Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(33)

“So you’re already wearing a mask, then,” said the second woman. “Who are you really?”

This felt like a dream, too, only in a dream, he’d be able to change the contents. Here he was only as powerful as his physical waking body.

Ronan wrenched himself free. The sisters laughed as he backed away.

When Declan took his arm a moment later, he flinched.

“Stop horsing around,” Declan said, turning him to propel him through the crowd. Before Ronan could protest this, Declan added in a low voice, “They’re talking about that guy in here, too. The one Angie and Heydar were talking about. Him.”

Say it, Ronan thought. Say Bryde.

Room three, room four, room five. Room six, seven, eight, nine: They saw stolen art, jeweled dresses, rooms striped with blood, more endangered species hanging on walls, jewelry from dead people’s collections. Guns. Lots of guns. Poisons, too, and drugs. They swiped one door open and on the other side of it a man had his hands around a woman’s throat. The woman’s eyes were wide and veins bulging, but when she saw the brothers watching she mouthed GO AWAY. There was something terrible about the scene, in the complicity of it, in the way the woman was not saving herself, in the way they couldn’t tell if she was the client or the product. Ronan let the door fall shut, but he knew from experience when he’d seen an image that would haunt him again in dreams.

As they passed through one room, a fortune-teller with a visible third eye tattooed over her invisible third eye said to Ronan, “Twenty dollars, final offer, your future,” as if Ronan had already begun a negotiation with her.

“I’ve already got one,” Ronan said.

“Do you?”

“Ronan,” Declan said. “Come on.”

“Lynch boy!” A man leaning on a cane beside a box of other boxes recognized Declan. “Have you seen him? Have you seen him run?”

Declan, all business, just twitched his fingers dismissively as he passed, but Ronan paused.

“Who?” Ronan asked. “Tell me. Don’t play.”

The old man gestured him closer in order to whisper in his ear. He smelled of garlic and something sweeter and something fouler, reminiscent of the odor of Gasoline the vanishing boar.

Declan had stopped, looking over his shoulder at Ronan, eyes narrowed. He didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t like it, probably because he didn’t know what was going on.

“I want his name,” Ronan said.

You’re wondering if this is real.

Say it, thought Ronan.

The old man whispered, “Bryde.”

Room ten: This was a top-floor library, a holdover from a far earlier era. The room was very long and very thin, dark and close, one side lined with dark bookshelves, the other with deeply red-and-gold wallpaper that matched the deeply red-and-gold carpet. Dusty crystals gleamed dimly in low-hanging chandeliers, like insects caught in spiderwebs. Art was everywhere: hanging on the walls, piled against harpsichords and pianos in the middle of the room. Music played from somewhere, some sort of sloping, uncanny reed instrument.

A man in a purple slicker on his way out asked Declan, “Do you have the time?”

“Not today,” Declan replied, as if answering an entirely different question. The purple slicker turned toward Ronan, and Declan put a hand on his chest firmly. “He doesn’t, either.”

The man sighed and moved on.

Declan stopped before a pairing of two abstract pieces, one of them violent or passionate, depending on your point of view, and one of them complexly black. On either side of the paintings hung antique violins, their bodies spindly and fragile with age. Ronan didn’t care for the first painting, but the second was alluring in the way it could be so many different things at once while still being entirely black. He could feel it as well as see it.

“Dreamed?” Ronan asked.

Declan said, “That one’s a Soulages. The other’s de Kooning. Several million dollars between the two of them. You like them?”

Ronan jerked his chin toward the Soulages. “That one’s all right.”

“‘All right.’ Figures. Everything in black, right?” Declan said ruefully. “There’s a thing Soulages said. ‘A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us.’ ” He recited it carefully, perfectly. Like their father, he had an ear and a desire for a cunning turn of phrase, but unlike Niall, he rarely demonstrated it.

“Do you like them?” Ronan asked.

Declan said, “They make me want to goddamn cry.”

Ronan had never seen his older brother goddamn cry and could not remotely begin to picture it. Declan had already moved on to rummage through a pile of canvases leaned against each other in a temporary booth. They were dull so Ronan left him there to prowl in ever-widening circles. Canvases, pastels behind glass, paper rolled into uneven scrolls, sculpture reaching toward the lights, boards leaned akimbo like someone starting a house of cards. He wanted to take a photo of all this to show Adam, but he had an idea this was the kind of place that wouldn’t take kindly to photos.

Then Ronan saw it.

It. It. Her.

“Declan,” Ronan said.

Declan kept digging through paintings.

“Declan.”

His brother turned at the tone in his voice. Ronan didn’t point. He just looked, and let his brother look with him.