Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(46)

Poignant, ungory tragedy in Aurora’s version. Complex, lengthy horror in Niall’s.

And here was Ronan, trapped between his two geasa: the geis that was growing inside him, demanding that he dream, and the geis Declan had put on him, the need to stay hidden.

The little white sedan pulled round to face him. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to pull the BMW across the road to block them. They were trapped. At his mercy. He could still do it, but his heart—his—

The BMW coasted to a stop in the middle of the cul-de-sac.

Shit, he thought, not here—





27

You were right,” Farooq-Lane said, with wonder.

“Of course I was,” Parsifal said stiffly.

The two of them sat in her rental car, looking at the still-smoking ruin of the Carter Hotel. He’d told her that he’d seen the Carter Hotel burned to the ground in his vision, and so he promised, so it was. It seemed unbelievable that there had been enough time for the entire hotel to burn since she’d run from it. There should be chunks, she thought. Columns. Chimneys. Skeletal bones of hotel reaching up toward the blue, blue sky. But there was just a thorough, blackened expanse with tire tracks through it. One could not have done a better job obliterating a building if one had tried. And surely someone had, she thought. This couldn’t have been an accident.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Farooq-Lane said. “It was more about me than you.”

She could feel him watch as she sipped her coffee. She’d asked him if he wanted to stop for coffee (“If you want to.” “Will you drink it?” “That seems unlikely.”) and then gone out of her way to find a good roaster anyway. She missed her routine of good coffee, good work, good life, and she felt the appearance of a successful vision merited the return of at least one of those things.

Now she had a nice espresso and she was feeling more like herself than she had in ages, and Parsifal had a cocoa and looked like a load of laundry that had been taken out of the dryer before it was done. Nothing about his body language indicated that he was enjoying the beverage in his hand.

She asked, “Did you see how it happened? Was it intentional?”

Parsifal didn’t reply. He rolled down his window and sucked in some air. It smelled ashy. Noxious. His sour face matched it.

“Lock asked me if there was anything we could do to make you happy,” Farooq-Lane said. “Anything to improve your comfort. Is there something you’d like?”

He turned to the radio and began silently punching buttons.

She refused to let him ruin her good mood and good coffee. “I have a good budget.”

“All I would like is a piece of Bienenstich the way my mother made it for me,” Parsifal said, managing to sound as if she had somehow maligned his mother. His long fingers constricted from the radio like a dying spider’s legs: He had found opera. A chesty man cooed from the rental car’s speakers. “And that is not to be had.”

Farooq-Lane swiftly googled Bienenstich, intent on proving him wrong. This was America, you could Uber Eats or overnight anything in a metropolis if you had a solid credit card and a can-do attitude. It took her only a few minutes, however, to discover that can-do attitudes didn’t apply to Bienenstich. It was a kind of a dull-looking German cake that did not seem to have found an audience in the DC area, nor among the kind of bakeries that would drop ship a cake to a hotel room. It didn’t seem to have an American counterpart, either.

Why couldn’t he just want to drive in a fast car or to get laid or whatever it was that boys were supposed to want, she thought with annoyance.

She furtively texted Lock. Find me Bienenstich.

Then she asked, “Can I do something to help you remember what you saw in the vision? Give me some ideas. Let’s brainstorm. Jog something loose.”

He looked out over the ash. “Why do you do this?”

“The same reason you do,” she replied.

Parsifal blinked back at her, his eyes confused and surprised behind his glasses. “What?”

“I said I do it for the same reason you do it,” Farooq-Lane replied. “To save the world. Who wouldn’t do that?”

He looked perplexed. “What?”

“You can’t tell me that you aren’t sitting in this car with me because you want to stop the apocalypse from killing all of mankind,” Farooq-Lane said.

“What?”

“You asked why I did this.”

He shook his head, eyeing her warily. “I didn’t say anything.”

Farooq-Lane put her coffee down in the cup holder a little harder than she needed to. Her hands were wobbly again. She replayed the last minute back in her mind. Had she actually heard Parsifal? Or had it sounded instead like Nathan taunting her, inside her head, just like he had done when he was alive?

“Sorry,” she said. “I think I’m a little on edge.”

Parsifal gave her an extremely annoying look that indicated that he completely agreed, and then he said, “That’s him.” He pointed out the window to the tire tracks that dragged ash across the street. “I saw that. I remember that. I saw his car make them. Today. I’m sure it was today.”

She felt her heart beat a little faster. This was more like it. This was how it had felt when they were closing in on Nathan. Specific little puzzle pieces that made more and more of a picture as each was revealed. Things that could be checked off a list. Things that might prove to Lock that his faith in her wasn’t unfounded. “Good. That’s good, Parsifal. What happened after that? Where do we go?”