The Dream Thieves

Read The Dream Thieves for Free Online Page B

Book: Read The Dream Thieves for Free Online
Authors: Maggie Stiefvater
Tags: Romance Speculative Fiction
of his wireframes. “Don’t use that voice on me . You have no idea whatsoever?”
    “I think it’s supposed to translate things. That’s what it did in the dream.”
    Up close, the carvings were letters and words. The buttons were so small and the letters so precise that it was impossible to see how it could’ve been made. Also impossible was how the wheels of characters could have been fixed into the box without there being any seams in the rainbow-striped grain of the wood.
    “Latin on that side,” Gansey observed. He turned it. “Greek here. What’s that — Sanskrit, I think. Is this Coptic?”
    Ronan said, “Who the hell knows what Coptic looks like?”
    “You, apparently. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is. And this side with the wheels is us. Well, our alphabet, anyway, and it’s set to English words. But what is this side? The rest of these are dead languages, but I don’t recognize this one.”
    “Look,” Ronan said, pushing to his feet. “You’re overcomplicating this.” Stalking to Gansey, he took the box. He spun a few of the wheels on the English side, and at once buttons on the other sides began to move and shift. Something about their progress was illogical.
    “That hurts my head,” Gansey said.
    Ronan showed the English side to him. The letters read tree . He flipped it to the Latin side. The letters had shifted to read bratus . Then round to the Greek side..
    “So, it’s translated the English into all those other languages. That’s ‘tree’ in all those. I still don’t know what language this is. T’ire? That doesn’t sound like …” Gansey broke off, his knowledge of perished linguistic oddities exhausted. “God, I’m tired.”
    “So sleep.”
    Gansey gave him a look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid to think that sleep was just a thing that could be so easily acquired.
    Ronan said, “So let’s drive to the Barns.”
    Gansey gave him another look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid as to think that Gansey would agree to something so illegal on so little sleep.
    Ronan said, “So let’s go get some orange juice.”
    Gansey considered. He looked to where his keys sat on the desk beside his mint plant. The clock beside it, a repellently ugly vintage number Gansey had found lying by a bin at the dump, said 3:32 .
    Gansey said, “Okay.”
    They went and got some orange juice.

Y ou are an unbelievable phone tramp,” Blue said.
    Orla, unoffended, replied, “You’re just jealous that this isn’t your job.”
    “I am not.” Sitting on the floor of her mother’s kitchen, Blue glared up at her older cousin as she tied her shoe. Orla towered over her in a shirt, stunning both for its skintight fit and its paisley print. The flare of her bell-bottoms was capacious enough to hide small animals in. She waved the phone above Blue in a hypnotic figure eight.
    The phone in question was the psychic hotline that operated out of the second floor of 300 Fox Way. For a dollar a minute, customers received a gentle probing of their archetypes — a slightly more than gentle probing if Orla answered — and a host of tactful suggestions for how to improve their fates. Everyone in the house took turns answering it. Everyone, as Orla was pointing out, but Blue.
    Blue’s summer job required absolutely no extrasensory perception. In fact, working at Nino’s would have probably been unbearable if she’d possessed any more than five senses. Blue generally had a policy of not doing things she despised, but she despised working at Nino’s and had yet to quit. Or to get fired, for that matter. Waitressing required patience, a fixed and convincing smile, and the ability to continuously turn the other cheek while keeping diet sodas topped up. Blue possessed only one of these attributes at any given time, and it was never the one she needed. It didn’t help that Nino’s clientele was mostly Aglionby boys, who often

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