Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(44)

“My friend has the flu,” she told them, and gave them another twenty dollars because that felt appropriate.

When she came back, the empty water glass with the lemon in it was on the kitchenette counter and Parsifal was sitting straight and proper on the sofa, glasses on, neatly dressed, as if he had never been otherwise. His mouth looked stiff and cranky as it ordinarily did. She was beginning to see that the expression that was always on his face might be pain. She was beginning to understand he might want to control everything he could because of the things he couldn’t.

She was beginning to see why the other Moderators had been eager to give this job away.

He didn’t thank her for cleaning up his vomit, and she didn’t ask him how he was feeling.

“I had a vision,” he told her.





26

Ronan didn’t go home right away.

He was oozing black slowly from his right nostril, and he really should have begun the two-hour drive back to the Barns to take care of it, but instead, he lingered in the city. He felt less like putting miles between him and the Fairy Market and more like hunting Bryde’s rabbits.

He had time, he thought. He could play those odds.

He felt like a hero from one of his parents’ old stories. When Niall had been home, he’d spun wild adventure tales of children turned into swans, crones simmering wisdom in cauldrons, and kings felled by powerful knights and poor decision-making skills and lovely daughters. When he was gone, Aurora had retold these stories, but from the points of view of the swans, the crones, the queens, and the daughters. Aurora’s stories were kinder, in general. Softer. But she didn’t soften the heroes’ taboos. Their geasa. All the heroes had them. Some were acquired along their journeys; some were given to them by other heroes; some were inherited. All were peculiar. Some heroes couldn’t refuse food from a woman, and others couldn’t be struck three times in a row without a word spoken in between; some couldn’t kill a boar, and others couldn’t pass an orphan without helping them. The penalty for defying one’s geis was deliciously terrible: death.

In Aurora’s versions, a poignant, soft-focus death. In Niall’s, a complex and several-minute-long finial.

On long car trips, Ronan and Matthew sometimes invented new geasa to pass the time. A hero who had to pet every dog he saw. Clap his hands every time he entered a church. Say exactly what he was thinking as he said it. Wear a gray suit every day.

Your father has the geis of blarney, Aurora often said. He has to tell stories or he’ll die.

Geis of bullshit, Declan had replied once, and had promptly gotten sent to the cow shed to muck stalls in the cold.

Here was Ronan’s geis, he thought: Dream things into being, or dissolve into nothing.

He was headed back to the Carter Hotel. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping to find there—Inspiration. Evidence. A staff member who remembered something, anything. In the back of his head was a bit of advice Uncle used to say. If you’d lost things, he’d say you should retrace your steps to where you last had them. He’d been a great treasure trove of these clickable bits of potpourri-scented wisdom, searchable apple-cider proverbs, cross-stitched country kitchen words to live by. If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the kitchen. Why fit in when you were born to stand out? You have to be odd to be number one. Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see a little farther. Make your life a masterpiece; you only get one canvas. He wondered what happened to him and Aunt. As a kid, he’d never thought to ask for their real names. As a kid, he hadn’t thought there was any other kind of name.

Declan texted as he got closer to the hotel. Tell me when you get that taken care of.

Ronan knew that the real meaning of the text was Tell me when you are safely installed at the Barns instead of chasing things I told you not to chase.

He didn’t reply. He sat in traffic. He wiped his nose. He edged close to the hotel. The sun glared down, touching everything, brilliant and caustic.

Declan called.

“What?” Ronan demanded. “This is a fucking stick shift.”

“You’re going home, right?” Declan asked. There was some kind of terrible youthful singing audible in the background.

“Don’t harass me just because you’re having a bad time.”

“Are you?”

Ronan didn’t care for lying, but he also didn’t care for a lecture. He grunted noncommittally.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Declan said, and hung up.

Here was Declan’s geis: to never pull the stick out of his ass.

“You have arrived at your destination,” remarked the GPS.

But Ronan hadn’t. He had to pull over and roll down the window to get a better look, because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

The Carter Hotel was gone.

Caution tape lay limply over the entrance to the parking lot like dispirited birthday streamers. Beyond it, the lot was empty except for a single anonymous little white sedan and scudding gray tumbleweeds of ash. The hotel building itself was just a black, flattened ruin.

It was still smoldering in places.

Ronan wiped his nose. He stared. He wiped his nose again. He stared some more.

It was simply gone.

He could smell its remains, the complicated, toxic smell of things that melted instead of burned, combined with the appetizing, feral scent of burned wood and paper.