Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(30)

“Angie,” Declan said. Impossible to tell how he felt about her.

“It’s been so long, honey,” she said.

She was staring at Ronan, so Declan led him over and said, “This is my brother.”

Angie was still making an uncomfortable amount of eye contact. Ronan was a champion at staring, but she might have had him beat for sheer intensity. “He looks—”

“I know,” Declan said.

“You talk?” Angie asked Ronan.

Ronan bared his teeth. Her eyebrows continued looking surprised.

“Where you boys keeping yourselves?” Angie asked. “Your daddy was always telling me to come over for dinner if I was in the area, and here we are. It always sounded like a paradise. The Lynch farm. I feel like I could draw that farmhouse if I had to, he was such a good storyteller.”

Ronan felt a twinge of betrayal. The Barns was the Lynch family’s secret, not something to be given away over a pint or two. He’d idolized Niall before he died; maybe he didn’t want to know more about this side of him.

“It burned down,” Declan lied smoothly, without a pause. “Vandals, while we were away at school.”

Angie’s face turned tragic. “You boys have had more than your fair share of bad news. You’re like a podcast. Look at you. Tragedy. What brings you back? You here like everyone else, to see if you can catch a glimpse of him before they bring him in?”

“Him?”

She leaned across the counter, all of her spilling against the drawstring closure. In a stage whisper, she said, “He’s breaking the rules, they said. On the wrong side of everything. Doesn’t care about the rules out there or the rules in here. Just does what he wants. They say he’s here because there’s law here and we all know how we feel about that.”

Declan said, “Who?”

Angie patted his cheek. “You always did want answers.”

Annoyance briefly broke through Declan’s features before being replaced with his neutral expression again. “We’d better go. Time’s money.”

It was always a good time, Ronan thought, to trot out a Declanism.

“Watch out for the po-po,” Angie said.

Declan was already turning away. “I’ll do that.”

As the Lynch brothers retreated down a long red hallway, Ronan asked, “Does she help run this?”

“Angie? Why would you think that?”

“She was behind the desk.”

“She was probably seeing if she could get cash from the drawers. Do you have the keycard? We’ll need it to get into the elevator.”

This was dreamlike, too, this casual admission of her criminality, said in the same bland tone Declan said everything. But this used to be Declan’s world, Ronan reminded himself. Before the gray town house, before the gray suit, before gray tone of voice, before invisibility, before their father’s murder, Declan Lynch came to these often enough to be recognized.

Sometimes Ronan wasn’t sure he knew any of his family.

The elevator doors at the end of the hall were like a gateway to an otherworld: brass and glimmering and surrounded by an elaborately carved frame, set like a jewel in the blood-red wall.

Declan swiped the keycard in the elevator’s reader and the doors hissed open, revealing mirrored sides. The brothers, outside, looked at the brothers, inside. Declan, with his good boring suit and Niall Lynch’s nose and curled dark hair. Ronan, with his shaved head and his tattoo creeping out of his collar and Niall Lynch’s mouth and nose and eyes and chin and build and dream ability and everything else. Unmistakably Niall Lynch’s sons, unmistakably brothers.

They stepped in.

“Up we go,” said Declan.





16

Jordan sat in her car in the Carter parking lot. It was only dumb luck that she’d found a spot there, one last circle round through the cars, telling herself that if she was meant to find a spot there would be one, and there it was.

She was late, but she took a moment anyway, because she was having one of her episodes.

Jordan didn’t dream when she slept—she didn’t think any of Hennessy’s dreamed girls did—but when this feeling started, she thought she knew what it must feel like. Her thoughts pulsed with slightly wrong memories and places she had never been and people she had never met. If she didn’t stay focused, those daydreams would seem as important as reality. She’d find herself breathing in time with a pulse outside herself. If she didn’t focus, she’d find herself heading toward the Potomac, or just due west. Once she’d come back to herself and found she’d driven two hours to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

It had taken all of her concentration to get to the Carter.

Please pass, she thought. Not tonight. Tonight’s not a good time.

She forced herself to be in the moment by considering how she would re-create the view before her on canvas. The big, square Carter Hotel looked like a dollhouse made out of a moving box, its tiny windows alight with a yellow glow, silhouettes moving festively in them. It would be easy to render the scene charming, but really, everything here had an edge. Dark, dead leaves heaved restlessly in front of the exterior lights. The sidewalks were apocalyptically empty. For every cozily lit window was a shrouded window. Statistically, someone behind one of them was getting hurt.