Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(113)

June screamed, high and light and airy.

“Stay down,” the man said to Jordan, punching her. “Why won’t you fucking stay down?”

Jordan elbowed him right in the nose and he swayed. Not enough to stop him, but enough for her to scramble out from under his weight. She felt her arms seized from behind. Her feet kick, kick, kicked on the tile. They had her by her biceps and she couldn’t twist free. The guy was getting up. She was done, she could feel it.

Suddenly, she felt the hands holding her jerk. They jerked again, and then, just as the first man went for his gun, they fell away.

Jordan scrambled back, losing her balance, but an entirely different hand reached out to steady her. As this new person lifted her up instead of dragging her down, her gaze snagged on something familiar: Beautiful shoes with exceptional tooling.

Declan released her in time to punch the man as he rose with his gun.

Jordan got her feet under her. There was a confusing number of people in the room. The stunned woman on the floor must have been who was holding Jordan before. Declan had landed another punch on the man. June was here, somewhere.

The man who Declan had punched staggered but didn’t go down. He threw himself at both of them.

There was a professional precision to both his offense and his defense, a surgical and effortless way that he fought both Declan and Jordan, using the two of them against each other instead of regarding them as a double threat. When the other woman got up, the two of them quickly forced Declan and Jordan up against the walk-in pantry door. It flapped open behind them.

Jordan didn’t want to think of how quickly it would be over in that small space.

Then the man violently spasmed back and the woman stumbled, unbalanced.

June, gasping blood, had shot the man.

She squeezed the trigger again, but the gun clicked, pointless, empty.

“Jordan,” she rasped. Everything about her was ruined. Jordan couldn’t bear it, but there was nothing to do but bear it. “Run. Go.”

“June,” Jordan said, “June, I can’t.”

The woman scrambled for one of the discarded guns.

“There’s so … many … more …” June said. “Go.” She told Declan, “They’re looking … for Ronan, too. They know about his brother. Where he lives—”

Then she threw herself at the woman as the woman rose with the gun, wrapping herself around the woman’s body even as the woman shot her.

“Matthew,” Declan said.

They ran.





72

The Lace was killing Hennessy.

It was doing what it said, really, what it always did.

It overlaid her, enveloped her, replaced her. Give in, it urged, and this will stop hurting.

It had been killing her for ever so much longer than it normally did. Normally she had hurled herself awake by now, arriving with a copy of herself, newly tattooed, a little closer to death.

But this wasn’t a dream she could stop, this was Lindenmere, and the person who could stop it was—

“Lindenmere,” bellowed Ronan, in a completely unfamiliar voice, light flashing all around her, “take it away.”

And then the Lace had released her, and then it was simply gone, and Hennessy was lying in the middle of the clearing on her back. Opal was crying in a frightened way and petting Hennessy’s sleeve carefully. Hennessy couldn’t move because everything hurt. It hadn’t been long enough since the last time to fully recover and now she just felt … extruded. Her throat stung and she knew without checking that the Lace had branded her with another tattoo. Room for just one more.

It was almost over.

It was almost a relief to let herself think it.

Ronan cussed under his breath as he knelt beside her. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t realize it was going to come for you like that, all of a sudden—” He cussed some more.

“The copy …” Hennessy said.

“There’s no copy,” Ronan said. “You didn’t bring anything back because it wasn’t your dream, you didn’t wake up, you were never asleep. Lindenmere just stopped it. There’s just you. Shit. Shit damn. Lindenmere, Opal, can you help her—”

So it really was true. The Lace really would kill her even without the copies. It felt true. It felt like she was almost dead now. It felt like if Opal touched her skin, it would just wipe away.

Opal laid something cool on Hennessy’s forehead, then repeated her ministrations on the backs of Hennessy’s hands, and then on her exposed ankles. She babbled soothingly in an unrealistic-sounding language. She was still snottily crying herself. Ronan stood and hugged Opal’s head to his leg.

“I don’t know,” Ronan said. “You need something to drive it away from you, like my light did.”

Hennessy was about to say she hadn’t seen that, but it took too much work to talk, and anyway, she thought she had actually seen it, now that she thought about it. That flash of light. That momentary retreat of the Lace before Lindenmere had taken it away.

“Something already in place,” Ronan continued. “Is that helping? What Opal’s doing? Armor. Armor and then something else, like a shield, something you could bring back with you that’s not yourself, until you learn how to not bring things back every time you dream.”