Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(102)

Lindenmere was a dream.

It was worlds away from the café she’d met Ronan at that morning, both physically and spiritually. A two-hour drive had taken them to the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then Ronan had navigated up increasingly smaller roads to an unpaved fire road, and then he’d told her they would have to walk.

They walked.

Neither of them looked particularly like the hiking sort—Hennessy in her leather and lace, and Ronan in his black boots and his shaggy raven on his shoulder. There was comfort in the absurdity of that, Hennessy thought.

Because she was getting afraid again.

Lindenmere is a dreamspace, Ronan had told her in the car. So control your thoughts in it.

Control had never been Hennessy’s strong point.

She checked her timer on her phone. She’d just reset it. The odds of her slipping and knocking herself out while walking were low, but she couldn’t bear living without the comfort of it counting down to waking her up before the dream.

Ronan texted someone as they were walking. Hennessy saw only that the contact was labeled MANAGEMENT.

“Who’s that?”

“Adam,” Ronan said. “I’m telling him I’m going in so that he’ll know where to find me if days go by.”

Days?

“We’re here,” Ronan said.

She didn’t think she’d be able to tell, but she could tell. This far into the mountains, the ordinary trees were thinner, more slanted, striving for toehold among the granite and straining for the sun. But Lindenmere’s supernatural trees obeyed different rules. They were broad and tall, watchful and lovely, unaffected by the paucity of resources on the mountaintop. Green mosses and lichens furred their northern sides, with small moss flowers trembling at the end of delicate stalks.

And the sky was different. It had turned gray. Not the dull gray of high fall cloud cover, but rather a turbulent, molten gray that was really blue and purple and flint, all of it shifting and moving and swirling like the undulations of a snake. It had no eyes and no heartbeat and no body, but nonetheless one got the sense that the sky itself was sentient, even if it did not notice them below it.

“Wait,” Hennessy said. “I changed my mind.”

Ronan turned to look at her. “Lindenmere won’t hurt you unless you want it to. Not when you’re with me. It only protects itself or manifests what you ask it to.”

“But,” Hennessy said. I don’t trust myself.

She was trying not to shake again. For a decade she’d held herself together and now she was a ruin.

She couldn’t bear the idea that she might have to see the Lace again so soon.

Ronan regarded her.

Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and said, “Opal!” He paused, listened. “Where are you, maggot?”

Hennessy asked, “What’s Opal?”

An invisible bird let out an alarmed bark from somewhere overhead. Hennessy turned in time to see something dark move between the trees, or rather to experience the feeling that she’d just seen something dark.

“I told you, keep your thoughts steady,” Ronan told Hennessy. “Lindenmere will give you what it thinks you want.”

“They’re like a fucking rock.” They were not like a fucking rock.

“Chainsaw, go find Opal,” Ronan told the raven. “She needs Opal.”

Hennessy was not one hundred percent on bird body language, but she thought the raven nonetheless managed to look pouty. She hung her head and stepped from foot to foot on his shoulder, her neck feathers all ruffled up.

Ronan rummaged in his jacket pocket and removed a package of peanut butter crackers. He unwrapped one as the raven became suddenly attentive.

“Cracker,” he said to her.

“Krek,” she replied.

“Cracker,” he repeated.

“Krek.”

“Cracker.”

“Kreker.”

He gave her one. “The other’s if you get Opal.”

The raven took flight, her wings audible as they beat the air. Hennessy watched it all with some amazement. She and Ronan had been out of place while hiking, yes, but he was not out of place here. He belonged in this strange lush forest with his strange dark bird.

“You dreamt this place,” Hennessy said.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“I had a dream, and after it, Lindenmere was here,” Ronan said. “But I think I might have just dreamt of it where it existed somewhere else, and then my dream was just the doorway for it. It’s a forest because that’s what my imagination could hold for it. It was limited by whatever my thoughts were. So, trees. Ish.”

Hennessy shivered, both because it was cool in this lofty forest and also because this reminded her of the Lace and what it wanted her to do. “That doesn’t bother you?”

She could see by his face that it didn’t. He loved this place.

Another alarmed animal cry came from the underbrush, and something like a growl, either an animal or a motor.

“Steady,” Ronan said, but she wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or himself.

“If you made this place,” Hennessy said, “why didn’t you make it safer for you?”

He reached up to run his fingers along a low-hanging branch. “I had another forest before Lindenmere.” He looked like he was going to confess something, but in the end, he just said, “Bad things happened to it. I made it too safe, because I was a chicken-shit. Made it more ordinary. So it had to rely on me to keep it safe and—” He did not finish this, but he did not have to. The girls relied on Hennessy to keep them alive, too, and she knew how it felt to let them down. “I let Lindenmere be more of itself, whatever it was in that other place.”