Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(115)

Greywaren, the trees said. We will give you what you need.

“I don’t know what I need, Lindenmere,” he said. He struggled to imagine a solution. “I can’t get there in time. I need something that will get there. Something secret. I’m trusting you. Give me what I need.”

Something dangerous, like you, he thought.

And like you, the forest whispered back.

Hennessy’s little glowing bauble of hope still remained in the clearing, suspended between raindrops.

Lindenmere began to work.

The rain sank into the ground.

Chainsaw reappeared with a wary cry, accompanied by the soft whuff of her wings through the air. She landed on his arm, her ruff hackled up. She chattered her beak. Her talons clung more tightly to his arm, and where his wrist wasn’t protected by his leather bracelets, they drew blood.

Hennessy covered her head as leaves exploded from the ground. Birds swirled up around them, one and the same with the leaves. The ground rumbled, the dirt pulling loose from around the roots down below. That low booming growled through the earth, getting higher and louder until it was a pure and clarion note ringing through the air, a purposeful and clean version of Adam’s scream—a sound that meant it was alive, very alive, not the reverse. The leaves were frozen in midfall. The birds were trapped in midflight. Everything was held in that note.

In this frozen moment, lights swirled and spiraled in between the trees. The lights spooled the darkness around themselves like they were twisting yarn onto a bobbin. The darkness had weight and mass and shape. This was what Lindenmere was making for Ronan, with Ronan.

The dark new shapes let out no sound except for the dry leaves rustling with the force of their movement as the darkness kept spooling new layers on top of the light, hiding the light away inside.

Then the trapped leaves fell; the birds flew away.

The pack was made.

They coursed toward Ronan and Hennessy, a pack of creatures without definition.

With a squeak, Opal begged to be picked up, and he did so just as the creatures reached them.

Ronan saw that they were dogs, or hounds, or wolves. They were sooty, dead black, all mingling into each other, less like distinct animals and more like smoke billowing. Their eyes gleamed white-orange, and when they panted, their mouths glowed and revealed the brilliant furnaces inside each of them.

Sundogs are as fast as sunbeams, the trees whispered. They’re hungry. Quench them with water.

“They’re frightening,” wailed Opal.

“I think that’s the idea,” Ronan said.

Tell them what to do, the trees said. The sundogs milled before him, black tongues rolling over black teeth, smoke seeping from them.

Ronan told the pack, “Save my brother.”





74

The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. In a way, the Lynch brothers had always been the most important and truest definition of the Lynch family. Niall was often gone, and Aurora was present but amorphous. Childhood was the three of them tearing through the woods and fields around the Barns, setting things on fire and digging holes and wrestling. Secrets bound them together far more tightly than any friendship ever could, and so even when they went to school, they remained the Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. Even after Niall died and Ronan and Declan had fought for a year, they’d remained tangled together, because hate binds as strongly as love. The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch.

Ronan didn’t know who he would be without them.

He drove like a demon.

It wasn’t only in Lindenmere that time did funny things. It took Ronan and Hennessy one hour and thirty-eight minutes to get to Alexandria, a feat only made possible through a combination of illegal speeds and giving very few damns about the consequences of those speeds. But one hour and thirty-eight minutes had never taken up so much space before. Every second was a minute, a day, a week, a month, a year. Every mile took lifetimes to cover. He would not know if the sundogs had made it in time until he got there.

He called his brothers. They did not pick up.

“Pick up,” Hennessy muttered, in the passenger seat.

Ronan was always the one to find his dead family members; it didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t that he wanted his brothers to be the ones to have to bear the emotional wound of discovering the bodies. He just didn’t want it to be him. He had been the one to find his father’s body in the driveway outside their farmhouse, skull, meet tire iron. He had been the one to find his mother’s body in the dying ruins of Cabeswater, a dream, extruded. Those images were his forever now, to the victor the prize, to the discoverer the memory.

He called Adam. Adam didn’t pick up.

“Pick up,” Hennessy said.

Time stretched out long and weird and infinite, a night without end, a city no closer.

He tried calling his brothers again.

They still didn’t pick up.

“Somebody pick up.” Hennessy pressed her hands over her face.

Finally, they pulled into the sedate, sterile town house neighborhood Declan and Matthew lived in. It appeared quiet and ordinary, the cars sleeping in driveways, the streetlights humming to soothe themselves, the leafless decorative saplings shivering in their dreams.

The door to Declan’s town house was cracked open.

Ronan discovered in himself not worry, nor sadness, nor adrenaline, but rather a dead, dull absence of feeling. Of course, he thought. He looked to the dark city street behind him, but it was empty. Then he pushed open the door, Hennessy limping in behind him.