Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(120)

Jordan eyed her dreamer, and then she eyed Declan, and then Ronan. She shook her head. “No. I’m coming to watch you sleep.”

“Jordan,” Hennessy said. “Please go with him. In case something happens.”

Jordan shook her head. “I’m not leaving you to do this alone.”

“Jordan,” Hennessy begged. “The others are all dead. They died thinking I just left them, that I wasn’t even trying. I saw their faces. Please let me do this thing for you. Please. Please just be safe.”

All of this was the opposite of safe, but Declan knew what she meant. She didn’t really mean safe, any more than his life before this had been safe. She meant something I can control.

“Jordan,” Declan said, “I’ll let you drive.”





77

Great Falls sounded wild at night. There were no tourists, no car sounds, no day birds calling. There was just the massive surge of millions of gallons of water rushing down from West Virginia toward the Atlantic, and the trees murmuring in sympathy.

It was cold, finally cold, properly November. They parked the car in a parking lot over a mile away from the falls; they planned to walk the rest of the way in since the park was closed from dusk until dawn. That was how they wanted it. Empty. Undisturbed.

It would have been better to dream closer to the ley line, but none of them felt like they had that kind of time. And they already well knew that Great Falls was the best source of alternate power close by.

Somewhere, the other two Lynch brothers were racing across the state toward the Barns. Hennessy had watched Ronan and Matthew hug, and then watched Ronan and Declan face each other. Ronan had kicked the ground like he was mad at it. Declan had said, I’ll see you at the Barns.

And then Jordan and Hennessy had said goodbye. Maybe the last time they would ever see each other again, their faces that looked so like each other and yet were nothing alike. Jordan, who’d always believed in the world, and Hennessy, who’d always known it was waiting for her to die. The Hennessy who had never seen the Lace, and the Hennessy who had.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Hennessy had said. It was a joke.

“Bring me back a T-shirt,” said Jordan. Another joke.

Then they had hugged, tightly.

Hennessy didn’t want Jordan to go to sleep forever.

And now they were at Great Falls. Hennessy and Ronan lay in the middle of Overlook 1, looking up at the black leaves against the black sky, uncomfortably similar to the appearance of the Lace. The water sounded impossibly close when her head was resting on the boards, like it was just inches below the deck.

She was tired, because she was always tired, but she didn’t know how she would ever sleep like this. Knowing it might be the last time she did.

After several minutes, she asked, “What do you think he’ll be like?”

“Bryde? I don’t know.”

“What do you want him to be like?” Hennessy asked.

“Better at this than me,” Ronan said.

“What’s this?”

“Dreaming. Staying alive. Knowing what to do about the nightwash. Knowing what to do with Matthew. Knowing what to do with these dreamkillers. What do you want him to be like?”

She wanted him to tell her how to stay alive. She wanted him to tell her how to save Jordan for good, so that she no longer had to rely on Hennessy, who was always and ever unreliable. She wanted Jordan to have the life she deserved.

“Sexy as hell,” Hennessy said.

They both laughed.

Every sound seemed amplified; their laugh boomed.

A bright square illuminated the night as Ronan checked his phone. He was looking for a response to his last text to MANAGEMENT. Hennessy could see a wall of text that Ronan had sent about Bryde, and then, on its own line, where Ronan had texted Tamquam. It was marked unread.

He put the phone away.

She could tell that he had been hoping for a reply before they did this.

“Okay. Okay,” Ronan said. “You go to sleep first, because I know how to find you in dreamspace. But that means when you fall asleep, you have to make something to keep the Lace away from you. Immediately. You can’t get shunted out of that dream before I get there to call Bryde, or you die, and the game’s all up.”

She didn’t answer.

“You did it in Lindenmere. You saw how I did it.”

She did. Not just with those little baubles of joy, but with those sundogs. The most incredible part of watching Ronan manifest them hadn’t been the sundogs themselves. It had been when Ronan said to the vast dreamspace that knew every part of him: I’m trusting you. A savage fuckup like Ronan could trust his subconscious that deeply.

Could she?

“I’ll make something, too,” Ronan said. “As soon as I see you.”

She was so afraid.

“Hennessy?” Ronan said, in a slightly different voice.

“Lynch.”

“I’ve been alone a long time,” he said.

Part of her thought that he hadn’t, though. His brothers, his boyfriend, his friends who called him with information in the middle of the night.

But the bigger part of her understood it, because she’d been alone, too. Because at the end of the day, no one else could fathom what it was like living with these endless possibilities inside your head.