Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(10)

He even sounded different. There was no trace at all of his subtle Virginia accent. He’d endlessly practiced erasing it in high school but never pulled it off. Now it was completely hidden. A stranger’s voice.

Ronan felt a little unsteady. There had been no room for this experience in his daydreams.

Adam glanced at his watch, and Ronan saw then that it was his watch, the elegant timepiece Ronan had dreamt him for Christmas, the watch that told the correct time for wherever Ronan was in the world. The ground steadied a little beneath him.

Adam said, “I thought you wouldn’t be here for hours. I thought you—I should’ve known how you drive. I thought …”

He was staring at Ronan in an unfamiliar way, and after a moment, Ronan realized that Adam was staring at him in exactly the same way Ronan was staring at Adam.

“This is fucking weird,” Ronan said, and Adam laughed in a haggard, relieved way. They hugged, hard.

This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam’s ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam’s narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan’s skull the way it always did when they hugged. His voice was missing his accent, but now it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan’s skin: “You smell like home.”

Home.

Ronan felt even steadier. It was going to be all right. He was with Adam, and Adam still loved him, and this was going to work.

They stepped back from each other. Adam said, “Do you want to meet my friends?”

Friends were serious business for Ronan Lynch. He was slow to acquire them, slower to lose them. The list was small, both because secrets made relationships complicated and because friends, for Ronan, were time-consuming. They got all of him. You could not, Ronan thought, give all of yourself away to many people, or there would be nothing left. So there was burnished Gansey, who might not have saved Ronan’s life in high school, but at the very least kept it mostly out of Ronan’s reach so that he could not take it down and break it. There was pocket-sized Blue Sargent, the psychic’s daughter, with her ferocious sense of right and wrong; they’d learned each other so slowly, peeling back layers and only truly figuring each other out just in time for high school to end. There was Adam, and there were Ronan’s brothers. That was it. Ronan could have had more casual friends, but he didn’t see the point.

“Repo! You’re supposed to say Repo.”

“What?” Ronan was playing a card game. It was a confusing card game, with a lot of rules, an elaborate setup, and an unclear time frame for completing gameplay. He was fairly certain it had been developed by students at Harvard. He was fairly certain, in fact, that it had been developed by the students at Harvard he currently sat with: Fletcher, Eliot, Gillian, and Benjy. Adam sat beside him, hearing ear closest (he was deaf in one).

Beneath the table, Adam’s shoe was pressed hard up against Ronan’s.

Eliot explained, “To notify the other players.”

“Of what?”

Eliot flinched at his tone, although Ronan hadn’t thought he’d been any more terse than usual. Possibly his usual was enough. The first thing breezy Eliot had said when they met Ronan was “Oh, you’re scarier than I expected!”

Fucking nice to meet you, too, Ronan had thought.

The game unrolled at a table in the basement common room of Thayer. Other students played pool, gathered around TVs and laptops, and listened to music. It smelled like garlic and take-out food. The brick arches holding up the ceiling gave the entire space the vibe of either a wine cellar or catacombs. It all felt like a secret club.

Gillian, who wore a tie knotted with more certainty and polish than Ronan ever had, shook her cards at him. “You say ‘Repo’ unto them so they can assess the suit and color of your lot and form a strategy to hopefully stop you from repo’ing the last card you need to win.”

Ronan looked at the cards he’d already laid out on the table. “I only need one more?”

“He’s a savant,” said Fletcher, whose great, round expanse was held in by a snazzy sweater vest. He seemed as if he ought to be smoking a cigar or backing slowly into the black-and-white photo he had emerged from. “He’s a savant and he doesn’t know it. The beautiful girl who doesn’t know her beauty. The brute who doesn’t know his strength. Twenty’s what you need. Twenty in your lot, and you’re the boss, game over. And you, my friend, have nineteen.”

“H-E-double boomerang,” said Benjy softly, with feeling. He had only two cards in his lot.

“But you could be put off,” Gillian explained. “Adam, for instance, could pay his bill with his spades. He could put them all in the bank, and then you wouldn’t be able to complete the spades in your lot with his cards.”

Beneath the table, Adam pressed the rest of his leg up against Ronan’s, his expression unchanging as he did.

This card game, Ronan thought, was going on forever.

“But if Adam pays spades, then he wouldn’t be able to complete his own lot with spades,” Fletcher interjected in his plummy voice. “Technically, yes, but not practically. Paying spades would be on his record for ten more turns, so he couldn’t play spades until after that. At this stage in the game, someone else will have won before he frees up spades for himself again.”