Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(108)

Hennessy didn’t feel up her own ass. She really had been trying to think about the Lace. She didn’t know why she had to keep looking at that shitty memory instead. “I’m not trying to do this. I’m trying to do my other dream.”

“Are you?” Bryde asked. “Do you think this forest lies? Or does it just give you what you ask?”

“I wasn’t asking for this,” she said.

“Your mind wasn’t,” Bryde said. “Your heart, though.”

She couldn’t argue. She had been ignoring what her heart felt about things for too long to pretend to be an expert in it.

“We fool ourselves better than anyone when we’re afraid,” Bryde said.

“Can you help her?” Ronan asked.

Bryde sounded a little amused. “Haven’t I been? Ah—” This was because Ronan tilted his head, as if to look around the trees in the direction of his voice. “That’s a good way to get me to leave.”

“I don’t understand why you’re still hiding,” Ronan said. “You’re here in my biggest secret. You know everything about me. I’m not asking for a birth certificate. Just a conversation with your face.”

Bryde said, “That’s because you don’t know what you ask.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had changed a little. It was a little sad. “If you see me, it means everything’s changed for you. You can’t really go back from meeting me. I wouldn’t take you from your life. And so, this close, no closer. That is the closest you can get without things changing.”

“What happened to skip to the center?” But Ronan didn’t try to look around the trees again.

“I don’t know,” Bryde said. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t know if I want your life to change.”

It was clear from Ronan’s face that he did. He was master of this tremendous place, dreamer of dreams, and still he wanted more.

Hennessy could understand that. She wished Jordan could have been here to see this place. All of them. Maybe she should have brought them all here with her instead of always feeling like she had to carry this by herself. What good had it done in the long run? It was killing her as a secret, anyway.

She spoke up. “I need mine to change.”

There was a very long pause. Opal reached her fist into the air above her and opened it. A little light of joyfulness escaped out of her grip and, instead of raining down, drifted slowly up. They all watched it until it dissolved into the gray.

“Prove it,” Bryde said. “Prove that you two can work together. And if you still want me, come for me together to tell me. But remember what I said. Oh—no. No. The world is going to shit.”

The forest was silent.

He had not said goodbye, and he was not visible for them to see him go, but Hennessy could tell that he was gone. It was a disquieting send-off. She could tell from Ronan’s face this wasn’t how Bryde ordinarily vanished.

“I’m going to do it,” Hennessy said. “Don’t let me fall too hard, Lynch.”

The clearing became dark.

This was how the dream began: in darkness.

There was no sound.

There was the vast movement of time and space, which had its own substance in the dream, but was not exactly sound. There was nothing in the dream you could really look at. There was nothing in the dream you could really put words to.

There was Hennessy, and in the dream, Hennessy knew she could manifest anything, if she really wanted to. It was limited only by her imagination—what an impossible, terrifying, brilliant truth. She’d been given this talent when born and not told how to use it. Given this talent and watched it kill her mother, or at least not save her.

She could do better with it.

If only she was dreamt of something besides …

It was there.

She felt it, and then she saw it. Dark and looming, the opposite of color and understanding.

Only its edges made any kind of sense. Slanted and hooked, checkered and geometric. Lacy, if they were anything at all.

Mostly it was bigger. It was bigger than anything she could understand. It was so enormous and old that age didn’t apply to it. It had been there for so long that humans were bacteria to it. Infinitesimal. Irrelevant. It was so much more powerful than they that the only saving grace was that it had never noticed—

Its awareness became a thing in the dream.

It saw Hennessy.

She could feel how awful that weight was. How it changed everything. Now that she had been noticed, she could never be unseen. There were two Hennessys, the one who had lived without knowing this thing existed, and more importantly, without it knowing she existed, and the one who was seen.

Now that it had seen her, it hated her.

It was going to kill her. It was going to kill her like this: It was going to get inside her, it promised, and it was going to kill her just by existing there, because she was so small and porous, and it was everything. She couldn’t hold it inside her.

Or she could let it out, and live.

She would never let it out. She was not strong enough to keep it from moving toward her now, but she was strong enough to never let it out. She wasn’t so weak that she would let anyone else have to live with it looking, seeing, touching, invading—





69

Declan didn’t ordinarily bring people home.