Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(27)

She was wrong, of course. Jordan had to do this because she gave a shit. That was the rule: If you gave a shit about the job, the job was yours. Hennessy gave a shit about surviving, of course, but the bottom line was that she just didn’t think this Fairy Market plan was going to launch.

Jordan seemed to read her mind—easier, of course, when the minds were so similar—because she said, “It’ll work, Hennessy.” At the end of the day, this was the difference between Hennessy and Jordan. While Hennessy imagined flinging herself from a roof and falling, Jordan imagined flinging herself from a roof and flying.





14

It had only taken Farooq-Lane a day to discover that Nikolenko had been entirely wrong about Parsifal Bauer. He was not easy, he was passive, which was another thing entirely. He did not do anything he didn’t particularly want to do, but it was often hard to tell he’d managed to avoid it or subvert it. When Farooq-Lane had been young, they’d had a family dog who behaved the same way. Muna, a beautiful sort of shepherd mix with lush tufted black hair around her throat, like a fox. She seemed perfectly pliable until asked to do something she didn’t want to do—go out in the rain, come into a room for company to admire her. Then she would flop to the ground, a boneless rag doll, and have to be dragged, which was never worth it.

This was Parsifal Bauer.

For starters, he was an infernally picky eater. Farooq-Lane was an excellent cook (what was cooking but a delicious system?) and believed in good food treated well, but Parsifal Bauer made her look like an indiscriminate hog. He would sooner not eat than consume a meal that violated his secret inner rules. Soups and sauces were treated with distrust, meat could not be left pink in the center, crusts on baked goods could not be tolerated. Carbonated drinks were an outrage. He enjoyed a specific sort of yellow sponge cake but not frosting. Strawberry jam but not strawberries. Getting him to eat at the hotel that first night in Washington, DC, had been an absolute failure. It had been late enough that little was open and Farooq-Lane had felt virtuous to have found sandwiches for them both. Parsifal had not said he wouldn’t eat his, but he looked at the sandwich on the plate until midnight and then midnight thirty and then eventually she gave up on him.

He had rules for other parts of life, too. He had to sit by a window. He would not be the first through a door. He did not like to be seen without shoes. He would not allow others to carry his bag. He needed to have a pen on his person at all times. He wanted to listen to opera or silence. He had to brush his teeth three times a day. He preferred to not sleep in a full-sized bed. He would not sleep with the windows closed. He would not drink tap water. Bathroom stalls had to have doors that went all the way to the floor if he was to do anything of consequence. He would not go out in public without showering first.

He was most flexible first thing in the morning, and then he slowly became worse as he grew more tired. By night, he was an impossibility of caged rules and desires, his mood secretive and gloomy. The moods were so intractable and thorough that Farooq-Lane went straight through sympathy to aggravation.

The first fight they had was when Parsifal discovered they were sharing a room, Moderators’ orders. It was a suite, so he had a pullout bed in the sitting area, and she had a door she could close, but the bathroom was only accessible through Farooq-Lane’s room—impossible!—and he insisted the window be open while he slept. It was freezing, Farooq-Lane pointed out, and she didn’t think either of them getting flu would serve the situation. Parsifal, in the process of piling sofa pillows onto one side of his bed in order to make it seem more like a twin than a full, argued that she could keep the door to her room shut. Farooq-Lane countered that the in-room thermostat would respond to the open window and pump up the heat to intolerable levels. She thought the conversation was over. Decided. They went to bed.

After her door was closed, he opened the window.

She roasted. The window was closed by the time she got up, but she knew he’d closed it right before she came out. She confronted him. He was unapologetic, unresponsive. The window was closed now, wasn’t it?

This was Parsifal Bauer.

“I am not going,” Parsifal told her, his tall form perched on the edge of his sofa bed with its barricade of pillows.

It was evening on day four—no, day five, she thought. Day six? When you were traveling, time got mixed up. It stretched and pinched to create unexpected shapes. Farooq-Lane and Parsifal had been together in the hotel for several sweltering nights, battling over secretively open windows and take-out food against a backdrop of generic hotel carpet and deep-cut German opera. Parsifal had not yet had another vision, so she was operating on the data from his last one. It had taken her and the others days of arduous research to discover that his vision was presenting something called the Fairy Market, a rotating black market that only began after dark. It was hard to say what they would find there, but if Parsifal was having a vision about it, it had to involve either a Zed or a Visionary.

Lock had just sent her an entry pass via courier. There weren’t any other Moderators in the city, but Farooq-Lane had a number to call for backup from local agency staffers if she found something that needed to be acted on immediately. This meant if someone needed to be killed. Something needed to be killed. A Zed.

“You have to come with,” Farooq-Lane told Parsifal. “That’s not coming from me. That’s coming from above.”