Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater [uplifting novels txt] 📗

off and nearly to the porch of the house, even more disinterested in her banter than he had been at the beginning of all this. With a growl, Ronan shouldered his bag and the scabbard with vexed to nightmare and followed after. By the time Hennessy climbed the two steps to the front door to join them, they could already hear footsteps from inside the house, lots of them.

Ronan and Hennessy exchanged a look behind Bryde’s back. She looked as bemused as he did.

Then the door opened and a short woman with light brown skin and dark brown hair clipped back from her face stood there. Even though her appearance had little in common with Hennessy’s, she nonetheless reminded Ronan of what Hennessy had looked like when he first met her: exhausted and frightened. Just like Hennessy, she hid the exhaustion and fright away beneath a very different expression, but it still leaked out around the eyes, the tight smile. When she saw them, a little bit of the exhaustion and fright went away, replaced with curiosity and wariness.

Good, thought Ronan. That was the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

She looked Bryde up and down and then she looked over her shoulder. “Is this him?”

Behind her, several voices rose in a chorus of youthful excitement.

“He’s here!”

“Is it him?”

“I said he was here? I said that already.”

“It’s Bryde!”

“What about Jordan Hennessy?”

“Yes! I see her! I see her!”

“And Ronan Lynch?”

“He’s tall and bald! He has the sword!”

The children had rushed up behind their mother like a wave blustering to shore, stopping just short of breaking out onto the porch. Five happy faces in five different heights. They hissed and poked at each other and pointed at Hennessy and Ronan standing behind Bryde.

Ronan and Hennessy exchanged another look.

This was not what Ronan would have considered the correct response to the three of them showing up on one’s doorway.

But he kind of liked it.

“You might as well come in so they can paw at you,” said the woman. “Not that you’re here for me, but I’m—”

“Angelica,” Bryde said as he stepped past her into the cramped hallway. “Angelica Aldana-Leon. Yes. I know. They told me.” As her mouth dropped open, he lifted a closed fist and said to the five children, “Presents, but not until you tell me what they are.”

“Are they the seeds?”

“Are you real?”

“He said not to ask that!”

Bryde opened his closed hand and let a single seed drop from it into each of their palms. “Now, how do you make them grow?”

They conferred like it was a game show. Then one whispered the answer to the other, and together they clapped the seeds in their hands. Each immediately exploded into a bright blue lily, and just then, Ronan realized, stupidly, that they were all dreamers, each of these children, and Bryde must have come to them in their dreams, too, and shown them these dreamt seeds he was going to give them.

Ronan searched inside himself for the same jealousy he’d first felt over Rhiannon, but that wasn’t what he felt at all.

“The children told me that it’s you who have stopped the …” Angelica asked them, making a gesture to her eyes and nose. The nightwash.

“The slop!” shouted one of the boys.

“Thank you. Thank you so much. I don’t know how to thank you for what you’re doing, so just, thank you, you have saved them,” Angelica said, with feeling.

“You’re welcome,” Bryde said. “I don’t know how long it will hold, but we will keep working.”

Ronan stared at the kids, who stared back up at him. Now he understood why Angelica looked frightened and exhausted. Dreamers. Little dreamers, like he had been once, but growing up in a world where a lack of ley energy was killing them. He wondered how many dreamers had died of the nightwash without knowing anyone else like them existed, or knowing that they could save themselves by moving to a place with more energy.

This was why they were doing what they were doing.

He looked down. One of the kids had his hand and was shaking it, trying to get him to follow. Another was giggling furiously as Chainsaw sat on her shoulder, working hard to be extraordinarily gentle with her talons.

Same, Chainsaw, he thought.

A third hugged his leg, and without thinking, he draped a hand over her head, his unconscious remembering both Matthew and Opal. He had forgotten what it was like to hug and be hugged during these last few weeks. It felt like ages since these small comforts.

Angelica said something in brisk Spanish and the children began to argue noisily among themselves. In English, she told them, “The children will show you where you can put your things. I’m sorry, it is bunk beds for you two boys. We don’t have much room.”

“That’s all right,” Bryde said. “It will be nice to have a shower and a meal for a night.”

Hennessy was whisked away and Bryde and Ronan left in a bedroom with the promised bunk beds. There was nothing fancy about the beds—they were just raw wood screwed together with a can-do attitude and mismatched blankets—but the entire situation was homier than any place they had stayed since leaving.

Bryde didn’t seem to care. No sooner had he silently set his bag on the lower bunk than he turned to go.

“Wait a second,” Ronan said. “Wait a damn second.”

Bryde paused and Ronan nearly lost his nerve. He hadn’t expected Bryde to listen.

“What did we do?” Ronan asked.

Narrowing his eyes, Bryde shook his head a little.

Ronan pressed on. “Haven’t we been trying? What more do you want from us? We go where you tell us to go, we do what you tell us to do. You asked me to listen, and I listened. What did I do? What did I fuck up?”

Bryde’s expression changed. “I’m not angry with you. Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“I don’t, either,” Bryde said. “Why does Adam keep trying