Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(36)

Niall Lynch.

“It’s one of Dad’s,” Declan said.

“I can fucking see that.” Ronan sounded furious, which told Declan little about what he was really feeling. Every emotion that wasn’t happiness in Ronan usually presented itself as anger. “This is what you came for? I didn’t think you were sentimental about Dad’s stuff.”

Declan wasn’t, but he wanted this painting.

He needed it.

For years it had been in a collection in Boston, having been sold to Colin Greenmantle, the crooked collector who’d eventually had their father killed. Several months ago, Greenmantle had died himself—through equally shady circumstances—and one of the dealers who’d known both him and Niall had gotten in touch with Declan. He’d offered him the key to Greenmantle’s odd collection.

Take anything you want of your father’s before I sell it, he’d said. You earned it with blood.

A generous offer. Very generous. Generosity on a scale of tens of thousands of dollars.

I don’t want it, Declan had said.

He was going to keep his head down. Be invisible. Pretend that part of his life had never happened.

I don’t want any of it, and even as he said it, he knew it was a lie.

But what was Declan Lynch but a liar?

“She has a legend,” Declan told Ronan, who eyed it where it sat, one of several paintings leaned against a temporary booth’s walls. “Whoever sleeps in the same room as her will dream of the ocean.”

Apparently it drove people crazy. While Ronan was destroying a Harvard dorm room, Declan had been looking through what was left of Greenmantle’s collection in Boston. He’d discovered that The Dark Lady had been sold shortly after Greenmantle’s death and then changed hands dozens of times, no one keeping her for longer than a few weeks. And she was to be sold again, this time at the Fairy Market in Washington, DC.

It was like it was meant to be.

“I’m going to buy it, if I can afford it,” Declan said. The Lynch brothers were rich, but conditionally so. Niall had left each of them a piece of property—the Barns to his favorite son, an empty field in Armagh, Northern Ireland, to Aurora’a favorite son, and a sterile town house in Alexandria to the son left over—and a sum of money that would keep them in middle-class comfort for most of their lives as long as they didn’t make many splashy spends like car purchases, hospital stays, or deals for supernatural paintings. “Play it cool.”

“Play it cool,” mocked Ronan softly, but he arranged his face into indifference as they headed over to the booth.

The man who ran this booth didn’t look like he should be selling art. He looked like he should be running a gym, smiling on a billboard for the weight-lifting program he’d developed, promoting protein shakes, losing it all when he was busted for steroid use. His hair was greased into spikes nearly as strong as the rest of him.

“How much for that one?” Declan asked. “Of the blond woman?”

“Twenty thousand for that little lady,” said the man standing among the canvases. “Look at her spirit. What a gal. You can tell she’s got a giggle in her somewhere.”

Declan assessed his tone and posture and the placement of the painting in the booth, analyzing how invested the man was and how valuable he felt it was. And part of him tucked away the way the man spoke, too. Declan’s private collection of words and phrases was free and forever secret, a perfect hobby.

He said, “For a painting by a nobody?”

Ronan’s gaze bored holes in the side of his head. It wouldn’t have hurt Ronan a bit if he made his peace with lying for good cause, Declan thought.

“She’ll make you dream of the shore,” the man said. “My little daughter said it made her dream of the seaside. I had to try it out myself. Shuck and darn if it didn’t. There was the seaside, every night she was under my roof. Like a free vacation! That’s a guar-an-tee.”

“I don’t need a parlor trick,” Declan said. “I just need something to hang over my dining room table. Three-five.”

“Twenty thousand is firm.”

The pricing of uncanny objects was always subjective. How much was it worth, the feeling that you owned something that shouldn’t exist, or something that touched a supernatural realm you didn’t otherwise have access to, or something that made you believe that there was more to the world than what you’d been given? The answer was usually a lot. Declan didn’t know how much he could really talk the guy down. But twenty thousand was a big ding out of his carefully hoarded savings. An unwise sum for an already unwise decision. “Four thousand.”

“Nineteen.”

Declan said blandly, “I don’t want to leave this on the table, but I’m not going another round. Fifteen is my final.”

The man relented and accepted the bills. “I’ll get some wrapping paper.”

You’re really doing this, Declan thought. Down the rabbit hole.

Beside Declan, Ronan knelt by the painting. His hand hovered over the woman’s face but didn’t touch the surface. It wasn’t difficult to tell that it meant a lot to him to see Aurora again; Ronan couldn’t lie even with his body language. Somehow, objectively troubling truths about their parents had been unable to mar Ronan’s feelings for them. Declan envied him. His love and his grief both.