Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(59)

“I know.”

“She’s not going to end the world,” he said.

“I know.”

Parsifal watched her taking out her phone. “Then what are you doing?”

“I have to tell them we found one, Parsifal.”

He looked at her sharply. “They’ll kill her!”

“I’ll tell them she’s no threat,” Farooq-Lane said. “But I have to report her.”

“They’ll kill her!”

He was starting to get agitated. He squeezed his knobby hands into fists and stretched them out again on top of his knobby knees, and rocked a little as he looked back at the house. She wasn’t feeling great herself; adrenaline never felt good as it washed back out to sea.

She said, “Parsifal, they already think I might be on the Zeds’ side because of my brother. I know they’re testing me, and I’m failing. I’ll tell them she’s just an old lady. They’re not going to kill an old lady.” He curled a hand on the door handle and gripped it hard enough to turn his knuckles white as exposed bone, not as if he were going to get out, but as if he were keeping himself from floating away. She said, “You’re being fishy yourself, you know. Why don’t you want a Zed reported? They wouldn’t like that, either.”

She called Lock.

She and Parsifal didn’t speak for the rest of the day.

This was, she told herself, the business of the end of the world.





36

It was probably, Hennessy thought, not actually the end of the world.

She had mixed feelings about this.

“People like your mother were born to die young,” Hennessy’s father had told her once, before it had become obvious that his daughter was people like her mother. “I knew that before I married her. Her kind burn fast and hard. Exciting. Dangerous. Gorgeous. Always take the inside line. Push it until they break it. I knew it. Everyone told me that.” He hadn’t actually told this to Hennessy. He’d told Jordan, who he thought was Hennessy, but Hennessy had been hiding under the dining room table, so she’d heard it. It wasn’t a gaspworthy reveal anyway. This was dinner table conversation, old war stories.

“I married her nonetheless,” he’d said. “I wouldn’t take it back, but she was like a Pontiac. Some cars you only need to drive once.”

Hennessy’s father was Bill Dower and he was a race-car driver and kit-car fabricator. Everything he said came out as a race-car metaphor. Before one met Bill Dower, it seemed impossible for everything to eventually tie back into racing, but after one met him, it was hard to forget.

Hennessy’s mother was J. H. Hennessy, known as Jay to her friends, though it was understood that was not what the J stood for, only how the J sounded. Hennessy never knew what her real first name was. Art writers never knew, either, despite their best efforts, and theorized that she might not have truly had a J name at all. Maybe, they said, the initials were a sort of pseudonym, an invented identity. Maybe, others said, she had never really existed at all. Maybe, they posed, she was a co-op of artists all creating art under the name J. H. Hennessy and that was why she could not be effectively researched posthumously. Perhaps the woman who appeared at events had been hired to be the face of J. H. Hennessy and she was the Banksy of the gallery world.

Oh, she was real all right.

Anyone who had to live with her could never think otherwise.

Hennessy’s phone rang. She watched it skip and patter across the concrete stair until it fell to the next, where it lay on its face and hummed morosely. She left it there.

It was afternoon-ish. A crime had recently been committed in a young man’s town house in Alexandria; not too long ago, several women had finished breaking a window, stealing a painting, and repairing a broken window. Now Hennessy and The Dark Lady sat on the stairs of the National Harbor, alone except for some young professionals and the sun, both jogging through on their way somewhere else. In front of her she could see Seward Johnson’s The Awakening, a seventy-foot sculpture of a man emerging from the sand. Possibly emerging. Possibly sinking. If one didn’t know the piece’s title, it was just as likely the clawing hands and desperate face were being sucked back down into the earth.

She was stalling.

Hennessy wiped her nose with the back of her hand and then studied the darkness smeared on her knuckles with detached observation. Recently, she had seen what was considered the blackest paint in the world. Singularity Black, it was called. They’d coated a dress with it. It was so black that whatever it coated ceased to have any details beyond being black; there were no deeper shadows, no subtle highlights. It became an outline of a dress, all complexity erased. Singularity Black wasn’t properly a pigment, it was some kind of nanoshit, tiny bits and bobs that ate ninety-some percent of the light around them. NASA used it to paint astronauts so aliens couldn’t see them or something. Hennessy had looked into getting some of it for Jordan for their birthday before she’d found out it had to be applied fifty coats thick, cured at six hundred degrees, and then could still be wiped off with a finger. Only NASA could put up with that shit.

But it had been impressively black.

Not as dark, however, as the liquid coming out of Hennessy, because it wasn’t truly black. It was less than black. It was not anything. It was nothing. It only seemed black from far away, and when one got close, one could see its supernatural origins.