one side, studying it. A little closer than he would normally be. No, a lot closer than he would normally be. He had stepped over the chain that ordinarily warned museum-goers to stay out of the alcove, and he was close enough to see the ridges on brushstrokes, to smell the oldness of all the paint in the closed-in space. It felt quite illicit, and he couldn’t imagine what had come over him. This close, everything looked a little different than he remembered.
It took him a moment to realize that some of his disorientation was not because of proximity; it was because the museum was dark.
The dancer was lit only by a dim security light that came through the window to the right of the painting and reflected off the mirror to the left of it.
The museum was also silent.
The small, close building was never noisy, but right then, it lacked even the murmur of distant people in other rooms, the sound of life. Breath held, or breath gone. Tomblike.
He didn’t know how he’d gotten here.
He didn’t know how he’d gotten here.
Declan looked down at himself. He was dressed in the same clothing he’d been in when he’d left Jordan’s. Jacket, loosened tie. Same clothing the Declan in the portrait had been wearing. Same clothing the Declan who’d kissed Jordan had been wearing. He remembered returning to the apartment. Didn’t he? It was possible he was simply remembering other times he had and all those memories had stacked up to disguise that he was missing one.
This was dream logic, not waking logic.
He felt awake. He was awake, surely. But—
“Neat trick, right?” Ronan asked.
The middle Lynch brother leaned casually in the entrance from the courtyard, shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching him. He had changed since Declan had seen him. Not taller, because Ronan had already been tall, but bigger, somehow. Older. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and he had grizzle that instantly aged him. He was no boy. No student. He was a young man.
“Ronan,” Declan said. He couldn’t think of what else to say, how to say it, and so he just shoved everything he wanted to say into that one word. Ronan.
Ronan said, “The guard will be dazed for a while. The cameras are dazed, too. It’s pretty slick. I tried to get him to name it something. THE BEDAZZLER, all caps, but he’s not that sort. What do you want to see here? You can see anything. Touch anything. No one will know.”
Declan was badly disoriented. “I don’t understand.”
Bryde stepped into the room. He was a neat figure, controlled. Declan instantly recognized the posture. Not ego. Beyond ego. A man who knew precisely what his boundaries were and operated so thoroughly within them that he was untouchable and knew it. He did not have to lift a fist, raise his voice. He was a kind of powerful that other powerful people respected.
He held a small silver orb in between finger and thumb.
“It’s quite expensive,” he said, studying it. “Requires good ley energy, good dream, perfect focus. Razor focus, really. You have to hold what it means to be human in your head, because you don’t want to take that from them. These little baubles have to go off and send the mind in all directions but keep those pieces close enough to gather back. There is no point in a treat if it’s all trick. You may as well shoot someone if you aren’t going to put their minds back. A butcher ruins, a dreamer nudges.”
Declan found himself feeling precisely the same sensation as he had after his worst dream. He longed to wake up back in the apartment and find everything ordinary and correct around him. I don’t trust Bryde, Adam had said, and how could he? Look at him. Listen to him. Feel what he could do.
Declan remembered nothing about getting here. Bryde had taken it from him.
Declan took two steps back, putting himself on the proper side of the chain protecting El Jaleo. Immediately he felt better, giving the painting its space once more.