But then Kavinsky’s fire dragon broke off from the night horror. It tucked its gaseous forearms and dove. With a hissing blast of noise, it collided with one of the flood lamps. The impact had no effect on the dragon, but the lamp capsized. Shocked screams punctuated the air; the lamp tumbled like a tree.
Kavinsky’s face was alight. He’d leapt to his feet as the fire dragon hurled itself at another one of the lamps. Flames burst and dissipated. The bulb exploded.
Ronan’s night horror plummeted from the sky, snatching at the fire dragon. For a moment, the two hit the ground, rolling across the dirt, and then they were alight again.
No one was really afraid. Why weren’t they afraid?
It was magic, but nobody believed it was.
The music was still blaring. The cars were still wheeling. There were dragons fighting above them, and it was just another party.
The fire dragon screamed, the same horrible scream as before. It sped toward where Kavinsky and Ronan stood by the car.
“Stop it,” Ronan said.
Kavinsky’s eyes were still on it. “No stopping it now, Lynch.”
His furious dragon spun, wings outstretched. Tearing along the drag strip, it pulled a stretch of flames along the dirt behind it. It sprang off the roof of one of the Mitsubishis at the end. As its claws shrieked on the metal, the car burst into flame. The dragon charged into the air. The movement flipped the car behind it, easy as a toy.
Matthew?
On the other side of the strip, Gansey waved his arms above his head, shaking his head, catching Ronan’s eye. Not in that one.
“Tell me which car my brother’s in,” Ronan said.
“A white one.”
The dragon gathered itself up. It was obviously preparing to plummet down once more. It was curious, really, how clearly he could see its eyes from that great height. It had terrible eyes. It was not that they were empty, but rather that when you looked past all the flame and smoke and more flames, you could see that deep down inside the eyes was really just more smoke and flames.
There was a silence in the crowd.
In that silence, Kavinsky’s laugh was louder than anything.
A single scream erupted from the crowd. It was a sort of experimental sound, trying to decide if now, finally, fear was the correct response.
As Ronan’s night horror flapped toward the fire dragon, Kavinsky’s monster pinned its vaporous legs to its body. Sulfur clouded from its mouth. It was deadly like a cancer. Like radiation. It had teeth, but those were irrelevant.
Kavinsky snapped his fingers. Another firework shot up, smearing a glowing path between the two creatures. It exploded above them all like a toxic flower.
The night horror slammed into the fire dragon. The two of them crashed into the ground, rolling into the crowd. Now there was screaming as people leapt out of the way. The two creatures clawed their way over another of the Mitsubishis. Into the air. Back down again.
“Ronan!” Blue’s voice carried, high and thin. She had looked in another Mitsubishi — still no Matthew. The crowd was still scattering — somewhere, a siren howled. There was so much fire. It was as if Kavinsky’s dragon were slowly remaking the world in its own image. Most of the flood lamps were out, but the drag strip was brighter than before. Every car a lantern.
The fire dragon pitched toward Gansey and Blue.
Ronan didn’t have to shout to his night horror. It knew what Ronan wanted. It wanted exactly what Ronan wanted.
Save them.
The night horror tangled in the fire dragon’s wings. The two creatures sailed narrowly past Gansey and Blue.
Gansey shouted, “Do something!”
Ronan could kill Kavinsky. If he stopped Kavinsky, the dragon stopped. But it was one thing to know this solution. It was a very different thing to look at Kavinsky, his arms stretched over his head, fire in his eyes, and think: I could kill him.
And most important, it wasn’t true.
Ronan couldn’t kill him.
“Okay,” he snarled, grabbing Kavinsky’s arm, “We’re done. Where is my brother? No more. Where is he?”
Kavinsky threw his free hand out toward the Mitsubishi beside them. “He’s all yours! You missed my point, man. All I wanted was this —”
He gestured now at the tumbling dragon and night horror.
Releasing him, Ronan scrambled to the car. He pulled open the back door. It was empty.
“He’s not in here!”
“Boom!” shouted Kavinsky. Another car had just gone up. The flames were glorious and rolling, bubbling out of the car like thunderclouds. As Ronan slammed the door shut, Kavinsky scrambled up onto the hood of the Mitsubishi. He was shaking and ecstatic.
Pressing one hand to his concave chest, he fetched his white sunglasses from his back pocket with the other. He put them on, hiding his eyes. The lenses mirrored the furnace around them.
On the opposite end of the strip, the fire dragon screamed its dreadful scream again. It tore free of the night horror.
The creature turned directly toward them.
And suddenly, Ronan saw it. He saw how every car but this one burned. How the dragon had destroyed each of Kavinsky’s dream things here at the strip. How now it came at them, a frenzy of destruction. The night horror flew after it, less graceful, a bit of ash tossed in a nuclear wind.
He heard thumping, barely audible over the chaos.
Matthew was in the trunk.
Ronan bolted around the back of the car— no, no, that wasn’t right, he needed to open the trunk from inside the car. He darted a look at the dragon. It was flying directly for them, purposeful and malevolent.
Fumbling along the driver’s side door, he popped the trunk. As he tore around the car, he saw Matthew kick the trunk open the rest of the way. Rolling out, his younger brother stumbled drunkenly, clambering up, hand pressed against the car for support.
Ronan could smell the fire dragon, all carbon and sulfur.
Ronan dove for his brother. He dragged him away from the car. He shouted to Kavinsky, “Get down!”
But Kavinsky didn’t look away from the two creatures. He said, “The world’s a nightmare.”
Horror clawed its way up inside Ronan. It was precisely the feeling he’d had when he realized Kavinsky was going to blow up the Mitsubishi at the substance party.
Dust swirled up from the dragon’s wings.
Furious, Ronan shouted, “Come down, you bastard!”
Kavinsky didn’t answer.
There was that whoof he’d heard in the dream, that clap of wings against air. Like an explosion taking all the oxygen from a room.
Ronan wrapped his arms around Matthew and ducked his head.
A second later, the fire dragon exploded into Kavinsky. It went straight through him, around him, flame around an object. Kavinsky fell. Not as if he was struck, though. Just like when he’d taken the green pill. He crumpled to his knees and then slumped gracelessly off the car.
A few feet away, the fire dragon careened into the dirt, limp.
Non mortem, somni fratrem.
Across the dirt track, one of the Mitsubishis, still smoldering, crashed resoundingly into one of the buildings. Ronan didn’t have to see the driver to know it was Prokopenko. Asleep.
Which meant that Kavinsky was dead.
But he had been dying since Ronan met him. They both had been.
Dying’s a boring side effect.
The pair of white sunglasses lay in the dust beside Ronan’s toe. He didn’t take them. He just held Matthew tightly, unwilling to let him go yet. His brain kept replaying the image of Matthew climbing out of the trunk, fire hitting the car, Kavinsky falling —
He’d had so many nightmares of something happening to him.
Overhead, the albino night horror flapped. Both Matthew and Ronan looked up at it.
Tck-tck-tck-tck.
Both beaks chattered. It was a dreadful thing, this night horror, impossible to understand, but Ronan was done being afraid. There was no fear left.
With a shudder, Matthew pressed his face into his older brother’s shoulder, trusting as a child. He whispered, voice slurred, “What is it?”
The night horror barely checked itself as it regarded its creator. It flapped upward, spinning two or three times as it did. It was headed into the night — where, it was impossible to say.
“It’s all right,” Ronan said.
Matthew believed him; why shouldn’t he? Ronan had never lied. He looked up over Matthew’s head as Gansey and Blue began to head toward them. Sirens wailed from close by; blue and red lights strobed through the dust like lights at a club. Ronan was suddenly unbearably glad to see Gansey and Blue joining him. For some reason, although he had arrived with them, he felt as if he had been alone for a very long time, and now no longer was.
“That thing. Is it one of Dad’s secrets?” Matthew whispered.
“You’ll see,” Ronan replied. “Because I’m going to tell you all of them.”
63
The Gray Man couldn’t think of a way to get rid of the other treasure hunters without having to confront his brother.
But that was unthinkable.
The Gray Man thought about the card Maura had drawn for him. The ten of swords. The absolute worst it could get. He had thought that it meant leaving behind Henrietta, but now he knew that although that was terrible, it wasn’t really the worst thing that could happen to him.
The worst thing had always been his brother.
You’re going to have to be brave, Maura had said.
I’m always brave.
Braver than that.
For so long his brother had haunted him. Taunted and teased
him from hundreds of miles away, even as the Gray Man studied and trained and became ever more dangerous in his own right. He’d let him take everything from him.
And what, really, was keeping him from facing his brother now? Fear? Could he be any more deadly than the Gray Man? Could he really take anything more from him?
The Gray Man thought of Maura’s smile again. And he thought of the fuss and noise of 300 Fox Way, of Blue’s bright banter, of the tuna fish sandwich at the deli counter, the haunted blue mountains calling him home.
He wanted to stay.
Persephone had patted his knee. I know you’ll do the right thing, Mr. Gray.
As he drove, the Gray Man stretched one hand into the backseat and dragged his gray suitcase onto Greenmantle’s meters. Driving one handed, glancing from the rain-slicked road to the case every so often, he first found his favorite Kinks album.
He put the disc in the CD player.
Then he fetched out the gun he had hidden in the kitchen cabinets at Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast. He checked to make certain that Calla had not cleverly removed all the bullets. She had not.
He got off the interstate.
He was going to stay. Or he was going to die trying.
In the rearview mirror, he saw two cars get off the interstate behind him. Up ahead were two bleary-eyed truck stops— nothing said exhaustion like the wide-awake lights of a truck stop. He chose the larger one.
Already he could recognize his brother’s silhouette behind the wheel of the farther car. Age had not changed the set of his chin nor the shape of his ears. Age, the Gray Man guessed, had not changed much about his brother. Fear tickled in his gut.
Through the speakers, the Kinks confessed that they no longer wanted to wander.
The Gray Man pulled up to a pump.