Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(40)

He got there just as the doors dinged shut, closing her away. The arrow pointed down, down, down.

He smashed the door button again, but nothing happened.

Gasping for air, he breathed a swear word. He linked his arms behind his head and tried for air, for reality. Damn, damn. He was getting his breath back but not his heart. It was skipping rope and entertaining itself out of rhythm. His mother. A ghost.

Three doors down, two women emerged from a room and made their way toward the elevators. They were arm in arm, talking in low voices. The sisters. The sisters from the mask room. They looked at him with curiosity, seeming to find his disarray more interesting than distressing.

“Oh, the man with a mask,” said one of them.

The other asked, “Where’s your pretty lady?”

He put it together. “The lady, the lady you saw before. Was she blond—was she wearing a jacket—did she—did she have blue eyes?” He pointed at his own.

They both looked at him, lips pursed, schoolmarmish.

“Look, she was dead. I know she was dead. I saw—I need to know what’s going on,” Ronan said. Please help. Please help me understand. “Please. Did you talk to her?”

The sisters scrutinized him. One of them, the older one, reached out to trace Ronan’s eye socket lightly, as if she were sizing him for a mask. Her finger was icy cold. He turned his face away.

“She gave us this card,” one of the sisters said. “You can have it; we don’t want it.” She handed over a square tile. There was a block-printed image of a woman on it, with a cross painted on her face.

It didn’t mean anything to him, but he took it anyway. “What did she want?”

“What everyone else wanted. To know more about …”

He knew what they were about to say, because it was the word that had been concluding nearly every sentence that night. He finished it for them. “Him.”

“Yes,” said the older sister. “Bryde.”





22

Farooq-Lane had never put her physicality to the test. Not a real test. Not a lion-gazelle situation. Not a hurtling down hallways and vaulting through doorways and knee-up-careful-now spiral down a dozen flights of stairs. She had only ever run on the treadmill of her local gym, earbuds spitting beats at her, and sometimes beside the lake on good days, shoes matching shorts matching sports bra matching Fitbit counting up toward health on her wrist, and occasionally in the fitness centers in hotels, bottled water reflecting the up-down of her smoothly toned legs. She had only ever run to look good.

She hadn’t ever run for her life.

But that was how she exited the Carter Hotel, trailing an increasing number of antagonists on every floor. She heard things hit the walls behind her, but she didn’t look to see what they were. At one point, she felt a hand encircle her ankle, and she slid free of it and poured on more speed.

As she bolted through the lobby, a woman in a drawstring top smiled at her, not in a pleasant way, and said, “Run, cop.”

Farooq-Lane skidded out the front doors. She hurtled down the front stairs so quickly that she almost ran into the car parked at the base of them.

It was her car. Her rental.

Parsifal Bauer sat behind the wheel of it, sitting perfectly straight, looking like an undertaker behind the wheel of a hearse.

She heard someone—probably the doorman—coming up behind her.

She threw herself into the backseat. The car was already moving as she dragged the door shut behind her. The doors audibly locked.

A little thwick as they pulled away indicated the sound of both a bullet hitting the car and Farooq-Lane being glad she’d gotten full insurance coverage on the rental.

About a mile away, Parsifal pulled over and put the car in park. “I don’t want to drive anymore. I don’t have a license.”

Farooq-Lane was still out of breath, her side pinching with a stitch. She couldn’t believe that he’d been right there, waiting for her. Quite possibly he’d just saved her life. “Did you have a vision?”

He shook his head.

“How did you know to be there?”

Parsifal unbuckled his seat belt. “Common sense.”





23

We gave the world to them back before we knew any better.

Already they were telling stories about us and we were believing them. The story was this: The trade-off for being a dreamer was emotional infirmity. We could dream, but we couldn’t stand being awake. We could dream, but we couldn’t smile. We could dream, but we were meant to die young. How they loved us still, despite our weaknesses, our unsuitedness to all things practical.

And we believed them. A benevolent, wicked fairy tale, and we believed it. We couldn’t run the world. We couldn’t even run ourselves.

We handed them the keys to the goddamn car.

Ronan dreamt of summer, of Adam.

He was in a sun-simmering garden, surrounded by tomato plants as tall as him. Green. So green. Colors in dreams weren’t seen with eyes, they were seen with emotion, so there was no limit to their intensity. A radio was skewed in the mulch, playing Bryde’s voice, and Adam was there, his gaunt features looking sun-bitten and elegant. He was an adult. Recently, he’d been an adult in all of Ronan’s dreams, not just cigarette-legal but properly, truly into adulthood, every bit of him mature, certain, resolved—probably there was some psychological explanation for this, but Ronan couldn’t guess at it.