Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(116)

Inside, the town house was trashed. Not just trashed, but ruined, intentionally destroyed. He had to step over the microwave, which had been thrown into the middle of the entry. Art from the walls was cast onto the stairs, as if it had been shot fleeing. The drawers of the hallway table were pulled out and thrown against the wall. Every light was on.

Ronan examined himself for feeling again. It had not yet returned. He turned his head and told Chainsaw, “Find them.”

Silently, the raven took wing, wheeling around a light fixture and swooping up the stairs.

The last thing Matthew had said to him was that he was a liar.

He pulled the front door closed and stalked through the first floor, Hennessy following him in a daze. The rooms were unrecognizable. It took him a moment to realize that some things were missing: lamps, statues, some of the furniture. And some things were like the microwave: hurled into a wrong place.

There were bullet holes in the sofa.

he

felt

nothing

“Matthew?” he said in a low voice. “Declan?”

The first floor was empty. He found he didn’t want to climb the stairs. He still had that fuzzy noiselessness inside him, that lack of feeling, but he also sort of thought that if they were dead upstairs, this was the last minute he had before adding the memories of their bodies to his others.

“Kerah,” Chainsaw called from the second or third floor.

Okay. Just do it.

Ronan climbed the stairs. At the top of them he found words painted across the wall that used to hold family photos.

STOP DREAMING

A pair of Matthew’s novelty socks were inexplicably tossed in the center of the carpet. The beagles on them peered at Ronan, who peered back.

He heard a rustling from the master bedroom. It was impossible to place. It sounded busy.

“Ronan?” whispered Hennessy. She didn’t sound like herself.

“Stay downstairs,” he whispered back. He knew he didn’t sound like himself, either.

“Kerah,” Chainsaw insisted, from the master.

Ronan risked it. “Declan? Matthew?”

“Ronan! We’re up here!” Matthew’s voice, and every feeling Ronan hadn’t felt for the past five minutes returned all at once. He had to crouch for a second by the beagle socks, fingers pressed into Declan’s carpet, normally perfect but now crunchy with paint splatters. God, God, God. It was both a prayer of gratitude and a plea.

“Did you send these damn monsters?” Declan called.

Yes, yes he had.

The mist had cleared; Ronan was able to straighten and continue to the master.

The sundogs filled it. Their omnipresence made no sense if one thought of them as a pack of dogs, but if one thought of them as a cloud of smoke, it made perfect sense. Like a gas, they expanded to fill the size of the container. They parted around Ronan, mouths gaping and fiery, as he looked in each room.

“Where are you guys?”

“Up here,” Declan said in a sour voice.

Ronan looked up. The voice was coming behind the tiny panel in the ceiling that led to the attic space. “Why the hell are you still up there?”

“Your monsters are trying to kill us, too,” Matthew’s voice said, but it sounded cheery about it.

The attic door cracked. Instantly all the sundogs were at Ronan’s feet, piling over one another, trying to get high enough to get in. They made a very good job of it in very short order.

“Whoa, whoa, shut it,” Ronan said. “Get down!”

But the sundogs didn’t attend.

“Ronan,” Declan said, in a warning sort of way.

“Hold on, hold on,” Ronan said, trying to work it out.

Lindenmere’s words came back to him. He cast around the second floor until he found Matthew’s sport water bottle rolled underneath his bed. Quench them with water, Lindenmere had said. There wasn’t enough water in here to pour over all of them, but it was at least enough to test a theory.

But to his surprise, that wasn’t how it happened.

He unscrewed the top.

Immediately, the sundogs poured into the bottle.

One moment the room was full of them, the floor covered by their milling, nebulous bodies. The next, the water in the bottle momentarily darkened and swirled and then went clear again. The only evidence that the sundogs were actually still in there, somehow, was a small wisp of darkness that wouldn’t entirely melt away, like a strand of dark oil.

Ronan capped the bottle. “All clear. Hennessy, it’s all clear!”

The attic door disgorged his brothers, first Matthew, then Declan, then Jordan.

Jordan rushed across the room and held Hennessy so fast that Hennessy stumbled and had to catch herself on the doorjamb.

“I thought you were dead,” Hennessy said in a hollow voice.

“They’re dead,” Jordan whispered. “They’re all dead.”

Matthew went to Ronan to have his head embraced, like when he was younger, and Ronan hugged him tightly.

“I’m sorry I lied,” he told Matthew. Declan and Ronan held gazes over the top of Matthew’s golden curls. In that shared gaze Ronan saw what the destroyed town house already implied: It had been bad.

Declan said, “Without your monsters we’d be dead. Are they—”

Ronan shook the water bottle. “They’re in here.” He handed the bottle to Matthew, who pulled out of his embrace to sit on the bed and study it. “There you go, kid, don’t say I never gave you anything.”