Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(2)

“Yes,” he said simply, “I want the key.” Then he hung up.

He told no one else about the call, not even his brothers. What was one more tiny secret, he thought, in a life full of them.

Boredom and secrets: an explosive combination.

Something was going to burn.





1

Creatures of all kinds had begun to fall asleep.

The cat was the most dramatic. It was a beautiful animal, if you liked cats, with a dainty face and long, cottony fur, the kind that seemed like it would melt away into liquid sugar. It was a calico, which under normal circumstances would mean it was certainly not an it, but rather a she. Calico had to be inherited from two X chromosomes. Perhaps that rule didn’t apply here, though, in this comely rural cottage nearly no one knew about. Forces other than science held domain in this place. The calico might not even be a cat at all. It was cat-shaped, but so were some birthday cakes.

It had watched them kill him.

Caomhán Browne had been his name. Was still his name, really. Like good boots, identities outlived those who wore them. They had been told he was dangerous, but he’d thrown everything but what they’d feared at them. A tiny end table. A plump and faded floral recliner. A stack of design magazines. A flat-screen television of modest size. He’d actually stabbed Ramsay with the crucifix from the hallway wall, which Ramsay found funny even during the act of it. Holy smokes, he’d said.

One of the women wore lambskin dress-for-success heeled boots, and there was now an unbelievable amount of blood on them. One of the men was prone to migraines, and he could feel the dreamy magic of the place sparking the lights of an aura at the edges of his vision.

In the end, Lock, Ramsay, Nikolenko, and Farooq-Lane had cornered both Browne and the cat in the low-ceilinged kitchen of the Irish holiday cottage, nothing within Browne’s reach but a decorative dried broom on the wall and the cat. The broom wasn’t good for anything, even sweeping, but the cat might have been used to good effect if thrown properly. Few have the constitution to throw a cat properly, however, and Browne was not one of them. One could see the moment he realized he didn’t have it in him and gave up.

“Please don’t kill the trees,” he said.

They shot him. A few times. Mistakes were expensive and bullets were cheap.

The calico was lucky it hadn’t gotten shot, too, crouched behind Browne as it was. Bullets go through things; that’s their job. Instead it merely got splattered with blood. It let out an uncanny howl full of rage. It bottle-brushed its tail and puffed its cotton coat. Then it hurled itself straight at them, because you can trust that the Venn diagram of cats and folks willing to throw cats is a circle.

There was a very brief moment where it seemed quite possible that one of them was about to be wearing a cat with every claw extended.

But then Browne gave a final shiver and went still.

The cat dropped.

A body hits the floor with a sound like no other; the multifaceted fhlomp of an unconscious bag of bones can’t be replicated in any other way. The calico made this sound and then was also still. Unlike Browne, however, its chest continued to rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.

It was impossibly, unnaturally, entirely asleep.

“Truly fucked up,” remarked Ramsay.

There was a window over the little white sink, and through it one could see a deep green field and, closer, three shaggy ponies standing in the churned-up mud by the gate. They sagged to their knees, tipping against each other like drowsy fellows. A pair of goats bleated a confused question before slumping like the ponies. There were chickens, too, but they had already fallen asleep, soft multicolored mounds littered across the green.

Caomhán Browne had been what the Moderators called a Zed. This is what it meant to be a Zed: Sometimes, when they dreamt, they woke up with a thing they’d been dreaming about in their hands. The cat, as suspected, was not a cat. It was a cat-shaped thing drawn out of Browne’s head. And like all of Browne’s living dreams, it could not stay awake if Browne was dead.

“Note time of death for the record,” said Nikolenko.

They all cast their attention back to their prey—or their victim, depending on how human one found him. Farooq-Lane checked her phone and tapped a message into it.

Then they went to find the other Zed.

Overhead, the clouds were dark, eclipsing the tops of the slanting hills. The little Kerry farm was edged by a tiny, mossy wood. It was beautiful, but in between the trees, the air hummed even more than in the cottage. It was not exactly that they couldn’t breathe in this atmosphere. It was more like they couldn’t think, or like they could think too much. They were all getting a little nervous; the threats seemed truer out here.

The other Zed wasn’t even trying to hide. Lock found him sat in the crook of a mossy tree with a disturbingly blank expression.

“You killed him, didn’t you?” the Zed asked. Then, when Farooq-Lane joined Lock, he said, “Oh, you.”

Complicated familiarity coursed between the Zed and Farooq-Lane.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Farooq-Lane said. She was shivering a little. Not a cold shiver. Not a frightened shiver. One of those rabbits running over your grave numbers. “All you have to do is stop dreaming.”

Lock cleared his throat as if he felt the bargain wasn’t quite as simple as that, but he said nothing.