Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(121)

Hennessy had come tonight thinking she didn’t want Jordan to sleep forever if this failed.

But now she knew this, too: She didn’t want to die, either.

She reached between them and fumbled until she felt his leather wristbands, then found his hand. She held it. He held back tightly.





78

Ronan was in hell.

He was dreaming.

The Lace was everywhere; it was the entire dream. It was wrong to say it surrounded him, because that would imply that he still existed, and he wasn’t sure of that. The dream was the Lace. He was the Lace.

It was hell.

It was the dreamt security system.

It was Adam’s scream.

It was his last forest dying.

It was his father’s battered body.

It was his mother’s grave.

It was his friends leaving in Gansey’s old Camaro for a year’s trip without him.

It was Adam sitting with him in the labyrinth in Harvard telling him that it was never going to work.

It was tamquam, marked unread.

The Lace.

It would kill him, too, it said. You have nothing but yourself and what is that?

But then there was a furious flash of light, and in it, he felt a burst of hope.

He was part of something bigger.

He remembered what he had promised Hennessy. Something. A weapon. Something. He felt it in his hand. He looked. It was no longer just him and the Lace. It was now his body, his hand, and in his hand, the hilt he’d woken with in the BMW after chasing Mór ó Corra.

“Hennessy?” he shouted.

There was no answer.

Shit.

He had fallen asleep and come here.

And she had fallen asleep and gone where she always went. Into the Lace. Maybe already dead.

“Hennessy!” he shouted. “Lindenmere, are you here? Is she here?”

The Lace pressed in, hungry, dreadful.

If only Opal were here, or Chainsaw. He needed one of his psychopomps. He needed to have Adam strengthening the ley energy while he dreamt. He needed— He needed another dreamer.

He shouted, “We’re more than this, Hennessy!”

That slice of light came again, so brightly white that he couldn’t look at it. He realized now it had been behind the Lace the entire time, and he’d glimpsed it before through one of the ragged holes. It was spinning in a massive circle, and it was getting closer.

Hennessy was behind it. She was spinning a strip of light around in front of her, and it was pressing the Lace away from her. Not vanquishing it, but not allowing it any closer.

It was a sword. Every time it cut the air it released pure white light like the moon and stars.

“Bryde gave this to me,” Hennessy said. Her face was caught in wonder.

Ronan looked at the hilt in his hand. It now had a beautiful black blade to match the hilt. Ronan lifted it, and as he did, it carved a line of sun glow behind it.

The Lace fell back.

Together they might not be able to vanquish Hennessy’s old dream, but they could hold it at bay.

Now they could get their breath. Now they could get their breath enough to say it together: “Bryde.”





79

The very first dream Ronan had ever been truly proud of, truly euphoric over, had been a copy.

It had been in high school. Ronan wasn’t good at surviving high school and he wasn’t good at surviving friendship, and so while his friend Gansey’s back was turned, he’d stolen Gansey’s car. It was a beautiful car. A 1973 bright orange Camaro with stripes right up its hood and straight down its ass. Ronan had wanted to drive it for months, despite Gansey forbidding it.

Maybe because of him forbidding it.

Within hours of stealing it, Ronan had totaled it.

Gansey hadn’t wanted him to drive it because he thought he’d grind the clutch, or curb it, or burn out the tires, or maybe, maybe blow the engine.

And here Ronan had totaled it.

Ronan had loved Richard C. Gansey III far more than he loved himself at that point, and he hadn’t known how he was going to ever face him when he returned from out of town.

And then Joseph Kavinsky had taught him to dream a copy.

Before that, all of Ronan’s dreams—that he knew about, Matthew didn’t count—had been accidents and knickknacks, the bizarre and the useless. When he’d successfully copied a car, an entire car, he’d been out of his mind with glee. The dreamt car had been perfect down to the last detail. Exactly like the original. The pinnacle of dreaming.

Now a copy was the least impressive thing to him. He could copy anything he put his mind to. That just made him a very ethereal photocopier. A one-man 3-D printer.

The dreams he was proud of now were the dreams that were originals. Dreams that couldn’t exist in any other way. Dreams that took full advantage of the impossibility of dreamspace in a way that was cunning or lovely or effective or all of the above. The sundogs. Lindenmere. Dreams that had to be dreams.

In the past, all his good dreams like this were gifts from Lindenmere or accidents rather than things he had consciously constructed. He was beginning to realize, after listening to Bryde, that this was because he’d been thinking too small. His consciousness was slowly becoming the shape of the concrete, waking world, and it was shrinking all his dreams to the probable. Bryde was right: He needed to start realizing that possible and impossible didn’t mean the same thing for him as they did for other people. He needed to break himself of the habit of rules, of doubt, of physics. His what if had grown so tame.