Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(24)

They walked. They ate—well, Ronan and Matthew did. Ronan, in big wolfing bites. Matthew, with the barely checked delight of a child at Christmas. Declan left his untouched because he hadn’t brought an antacid and his stomach was a ruin as usual. The only sounds were their footfalls and the continuous rush of the falls. Damp yellow leaves sometimes fell here or there, deeper in the trees. Puddles on the walk sometimes trembled as if rain had fallen in them, though there was no sign of rain. It felt wild. Hidden.

Declan cautiously stepped onto the topic at hand. “Your teachers say you’ve been sitting on the roof.”

“Yup,” Matthew said cheerfully.

“Ronan, Mary mother of God, chew some of that before you choke.” To Matthew, Declan persisted, “They said you were looking at the river.”

“Yup,” Matthew said.

Ronan tuned in. “You can’t see the river from the school, Matthew.”

Matthew laughed at this, as if Ronan had cracked a joke. “Yup.”

Declan couldn’t probe the motivations of Matthew’s mysterious pull toward the river too hard, because that might tip Matthew off to his dreamt origin. Why did Declan withhold this bit of truth? Because Matthew had been raised as human by their parents and it felt cruel to take it from him now. Because Declan could only handle one brother in crisis. Because he was so thoroughly trained in secrets that everything was one until proven otherwise or stolen from him.

“They said you keep leaving class,” Declan said. “Without explanation.”

Matthew’s teachers had said that and a lot more. They’d explained that they loved Matthew (an unnecessary statement; how could they not?), but they worried he was losing his way. Papers were turned in late, art assignments forgotten. He lost focus during class discussion. He asked to use the restroom in the middle of the period and then never returned. He had been discovered in the unused stairwells, empty rooms, on the roof.

On the roof? Declan had echoed, tasting bile. He felt he’d lived one thousand years, every one of them hell.

Oh, not like that, the teachers had hurried to explain. Just sitting. Just looking. At the river, he said.

“Whatdya gonna do?” Matthew said, with an amiable shrug, as if his behavior were something puzzling even to him. And probably it was. It was not that he was stupid. It was more that he had a deliberate absence of intellectual skepticism. Byproduct of being a dream? Deliberately dreamt into him?

Declan hated that he loved someone who wasn’t real.

Mostly he hated Niall. If he’d bothered teaching Ronan a damn thing about the dreaming, life would look very different right now.

Matthew seemed to have clued in to the idea, at the very least, that he was troubling his brothers, because he asked, “Whatdya want me to do?”

Declan exchanged a look with Ronan behind Matthew’s head. Ronan’s look said, What the hell do you want me to do? and Declan’s look back meant, This is far more your territory than mine.

Ronan said, “Mom would’ve wanted you to do a good job.”

For a brief moment a cloud passed over Matthew’s expression. Ronan was allowed to invoke Aurora because they all knew Ronan loved her as much as Matthew had. Declan, whose skeptical love was imperfect, could not.

“I’m not untrying,” Matthew said.

Ronan’s phone buzzed. He swept it up at once, which meant it could be only one person: Adam Parrish. For a few minutes, he listened to it very hard, and then, in a very quiet, very small, very un-Ronan voice, he said, “Alter idem” and hung up.

Declan found it all worrisome, but Matthew just asked with breezy curiosity, “Why don’t you just say ‘I love you’?”

Ronan snarled, “Why do you wear your burrito on your shirt instead of in your mouth?”

Matthew, unbothered by his tone, flapped some of the lettuce from his clothing with a hand.

Declan had complicated feelings on the topic of Adam Parrish. There was no way Declan would ever tell a significant other the truth of the Lynch family; it was too dangerous for someone disposable to know. But Adam knew everything, both because he’d been there when certain things had gone down, and because Ronan shared everything with him. So theoretically the relationship was a weak link.

But Adam Parrish was also cautious, calculating, ambitious, intensely focused on the long game, so therefore a good influence. And one only had to spend a minute with the two of them to see that he was deeply invested in Ronan. So theoretically Adam was more positive than negative in the safety department.

Unless he left Ronan.

Declan didn’t know how much complication was too much complication for Adam Parrish.

It wasn’t like Adam was the most straightforward of people, either, even if he was pretending he was at the moment.

The Lynch brothers had reached Matthew’s favorite vantage point, Overlook 1. The sturdy, complex decking jutted out toward the falls, cleverly fit around boulders larger than men. If one was less nimble, one could observe from the railing. If one was more nimble, one could scramble up the boulders for a higher view. Matthew always preferred scrambling.

Today was the same as all the others. Matthew pressed his burrito wrapper into Declan’s hands. His ugly hat tumbled from his head, but he didn’t seem to notice it as he clambered across the rocks, getting as high as he could get, as close as he could get.

He was transfixed.