Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(17)

“Oh God,” Adam said.

He had been sleeping, not dead, and now his face reflected the truth: that he’d woken to a hell-room of crustacean roommates.

“God, Ronan, God! What did you do?”

“I’m fixing it.” Ronan slid out of bed.

Slam.

As Ronan cast for a weapon, he saw that Adam had smashed one against the wall with a biology text. Its insides shot out—yellow glop like the inside of a squashed caterpillar.

This worked the rest of the creatures to frenzy.

“Fix it faster,” Adam said.

The hoverboard bobbed close; Ronan leapt on it. The momentum sent him rocketing to the corner of the dorm room, slamming up against the wall, but he kept his balance. Giving the wall a shove, he shot to the other corner instead, where a flag was leaned. He lifted it high, wielding it like a gallant Irish hero of old.

Slam. Adam smashed another, and another.

Ronan stabbed a crab with his makeshift lance. It pierced right through the barcode.

“Gotcha, you hungry bastards,” Ronan told them.

Another crab landed on his arm; he smashed it against the wall and impaled it just as quick. Another flipped onto its back; he stabbed it through the barcode. Stomp, stomp, flick. More slime. Slam. Slam. Adam was killing the ones by the bed. It had a certain gruesome satisfaction.

There was a knocking on the door.

It was unclear how long it had been going on. Only now with all the crabs dead was it quiet enough to hear.

Adam looked at Ronan, horrified.

“The bed,” Ronan hissed. “Put them under the covers for now.”

The knocking continued.

“Just a second!” Adam said.

The two of them furiously scraped a mound of gloppy crab corpses under the comforter. Ronan shoved the hoverboard beneath the bed, where it pressed up tightly against the mattress, desperate for flight.

Adam went to the door. Out of breath, he opened it a crack. “Yeah?”

“Adam Parrish,” Fletcher’s plummy voice said. “What the hell is going on? They’re gonna call the proctor.”

“Fletcher, look, I …” Adam said.

Fletcher pushed open the door.

He stood with his glorious breadth in the door, his hair oiled, books under one arm.

The room was a compelling contemporary painting, a textural experiment of disembodied crab legs, bright liquid guts, and a little bit of Adam’s and Ronan’s blood. It was beginning to stink of exhaust.

Fletcher’s eyes roved over all this. His eyes landed on Ronan’s makeshift lance.

“My flag,” Fletcher said.

Adam shut the door hurriedly behind him.

“The walls,” Fletcher said.

The crab guts were peeling the paint off them and the hoverboard had left several large dents in the plaster.

“The beds,” Fletcher said.

The sheets were torn and ruined.

“The window,” Fletcher said.

One of the panes had somehow gotten broken.

“A motorcycle,” Fletcher said.

It occurred to Ronan that the latter was the most likely to kill him right now, if Adam didn’t, so he turned it off. It took him a second to figure it out because it didn’t have a key, but eventually he found a toggle switch labeled YES/NO.

There was nothing overtly supernatural about the picture without seeing the crabs beneath the covers or the hoverboard beneath the bed.

There was only several thousand dollars’ worth of damage to a Harvard dorm, Ronan’s choking guilt, and a proctor on the way.

Adam said, very simply, “Help me.”





9

Even though Breck Myrtle was technically the number one on this whole thing, he had Jeff Pick break the window to get into the house. That made Pick the guy who started it. Silly, but it made Myrtle feel better about being involved.

Burglary was not Myrtle’s usual modus operandi. His siblings were into that sort of crime, the breaking and entering, the writing of bad checks, the taking of handbags out of unlocked Nissan Sentras. Their mother had taught them all this sort of low-impact criminality. Not taught-taught, not like flash cards. In a lead-by-example way. She was a Walmart greeter now and had urged her prodigy to go legit, but Myrtle had decided to rise above this. He sold art out of a shop in Takoma Park and also on eBay. The online component worked the best, as people trusted him more when they couldn’t see his face. All of the Myrtles had long faces with tiny eyes, and even when at their most benevolent, they had the look of something that might creep out of the dark to eat your body after you died. But that didn’t matter when he was selling art online; it wasn’t about him, it was about the work. Most of it was real, some of it was fake. He didn’t feel bad about the fake stuff; it was barely criminal. People only believed in fake art because they wanted to, so really he was just giving them what they wanted.

He was not a burglar.

But he was making an exception this time for Hennessy. She was already a criminal. Stealing from criminals was like multiplying negative numbers. It turned out positive in the end.

The McLean mansion they had just broken into sprawled at just under twenty thousand square feet, about the same size as the sculpted lot it sat on. If you don’t live in a twenty-thousand-square-foot house, it’s a hard size to wrap your head around. It is about the size of one hundred parking spots, or just under half the size of an NFL-regulation football field, or twice the size of the average American strip mall built between 1980 and today. The mansion had eight bedrooms and ten bathrooms and one ballroom and a pool and a fountain with mermaid statues in it and a movie room and a library full of books with only white spines and a kitchen with two ovens in it. The front room was the size of most New York apartments and was completely empty apart from a chandelier large enough to gain sentience and two sweeping staircases up to the second floor, just in case you wanted to go up one and come down another. Things that you didn’t expect to be coated in gold were coated in gold. Floors were made from marble that had once been someplace famous or covered in wood from trees that were now endangered.