Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(60)

Was it a side effect of being a dreamer, or a side effect of being Hennessy? There wasn’t anyone alive for her to ask.

J. H. Hennessy had been a dreamer. She didn’t talk about it with Hennessy except in metaphorical terms, but Hennessy knew what she was. Her mother would fall asleep drunk on the stairs or under the piano, and it didn’t take too much observation to discover that she tended to wake with more paints and bottles around her than she’d fallen asleep with. Or maybe it did, because Hennessy was sure that her father had never figured out that Jay could dream things into being.

When he said she was a mess, he just meant the vodka and ecstasy.

Retrospectively, Hennessy could see that he liked that J. H. Hennessy was a mess.

“Are you gonna save me?” Hennessy asked the Dark Lady, wiping her face again. The Dark Lady looked at her mistrustfully, pessimistically. “Us, I meant to say. Thanks for straightening that.” The Dark Lady didn’t smile. Neither did Hennessy. She didn’t know how potent The Dark Lady’s power to influence dreams was, but she didn’t think there was a chance in hell it was enough to shift Hennessy’s recurring nightmare. If it hadn’t wavered in sixteen years, it seemed unlikely that it was going to flinch now. Hennessy closed her eyes—there it was. She didn’t even have to close her eyes. She stopped thinking—there it was.

She was so tired.

Judging from the dream creations she woke with, Jay’s dreams seemed straightforward, uncomplicated. She dreamt of what she had been doing while she was awake. She went to a party, she woke with sequins. She got into a fight with Bill Dower, she woke with divorce papers. He lured her back with flowers and jewelry, she woke with more flowers and jewelry. The only thing she’d ever dreamt that interested Hennessy was Hennessy’s ferret, which she’d dreamt the day Hennessy spent all day begging for one.

Cassatt had been a great pet. He didn’t smell and ate nothing except prescription drugs.

Until Jay died and he fell asleep forever.

Curled up on the concrete stairs, Hennessy was starting to feel not good. She could tell her ears were starting to fill with the black stuff. The taste of it was awful.

“I’m gonna do it,” Hennessy told the Dark Lady, who was beginning to judge her for staying awake for so long. Didn’t she care about the other girls? the Dark Lady wondered. Didn’t she care that they were all probably starting to stagger around about now, starting to feel the trickle-down effects of the black ooze bubbling up in their creator? Didn’t she care that if she died, they’d all sleep? Hennessy resented all of this. The girls were basically the only thing she did care about. “I’m just not mad about the idea. Gimme a few to talk myself into it.”

It wasn’t just hatred of the nightmare that kept her awake. As bad as this felt, the way her body felt after she dreamt a copy of herself was worse.

She just didn’t think The Dark Lady was going to save her from that.

Hennessy’s phone buzzed again. She toed it over to see the caller ID. Jordan. So she was done with her date with Declan Lynch. She’d survived, apparently. Hennessy had googled the guy and it looked like Jordan had definitely drawn the shortest out of all possible straws, and that was including the black ooze among the straws. Hennessy would rather bleed out than date a boring white man in last year’s suit.

Jordan texted: The girls said you mistreated them

She hadn’t mistreated them. She’d just taken the newly stolen painting and told them to go spend the rest of their lives doing end-of-the-world things in case this next dreamt copy was the one to kill her. They hadn’t wanted to leave her. She’d repeated the exhortation. Persuasively. Stridently. It’s what she would have wanted. Party right up till the end. No warning. Not much in the way of parties to find at noon on a DC weekday, but surely they could think of something. They were Hennessys.

Jordan: Where are you

This wouldn’t be the copy to kill her anyway, Hennessy thought. Three more. That’s what she thought. Every time she dreamt a copy, a new flower tattoo appeared on her throat, and there was only room for three more.

She wiped some black on the top of her shoe.

“People like me,” Hennessy told the Dark Lady, “were born to die young.”

Which made it basically murder for J. H. Hennessy to have a kid in the first place.

The Dark Lady’s eyes glittered. She thought Hennessy was being melodramatic. Maybe she was. Hennessy shivered and looked out across the water, trying to imagine a dream that had the ocean in it instead of yet another Hennessy.

She couldn’t picture it.

She could only imagine the same dream that was already happening behind all of her thoughts. Over and over and over again.

Jordan texted: You can keep playing silly buggers and I can keep looking for you but it’s boring don’t you think

Oh darling, Hennessy texted back, I don’t think boring is something you and I have to worry about.





37

Declan Lynch knew he was boring.

He’d worked very hard to be that way, after all. It was a magic trick he didn’t expect any prize from but survival, even as he looked at other lives and imagined them his. He didn’t fool himself. He knew what he was allowed to do and to want and to put in his life.

He knew Jordan Hennessy didn’t belong.

But still, when he came back from the National Gallery of Art to his empty town house, he closed the door behind him and for a moment he just leaned against it, eyes closed, pretending—no, not even pretending. He just didn’t think. For one second of one minute of the day, he didn’t run the probabilities and worst-case scenarios and possibilities and consequences. For one second of one minute of the day, he just let himself feel.