Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(19)

Myrtle slowly turned.

Hennessy stood in the doorway to the room.

She had changed since she’d left in the car. Her kinky hair was now pulled up in a ragged black topknot. She wore tinted glasses, a rabbit fur coat, a lace bralette white against her dark skin, and leather leggings that exposed a fish-scale tattoo on her lower calf. More pastel tattoos covered her knuckles, which were also smeared with paint. He still couldn’t tell how old she was. She could be twenty-five. She could be seventeen.

“The most successful forgeries change as little as possible,” Hennessy said, lighting a cigarette. She had a face that looked like it was smiling even if she wasn’t smiling. “You follow the rules ninety-nine percent of the time, people won’t notice the one percent you don’t. A thousand little lies, pal, that’s the way to do it, not a big lie. A new Van Gogh? No one believes. But they’ll buy a mislaid Henry Tonks. A new Monet water lily? Fat chance. But a minor Philip Guston? Money for dinner. Piece of advice? No one’s gonna buy that Degas you’re holding.”

Myrtle had not prepared himself for this scene. He searched for a reply inside himself and found only anger. It was the way she was unafraid. It was the way she hadn’t screamed. It made him furious. His mother had always warned him he was an angry person and maybe it was true, because he felt his rage multiplying. Tripling, quadrupling, abillioning.

He put down the Degas and took out a knife. “You little bitch. You don’t just talk to me like that.”

Hennessy tapped ash onto the floor. “You don’t just creep into people’s houses like some mission impossible motherfucker, either, and yet here we are.”

A scream came from elsewhere in the mansion. It was hard to tell what age or gender of person had produced it. It did not appear to concern Hennessy.

Myrtle threw himself at her. He was not bad with a knife, and his nuclear rage lent him superpowers. Hennessy ducked out of the way as his shoes lost traction on the loose rug. As he slid onto his ass, anger ignited to white-hot hatred. He hadn’t hurt anyone in several years, but now he could only imagine how it would feel to crush his fingernails through her skin.

There was another scream. Unknown victim, unknown crime scene.

He scrambled to his feet to lunge for her again as she stood there smoking next to a half-finished nude.

“Hold it,” said a voice behind him. Something cold and blunt tickled the skin beneath his ear. “Unless you want to be licking up the mess of your brains.”

He held it.

“Why don’t you hand that knife to Hennessy?”

He handed it to Hennessy, who dropped it into an open jug of paint.

“Jordan,” Hennessy said, “it took you forever to get here.”

The voice attached to the gun replied, “Accident on 495.”

The newcomer stepped into his view. The first thing he saw was the gun, now pointing at his face, a Walther with the word D!PLOMACY sharpied on the barrel. The second thing he saw was the person holding it.

She was a twin; she had to be. She looked just like Hennessy—same hair, same face, same nose ring, same tattoos. She moved like her, too, kinetic, confident, taking up room where there was no room to be had, all muscle and power and teeth-flashing challenge.

He also hated her.

“Now who’s the little bitch?” Hennessy asked him, in that same lazy, mild way.

He called her an offensive word that started with a C and was not crunk.

“Don’t be a stereotype,” Hennessy said. She extinguished her cigarette on his bald spot, and when he was done yelling, the twin with the gun said, “We’re going to take a little walk to the door, and then I never want to see you again.”

Together, the three of them walked down the long hallway, past the collection of paintings he’d been gathering, and then to the door with the broken glass.

Pick stood by it, shivering and holding himself. Blood covered one half of his face, although it was hard to tell where it was coming from. Robinson crouched with an assortment of teeth, presumably his own, cupped in his palm.

Three other girls stood in the gray morning shadows. The light was poor, but to Myrtle, it seemed that they, too, looked very similar to Hennessy. At the very least they all stood like her, like they would fuck you or fuck you up.

The one called Jordan went through Myrtle’s pockets and got his wallet.

“My mind’s like a sieve,” she said. The bright friendliness of her voice as she snapped a cell photo of his ID was one of the more threatening things he’d ever heard. “Wouldn’t want to forget. Oh, hey now.”

She’d taken his Fairy Market invite out of his wallet.

“It’s got my name on it,” he said.

Hennessy laughed, as if that was the least important detail.

“You’ll be sorry,” he said as Jordan handed it off to one of the other girls and vanished it away.

“I don’t think I will be, friend,” replied Jordan.

Hennessy smiled widely at Myrtle, her mouth wide enough to swallow the planet. “Thanks for the dance.”





10

Ronan walked for hours.

At first he walked nowhere, just one foot in front of the other, eyes on boots, boots on leaves, leaves from foreign trees that didn’t know him and didn’t care to. He changed courses only when a walkway turned, when a building loomed, when the wall of Harvard Yard forbiddingly turned him back. Eventually, he found himself walking a labyrinth in an isolated courtyard outside the Divinity School. Some labyrinths had walls of stone or shrubbery; this one was just a brain-like pattern inlaid in the courtyard stones. One could step off the path from outermost circle to innermost at any time. The only thing that kept one in this maze was one’s own feet.