“What’s important to you?” Declan asked. “I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”

Bryde was still looking with his same expectant expression, hand on the doorknob to go to the dreamers they’d come to see.

“I have to go,” Ronan said. “I’ll call you back.”

He hung up.

He thought he grasped what Bryde had just been talking about before the call, because he, too, felt somewhat torn between the possibility of seeing his brothers again for a few minutes, and the knowledge that the dreamers were nearly to the end of the first part of this endeavor and whatever would change once the final obstacle to Ilidorin’s line was removed.

“I won’t tell you what to do,” Bryde said. “But I need to go on after this. I can’t stop this close to the end.”

“I know,” Ronan replied.

It was complicated to be a hero.

Chapter 26

Matthew was walking.

Not wandering, this time, but walking determinedly. Declan had told him he’d talked to Ronan and to stay put while he went out to take care of errands. He hadn’t said the two things were connected, but Matthew guessed they were. He’d had to guess, because no matter what Matthew said, Declan still failed to have real conversations with him. He confided in Jordan if he confided in anyone, and just kept pointing out dogs to Matthew. This filled Matthew with bad feeling, and the bad feeling, on top of all his previous bad feeling, set him to walking.

Not wandering.

Walking.

Like a human, not a dream.

He marched, hands stuffed in the pockets of his bright blue puffer jacket, head down. Watching his sneakers slap one in front of the other just made him walk faster and harder, dark pavement and sidewalk disappearing beneath them. Declan thought these big white sneakers were ridiculous. Matthew knew that now. He hadn’t when he’d bought them, all excited about having put away enough money. Aren’t they super? he’d said, and Declan had murmured, They are the most memorable pair of shoes I’ve ever seen, and at the time Matthew had thought that meant Declan loved them as much as he did.

How stupid he’d been, he thought, his ears burning red. How stupid he’d always been about everything.

Even the idea that Matthew had been excited about finally acquiring enough money to get the shoes was ridiculous. The money was from a weekly allowance that came from doing chores, a system started by Aurora back at the Barns and continued by Declan, even after they moved to the town house. Matthew had never questioned the correctness of this. Yes, of course he received an allowance for cleaning his room, vacuuming, unloading the dishwasher, spraying pine cleaner on the town house’s front door to get the pollen off, cleaning the trash out of Declan’s Volvo after school.