Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(123)



“How long?” Ronan asked.

“As long as it takes.”

His phone had still not buzzed; he had no answer from Adam. He wasn’t going to get one before he had to make up his mind.

Ronan put his hand on the hilt of VEXED TO NIGHTMARE. If he pulled the sword from the scabbard, there’d be no denying what he was. Everyone here would know what he was capable of. This was not just a vendor at the Fairy Market and a few black market onlookers. This was a crowd of sixty, a good majority of whom would consider such proof of dreaming a definite death sentence.

Hennessy and Ronan looked at each other.

They pulled the swords free.

VEXED TO NIGHTMARE gleamed blindingly. The blade was made of the sky, and the sun blasted along every inch of it. As he swung it in an enormous arc over his head, it shimmered and dripped and blasted sunlight out from it, obscuring him. Beside him, Hennessy had unsheathed FROM CHAOS and now it gleamed with the cold, pure white of the full moon, and when she swung it, sparks and stars and fuming comet trail dripped and blasted out from it, hiding the rest of them from view.

It forced the dreamkillers back even more surely than it had forced back the Lace.

Bryde stepped into this furious light. He was older than Ronan and Hennessy, but hard to say by how much. His eyes were intense and clever over his hawkish nose. He was tawny-haired and tall, with an understated confidence to his movement, a tidy way of carrying his height. He looked like a man who didn’t have to posture, who knew his strength. He looked like a man who didn’t lose his temper very easily. He looked, Ronan thought, like a hero.

Bryde said, “Now we dream.”

In his hands was a very familiar shape: a clone of the hoverboard that Ronan had dreamt back in Harvard.

He threw it down. It bobbed to Hennessy and Ronan and hovered just above the ground.

Ronan swirled VEXED TO NIGHTMARE one more time, creating a new shower of blinding light, and then Bryde, Ronan, and Hennessy climbed onto the hoverboard, gripping one another.

Bryde, in front, pitched the board over the surging and furious river.

When the light cleared, the dreamers were gone.

END OF BOOK ONE





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was a very long time coming, and for a nearly a year, I didn’t believe in it. I was too ill for stories, which was not a kind of ill I thought was possible, but it turns out that one should avoid harboring parasites if at all possible because they never pay enough rent to justify their occupation. Because it took such a very long time to diagnose and then even longer to cure, the story of my illness would probably take more words to tell than this book, but it is not overstating to say that this book wouldn’t exist without the medical team at Charlottesville’s Resilient Roots Functional Medicine, Ryan Hall, and Robert Abbott, MD. I can’t thank them enough in helping me stagger my way back to health.

My dear friends and longtime critique partners Brenna Yovanoff and Sarah Batista-Pereira were there every arduous step of the way, putting up with more bitching than any two humans should have to put up with, even when I was half-asleep. You’ve always been good at meeting me in my dreams anyway.

I’m intensely grateful to my editor, David Levithan, and my agent, Laura Rennert, for their forbearance. They saw many things in their inboxes that were not books before they finally got to see a book. Thank you for giving me time to blink awake.

Thanks also to Bridget and Victoria, for your reads of many ugly drafts without ends, and to Harvard Ryan, for late-night Thayer adventures, and Will, for putting up with a dreamer for so long.

And thank you, as ever, to Ed. This was a long one, but we woke from the nightmare together, and I’m glad to find we’re still holding hands tightly now that we’re awake.

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