Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(53)

It started to rain.





33

It was well after dark when Ronan arrived at the Barns. The driveway was difficult to see, a tunnel of foliage to a hidden warren, but it would’ve been difficult to find even under the full sun because of the newly dreamt security system. The dream had taken him weeks to perfect, and even though he was normally a slob in his workshop, he’d painstakingly cleaned up after finishing this particular project. He’d destroyed every draft; he didn’t want to ever run across one accidentally. It had been designed to work upon waking emotions, a sort of dream object Ronan ordinarily avoided. Fucking with free will felt distinctly uncatholic to him—one of those slippery slopes one is warned about. But he wanted the Barns to be safe, and every other idea he had relied on physical harm. Hurting intruders meant exposure, and killing intruders meant cleanup, so mindfuck it was.

The dreamt security system confused and saddened and obscured, tangling the intruder in nothing more or less poisonous than the terrible truths in their own histories. It didn’t precisely block the view of the driveway, but once caught, one simply couldn’t remember the present well enough to ever notice the entrance among the trees. It had been monstrous to install; it had taken Ronan the better part of a day to endure stretching it the few yards across the driveway. He’d had to stop every few minutes to put his head in his hands until the dread and regret passed.

That night, even knowing full well that his family home was on the other side of the driveway threshold, even having spent most of his life here, Ronan still had to give himself a firm talking-to when his GPS reached the coordinates of the house.

“Just get it over with,” he told himself.

He charged at the drive. Doubt and unpleasant memories swept through him and then—

The BMW was through and heading down the driveway on the other side. His headlights picked out a motionless cow here or there. Far on the other side of the deeply folded fields, dreamt fireflies winked in the woods.

Then the lights illuminated the old white farmhouse in the gloom, and beyond it, the glinting sides of numerous outbuildings, like silent attendants. Home.

For several long minutes, he sat in the car in the parking area in front of the farmhouse, listening to the night noises of the Barns. The crickets and the dreamt nightbirds and the hush of the wind from the mountains gently rocking the car. Everything about this place was the same as he had left it except for the person who lived inside it: him.

He texted Adam: you up?

Adam replied immediately. Yes.

Ronan, relieved, called him. “Bryde saved my life.”

He had not thought he was going to tell Adam the whole of it. At first he hadn’t wanted to call while Adam was in class, and then he hadn’t wanted to call when he might be playing cards with the Crying Club because the thought of him telling them just wait a minute it’s Ronan to take the call after the dorm incident was unbearable. Also, he hadn’t been sure how to talk about a thing he didn’t understand himself. But once he’d begun to explain the day to Adam, he couldn’t stop, not only because he needed to hear it said out loud, but because he needed to say it out loud to Adam.

Adam listened quietly while Ronan told him everything that had happened, and then, at the end of it, he was quiet for a long space. Then he said, “I want to know what he gets out of it. Out of saving you. All of them, actually. I want to know why they moved you.”

“Why do they have to get something out of it?”

“They have to,” Adam said. “That’s just the way the world works.”

“You saved my life.” Ronan remembered it freshly because the driveway security system sometimes dredged it up. Not the successful end, but the feelings before: Ronan drowning in an acid lake, hand stretched to his little psychopomp Opal, completely failing to save either her or himself. Adam and his exceptional, rarely used ability swooping in to rescue him, surprising them all.

“That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

Adam sounded irritable. “I saved your life because I love you and I was scared and I didn’t know what else to do. That doesn’t sound like Bryde.”

This statement simultaneously pleased and aggravated Ronan. His mind stored away the first half for safekeeping, to take out and look at again on a rotten day, and decided to discard the second half because it felt deflating.

“Most people aren’t like you, Ronan,” Adam went on. “They’re too afraid to put their necks out for nothing. There’s an element of—what do you call it? Self-defense. Survival. Not doing something risky without a good reason because bodies are fragile.”

“You don’t know if he had to stick his neck out,” Ronan said. He used his car key to dig cracker crumbs out from around the cigarette lighter. “You don’t know if they were risking anything to move my car and me in it.”

“There’s such thing as an emotional cost,” Adam said. “Investing in someone else’s survival isn’t free, and some people’s emotional banks are already overdrawn. Anyway, I know what you want me to say.”

“What do I want you to say?”

“You want me to tell you it’s okay to go after Bryde and those other people, no matter what Declan thinks.”

Adam was right. Once Ronan had heard it, he knew that this was, in fact, exactly what he wanted to hear.