Prologue
Everyone always assumed what Joseph Kavinsky wanted. Nothing. Everything. His life was a music video of sex and drugs and cars. He was a dream thief, he could take anything he wanted from that secret place.
Anything, except the one thing that dream place refused to let him forge.
Kavinsky had tried before. Once. Maybe a hundred times and the forest denied his every attempt. Only in the normal dreams, the human ones that he couldn't steal from, could he even see his desire. But never could he obtain. And even in the dreams he was allowed, his desire was imperfect.
Ronan Lynch was impossible to make a forgery of. He was a warring star full of endless possibilities. He was brother to a liar and brother to an angel, son of a dream and son of a dreamer. He was molten blue eyes and a smile made for war. He was Celtic tattoos and ravens and five knotted leather bands that tasted like gasoline. He was a bomb.
Ronan Lynch was impossible and maybe that was why Joseph Kavinsky wanted him: because there could only ever be one Ronan Lynch, the dream thief.
Maybe it was his unflinching gaze, his second finest weapon after his silence. Maybe it was the way he was dangerous in his own way. Maybe it was because they were two of a kind and Kavinsky was tired of being alone. Or maybe it was the way that Ronan Lynch just didn't give a damn about Joseph Kavinsky the way others, groupies really, pretended.
It should have been the two of them. Not Dick-Three, not the baby doll, and certainly not the Aglionby poster boy of poverty.
Kavinsky had known since the moment he saw Ronan wake up and the blood appeared. The moment Joseph Kavinsky recognized that Ronan was gay made him dream about it, even when he was awake. And it was a damn fucking confirmation the moments after he felt his own fingertips on Ronan's tongue. The impossibly red pill gave him one opportunity he would have been completely out of his mind to pass up.
It was the chance to touch Ronan. Not like the way he had to haul the Irish teen's dead weight through his house to the theater room where he woke. He didn't take advantage of that like he could have. He wanted to, damn did he want to, but he didn't.
Ronan Lynch, chest down on a perfect version of Dick's Camaro, the fair Celtic skin of his back on display. The inky black tattoo rippled over his muscles, fascinating the conscious thief while Ronan experienced a painless and very temporary death. He leaned over his desire and traced the pattern of the tattoo, light over his shoulder blades and then slowly down Ronan's spine, feeling the muscles tense up slightly but Kavinsky could feel the other restraining himself from moving. As though doing so would wound him.
Joseph Kavinsky never thought the word beautiful could be pinned to Lynch before, but in that moment it did.
It should have been them.
Instead, Ronan chose his gang of losers.
"It was never going to be you and me." That was Ronan's promise, followed with a smile like a knife.
Ronan Lynch brought it all on himself.
Ronan Lynch was Joseph Kavinsky's last straw.
This year there were two ambulances and four cops parked half a mile from the drag strip. This year there were ten Mitsubishis to blow up. One of them contained Lynch's angel younger brother, Matthew. This year was going to be the last Fourth of July that Kavinsky ever threw. This was going to be the last day for Joseph Kavinsky.
The last time he would ever see what — no. Who — he really wanted.
"You don't have to do this," was the last thing he let Ronan say in the dream world. Ronan didn't know just how much he really did need to do this.
When Ronan rejoined Kavinsky in the real world, he brought with him an albino version of his own personal torture. Three times larger than the black bastards that had tried to kill Ronan, leading the Celtic teen to wrecking Dick's beloved car.
And the two creatures fought, a destructive clash of dreams.
Kavinsky could feel Ronan's blue eyes on him before the dragon destroyed one of the Mitsubishis. Ronan tried to convince him to stop this. He tried to convince him to tell him which car his brother was in. Kavinsky told the truth. The white one. Not that the truth helped. All his Mitsubishi copies were white. He was smart though, Lynch was, and he checked the wrong door of the right vehicle though just as Kavinsky climbed on top.
The dream thief he wanted got what he wanted, his brother, and yelled at him to get off the car. To come down. Ronan knew Kavinsky was planning on dying now.
"Come down, you bastard!"
It didn't hurt like he thought it would.
Then again, though, this was his last impossibly red pill. The dragon was.
It was designed just for Kavinsky anyway. Designed to cut him and all his creations off from the dream place once and for all.
He did it for Ronan.
