Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(28)

Parsifal didn’t reply. He merely began to fold his laundry, which she’d just had washed by the hotel.

“I’m going to be gone for hours,” Farooq-Lane said. She should have been gone already. The night was fully black behind the hotel’s ugly gray drapes. “It’s unacceptable for us to be apart that long. What if you have a vision?”

He tucked two very long black socks together, fastidiously plucking some lint off one before pressing it flat on top of his already folded clothing. He didn’t bother to argue with her; he simply failed to get up. What was she going to do, drag him?

Farooq-Lane never lost her temper. As a child, she’d been famous for this unflappability—both her mother and Nathan had wild tempers. Her mother could be trusted to lose her patience over anything that began with the word invoice, while Nathan would be sanguine for days, weeks, before suddenly bursting into surprising fury over triggers no one else could identify. Farooq-Lane, however, could be neither needled nor frustrated. She’d been born with a head for plans. Making them, keeping them, revising them, executing them. As long as there was a plan, a system, she was serene.

Parsifal Bauer was making her lose her temper.

“Food,” Farooq-Lane said, hating herself first for not being any more eloquent and then because she had been reduced to bribery. “Come with me and we’ll find whatever food you want.”

“Nothing will be open,” Parsifal said reasonably.

“Grocery stores will be,” she said. “Dark chocolate can be had. Seventy percent. Ninety, even. We’ll get more bottled water.”

He kept folding as if she hadn’t spoken. She could feel her temperature continuing to rise. Was this what Nathan had felt like before he killed people? This swelling grim urgency?

She pushed that away.

“You can wait in the car,” she said. “With your phone. You can text me if you begin to have a vision, and I’ll come out of the hotel.”

Lock would be steamed by this wretched compromise, but Parsifal didn’t seem to realize what a stretch she was making. He carefully tucked the arms of a sweater with elbow patches into a perfectly geometric shape.

Farooq-Lane had absolutely no idea how to make a teen boy do anything he didn’t want to do.

But to her relief, Parsifal was now standing up. Selecting a few of the items of clothing. Heading toward the bedroom.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He turned, his expression unfathomable behind his tiny glasses. “If I’m going out, I have to shower first.”

The door closed behind him. She could hear music begin to play from his phone speaker. Two women richly cooed at each other with the trembling drama only possible in old opera. The shower began to run.

Farooq-Lane closed her eyes and counted to ten.

She hoped they found these Zeds soon.





15

Ask your brother about the Fairy Market.

It really existed.

It really existed, and that meant Bryde did, too. They’ll be whispering my name.

It was black outside, black, black, black, and Ronan’s mood was electric. He and Declan were at the Fairy Market, which Declan knew because Niall Lynch had frequented it and Ronan knew because a stranger had whispered it to him in a dream. Things were changing. His head didn’t know if it was for better or for worse yet, but his heart didn’t care. It was pumping pure night through him.

The Carter Hotel, the site of the Fairy Market, was a big, older building, perfectly square, with lots of small windows and intricate carving at the roofline, formal and tatty as a grandpa dressed for church. It was the kind of hotel one used as a landmark when giving directions, not a hotel one checked into. The parking lot was full of cars and vans. Lots of vans. Ronan wondered what they’d brought. Guns? Drugs? Dreamers? Was Bryde here tonight?

“He wouldn’t have been happy I was bringing you to this,” Declan said, glancing in the dark rearview mirror. For what, who knew. “He wouldn’t have wanted anything bad to happen to you.”

He did not quite emphasize the to you, but it was understood. Nothing bad to happen to you, something bad could happen to me. Sons and fathers, fathers and sons. Of all the things Niall Lynch had dreamt into being, his family was the most marvelous. Of course, he had only technically dreamt part of it—his gentle wife, the boys’ adoring mother, Aurora Lynch. A creature of fairy tales by nearly every measure: the bride with a mysterious past, the woman who’d never been a girl, the lady with the golden hair, the lover with the lovely voice. He hadn’t dreamt his sons, but they couldn’t help but be shaped by his dreams. His dreams both populated and paid for the Barns. His dreams taught the boys secrecy, the importance of being hidden, the value of the unspoken. His dreams made them an island: Niall had no for-bearers that were ever spoken of—there was an aunt and an uncle in New York, but even as children, the brothers understood that these were pet names, not true titles—and Aurora of course had no other family. Her pedigree began with Niall Lynch’s imagination, and that wasn’t a thing you could visit at Christmas.

The Lynch brothers were not Niall Lynch’s dreams, but they grew into the shape of them anyway.

And who more than Ronan, a son with his father’s face and father’s dreaming?

“He’s welcome to come back to stop me,” Ronan said.