to the magicians who woke me from my thousand-year sleep
I will not be clapped in a hood,
Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist,
Now I have learnt to be proud
Hovering over the wood
In the broken mist
Or tumbling cloud.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “THE HAWK”
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
—MARCEL PROUST, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, VOL. II
Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling?
—M. C. ESCHER, “ON BEING A GRAPHIC ARTIST”
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Maggie Stiefvater
Copyright
This is going to be a story about the Lynch brothers.
There were three of them, and if you didn’t like one, try another, because the Lynch brother others found too sour or too sweet might be just to your taste. The Lynch brothers, the orphans Lynch. All of them had been made by dreams, one way or another. They were handsome devils, down to the last one.
They looked after themselves. Their mother, Aurora, had died the way some dreams did, gruesomely, blamelessly, unexpectedly. Their father, Niall, had been killed or murdered, depending on how human you considered him. Were there other Lynches? It seemed unlikely. Lynches appeared to be very good at dying.
Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
Because the Lynch brothers had been in danger for so much of their lives, they’d each developed methods of mitigating threats. Declan, the eldest, courted safety by being as dull as possible. He was very good at it. In all things—school, extracurriculars, dating—he invariably chose the dullest option. He had a real gift for it; some forms of boring suggest that the wearer, deep down inside, might actually be a person of whimsy and nuance, but Declan made certain to practice a form of boring that suggested that, deep down inside, there was an even more boring version of him. Declan was not invisible, because invisible had its own charm, its own mystery. He was simply dull. Technically he was a college student, a political intern, a twenty-one-year-old with his whole life ahead of him, but it was hard to remember that. It was hard to remember him at all.
Matthew, the youngest, floated in safety by being as kind as possible. He was sweet humored, pliable, and gentle. He liked things, and not in an ironic way. He laughed at puns. He swore like a greeting card. He looked kindly, too, growing from a cherubic, golden-haired child to an Adonic, golden-haired seventeen-year-old. All of this treacly, tousled goodness might have been insufferable had not Matthew also been an excruciatingly messy eater, a decidedly lazy student, and not very bright. Everyone wanted to hug Matthew Lynch, and he wanted to let them.
Ronan, the middle brother, defended his safety by being as frightening as possible. Like the other Lynch brothers, he was a regular churchgoer, but most people assumed he played for the other team. He dressed in funereal black and had a raven as a pet. He shaved his hair close to his skull and his back was inked with a clawed and toothed tattoo. He wore an acidic expression and said little. What words he did unsheathe turned out to be knives, glinting and edged and unpleasant to have stuck into you. He had blue eyes. People generally think blue eyes are pretty, but his were not. They were not cornflower, sky, baby, indigo, azure. His were iceberg, squall, hypothermia, eventual death. Everything about him suggested he might take your wallet or drop your baby. He was proud of the family name, and it suited him. His mouth was always shaped like he’d just finished saying it.
The Lynch brothers had many secrets.
Declan was a collector of beautiful, specific phrases that he would not let himself use in public, and the possessor of an illuminated, specific smile no one would ever see. Matthew had a forged birth certificate and no fingerprints. Sometimes, if he let his mind wander, he found himself walking in a perfectly straight line. Toward something? Away from something? This was a secret even to himself.
Ronan had the most dangerous of the secrets. Like many significant secrets, it was passed down through the family—in this case, from father to son. This was the good and bad of Ronan Lynch: The good was that sometimes, when he fell asleep and dreamt, he woke with that dream. The bad was that sometimes, when he fell asleep and dreamt, he woke with that dream. Monsters and machines, weather and wishes, fears and forests.
Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
After their parents died, the Lynch brothers kept their heads down. Declan removed himself from the business of dreams and went to school for the dullest possible degree in political science. Ronan kept his nightmare games confined to the family farm in rural Virginia as best as he could. And Matthew—well, Matthew only had to keep on making sure he didn’t accidentally walk away.
Declan grew more boring and Ronan grew more bored. Matthew tried not to let his feet take him someplace he didn’t understand.
They all wanted more.
One of them had to break, eventually. Niall had been a wild Belfast dreamer with fire biting at his heels, and Aurora had been a golden dream with the borderless sky reflected in her eyes. Their sons were built for chaos.
It was a sharp October, a wild October, one of those fretful spans of time that climbs into your skin and flits around. It was two months after the fall semester had begun. The trees were all brittle and grasping. The drying leaves were skittish. Winter yowled round the doorways at night until wood fires drove it away for another f
ew hours.
There was something else afoot that October, something else stretching and straining and panting, but it was mostly as of yet unseen. Later it would have a name, but for now, it simply agitated everything uncanny it touched, and the Lynch brothers were no exception.
Declan broke first.
While the youngest brother was in school and the middle brother malingered at the family farm, Declan opened a drawer in his bedroom and removed a piece of paper with a telephone number on it. His heart beat faster just to look at it. He should have destroyed it, but instead, he entered it into his phone.
“The Lynch boy?” said the voice on the other side of the line.
“Yes,” he said simply, “I want the key.” Then he hung up.
He told no one else about the call, not even his brothers. What was one more tiny secret, he thought, in a life full of them.
Boredom and secrets: an explosive combination.
Something was going to burn.
Creatures of all kinds had begun to fall asleep.
The cat was the most dramatic. It was a beautiful animal, if you liked cats, with a dainty face and long, cottony fur, the kind that seemed like it would melt away into liquid sugar. It was a calico, which under normal circumstances would mean it was certainly not an it, but rather a she. Calico had to be inherited from two X chromosomes. Perhaps that rule didn’t apply here, though, in this comely rural cottage nearly no one knew about. Forces other than science held domain in this place. The calico might not even be a cat at all. It was cat-shaped, but so were some birthday cakes.
It had watched them kill him.
Caomhán Browne had been his name. Was still his name, really. Like good boots, identities outlived those who wore them. They had been told he was dangerous, but he’d thrown everything but what they’d feared at them. A tiny end table. A plump and faded floral recliner. A stack of design magazines. A flat-screen television of modest size. He’d actually stabbed Ramsay with the crucifix from the hallway wall, which Ramsay found funny even during the act of it. Holy smokes, he’d said.
One of the women wore lambskin dress-for-success heeled boots, and there was now an unbelievable amount of blood on them. One of the men was prone to migraines, and he could feel the dreamy magic of the place sparking the lights of an aura at the edges of his vision.
In the end, Lock, Ramsay, Nikolenko, and Farooq-Lane had cornered both Browne and the cat in the low-ceilinged kitchen of the Irish holiday cottage, nothing within Browne’s reach but a decorative dried broom on the wall and the cat. The broom wasn’t good for anything, even sweeping, but the cat might have been used to good effect if thrown properly. Few have the constitution to throw a cat properly, however, and Browne was not one of them. One could see the moment he realized he didn’t have it in him and gave up.
“Please don’t kill the trees,” he said.
They shot him. A few times. Mistakes were expensive and bullets were cheap.
The calico was lucky it hadn’t gotten shot, too, crouched behind Browne as it was. Bullets go through things; that’s their job. Instead it merely got splattered with blood. It let out an uncanny howl full of rage. It bottle-brushed its tail and puffed its cotton coat. Then it hurled itself straight at them, because you can trust that the Venn diagram of cats and folks willing to throw cats is a circle.
There was a very brief moment where it seemed quite possible that one of them was about to be wearing a cat with every claw extended.
But then Browne gave a final shiver and went still.
The cat dropped.
A body hits the floor with a sound like no other; the multi-faceted fhlomp of an unconscious bag of bones can’t be replicated in any other way. The calico made this sound and then was also still. Unlike Browne, however, its chest continued to rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.
It was impossibly, unnaturally, entirely asleep.
“Truly fucked up,” remarked Ramsay.
There was a window over the little white sink, and through it one could see a deep green field and, closer, three shaggy ponies standing in the churned-up mud by the gate. They sagged to their knees, tipping against each other like drowsy fellows. A pair of goats bleated a confused question before slumping like the ponies. There were chickens, too, but they had already fallen asleep, soft multicolored mounds littered across the green.
Caomhán Browne had been what the Moderators called a Zed. This is what it meant to be a Zed: Sometimes, when they dreamt, they woke up with a thing they’d been dreaming about in their hands. The cat, as suspected, was not a cat. It was a cat-shaped thing drawn out of Browne’s head. And like all of Browne’s living dreams, it could not stay awake if Browne was dead.
“Note time of death for the record,” said Nikolenko.
They all cast their attention back to their prey—or their victim, depending on how human one found him. Farooq-Lane checked her phone and tapped a message into it.
Then they went to find the other Zed.
Overhead, the clouds were dark, eclipsing the tops of the slanting hills. The little Kerry farm was edged by a tiny, mossy wood. It was beautiful, but in between the trees, the air hummed even more than in the cottage. It was not exactly that they couldn’t breathe in this atmosphere. It was more like they couldn’t think, or like they could think too much. They were all getting a little nervous; the threats seemed truer out here.
The other Zed wasn’t even trying to hide. Lock found him sat in the crook of a mossy tree with a disturbingly blank expression.
“You killed him, didn’t you?” the Zed asked. Then, when Farooq-Lane joined Lock, he said, “Oh, you.”
Complicated familiarity coursed between the Zed and Farooq-Lane.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Farooq-Lane said. She was shivering a little. Not a cold shiver. Not a frightened shiver. One of those rabbits running over your grave numbers. “All you have to do is stop dreaming.”
Lock cleared his throat as if he felt the bargain wasn’t quite as simple as that, but he said nothing.
“Really?” The Zed peered up at Farooq-Lane. His attention was fully on her, as if the others weren’t there. Fair enough; her attention was entirely on him, too. “That kills me either way. I expected more complexity from you, Carmen.”
Lock raised his gun. He did not say it out loud, but he found this Zed a particularly creepy son of a bitch, and that was even without taking into account what he’d done. “Then you’ve made your choice.”
During all of this, Ramsay had fetched his gas cans from the back of the rental car; he’d been dying to use them all day. Petrol, he’d smirked, as if variations in English usage were sufficient material for a joke. Now the small copse had begun to stink of the sweet, carcinogenic perfume of gasoline as Ramsay dropkicked the last of the gas cans in the direction of the cottage. He was probably the sort of person who would throw a cat.
“We’ll need to watch the road while it burns,” said Lock. “Let’s make this quick.”
The Zed looked at them with detached interest. “I understand me, guys, but why Browne? He was a kitten. What are you afraid of?”
Lock said, “Someone is coming. Someone is coming to end the world.”
In this humming wood, dramatic phrases like end the world felt not only plausible but probable.
The Zed quirked a gallows smile. “Is it you?”
Lock shot him. Several times. It was pretty clear the first one had done the job, but Lock kept going until he stopped feeling so creeped out. As the shots finished echoing through the wood, something deeper in the copse thudded to the ground with the same distinctive sound as the cat in the kitchen. It had some weight to it. All of them were glad that this dream had fallen asleep before they’d had a chance to meet it.
Now that the woods were silent, everyone left alive looked at Carmen Farooq-Lane.
Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut and her face was turned away, like she’d been bracing for a bullet herself. Her mouth worked but s
he didn’t cry. She did appear younger. Ordinarily she presented herself with such corporate sophistication—linen suits, lovely updos—that it was difficult to guess her age: one saw only a successful, self-possessed businesswoman. But this moment stripped away the glamour and revealed her as the twentysomething she was. It was not a comfortable sensation; there was the strong urge to wrap a blanket around her to return her dignity. But at least they couldn’t doubt her dedication. She’d been in this as deep as any of them and had seen it through to the end.
Lock put a paternal hand on her shoulder. In his deep voice, he rumbled, “Fucked-up situation.”
It was difficult to tell if this offered Farooq-Lane any comfort.
He told the others, “Let’s finish this up and get out of here.”
Ramsay lit a match. He used it first to light a cigarette for Nikolenko, and next to light a cigarette for himself. Then he dropped it into the gasoline-soaked undergrowth just before the flame bit his fingertips.
The forest began to burn.
Farooq-Lane turned away.
Releasing a puff of cigarette smoke in the direction of the dead Zed’s body, Ramsay asked, “Have we saved the world?”
Lock tapped the time of Nathan Farooq-Lane’s death into his phone. “Too soon to say.”
Ronan Lynch was about to end the world.
His world, anyway. He was ending one and starting another. At the beginning of this road trip would be one Ronan Lynch, and at the end, there would be another.
“Here’s the situation,” Declan said. This was a classic Declan way to start a conversation. Other hits included Let’s focus on the real action item and This is what it’s going to take to close this deal and In the interest of clearing the air. “I would have no problem with you driving my car if you would keep it under ninety.”
“And I’d have no problem with riding in your car if you’d keep it over geriatric,” Ronan replied.
It was early November; the trees were handsome; the sky was clear; excitement was in the air. The three brothers debated in a Goodwill parking lot; those entering and leaving stared. They were an eye-catchingly mismatched threesome: Ronan, with his ominous boots and ominous expression; Declan, with his perfectly controlled curls and dutiful gray suit; Matthew, with his outstandingly ugly checked pants and cheerfully blue puffer coat.
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