Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(62)

“How did you get through the driveway?” he asked suspiciously.

“Horribly,” Adam said, rolling the helmet onto the counter and peeling off the jacket and gloves. He threw both next to the helmet and smelled his bare arms. “Is it as bad leaving as it is coming? Because if so I’m staying here forever.”

He turned and realized Ronan was still holding the gun. His brows drew together. He didn’t look upset. He just looked as if he was trying to understand.

Ronan didn’t understand himself, either. Part of his mind was saying, Of course it’s Adam, put the gun down and another part was saying, What is real? He understood why both parts of him existed. What he didn’t understand was how evenly they were matched. He hadn’t realized that seeing his parents’ faces on living bodies had affected him so thoroughly until this moment of seeing someone he loved very much and yet not knowing if he could believe it.

“Tell me what I need to say to prove it,” Adam said. He’d worked it out. That alone was nearly enough to convince Ronan even after his face didn’t. Adam was the most clever person he knew. “What will make you know it’s me?”

Ronan didn’t know. “Why are you here?”

“I started thinking about it last night. Then I just got up this morning and thought, I’m going. I’m just going. Gillian found me this jacket at a thrift store. This is Fletcher’s helmet—can you imagine him on a scooter? These are my proctor’s gardening gloves. I read my sociology notes into my phone and I listened to them the whole way down for my quiz tomorrow. And now I’m here.” Then he looked rueful, realizing. He said, “Ronan, I know you.”

He said it just the same way he’d said it on the phone the night before. Ronan’s adrenaline melted out of him. He discarded all weaponry on a side table. “I’m convinced. Only you would listen to sociology notes on a motorcycle.”

They hugged, hard. It was shocking to hold him. The truth of him was right there beneath Ronan’s hands, and it still seemed impossible. He smelled like the leather of the thrift store jacket and the woodsmoke he’d ridden through to get here. Things had been the same for so long, and now everything was different, and it was harder to keep up than Ronan had thought.

Adam said, “Happy birthday, by the way.”

“My birthday’s tomorrow.”

“I have a presentation I can’t miss tomorrow. I can stay for”—Adam pulled away to check his dreamt watch—“three hours. Sorry I didn’t get you a present.”

The idea of Adam Parrish on a motorcycle was more than enough birthday present for Ronan; he was senselessly turned on. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he said, “What the fuck.” Normally this was his job, to be impulsive, to be wasteful of time, to visibly need. “What the fuck.”

“That batshit bike you dreamt doesn’t use gas,” Adam said. “The tank’s wood inside; I put a camera in it to look. Just as well I didn’t have to stop for gas anyway because half the time, when I slow down, I dump the bike. You should see the bruises on my legs. I look like I’ve been fighting bears.”

They hugged again, merrily, waltzing messily in the kitchen, and kissed, merrily, waltzing more.

“What do you want to do with your three hours?” Ronan asked.

Adam peered around the kitchen. He always looked at home in it; it was all the same colors as him, washed out and faded and comfortable. “I’m starving. I need to eat. I need to take off your clothes. But first, I want to look at Bryde.”





39

Adam Parrish was uncanny.

Perhaps standing next to Ronan Lynch, dreamer of dreams, he looked ordinary, but it was only because everything uncanny about him was turned inside instead of out. He, too, had a connection with the peculiar ley line energy that seemed to power Ronan’s dreams, except that Adam’s connection happened while he was awake, and only ever produced knowledge instead of objects. He was something like a psychic, if there was such a thing as a psychic whose powers extended more toward the future of the world than the future of people. During the idyllic summer he’d spent at the Barns with Ronan, he’d played with energy nearly every single day. He’d gaze into a bowl of dark liquid and lose himself in the unfathomable pulse that connects all living things. While on the phone with Gansey or Blue, he’d take out his deck of haunted tarot cards and read one or three cards for them. At night, he’d sit on the end of Ronan’s childhood bed and meet Ronan in dreamspace—Ronan, asleep, in a dream, Adam, awake, in a trance.

He had put all of that away to go to Harvard.

“If I stop breathing, bring me back,” Adam said now. He sat on the end of Ronan’s bed with one of Ronan’s dreamt lights cupped in his hands. There were all sorts of dreamt lights at the Barns: fireflies in the fields, stars tangled in the trees, orbs hanging in the long barn over his work, eternal wee candles in each of the windows that faced the backyard. The one in Adam’s hand was too ferociously bright to look at directly; it was a sun. Gansey had asked Ronan to keep his mint plant alive while he road-tripped, and Ronan, unsure of how to keep plants alive inside, had dreamt the outside in. Now it illuminated the otherwise dim bedroom where the two of them sat knee to knee on the bed.

“If it’s longer than fifteen minutes, bring me back,” Adam added. He thought about this, then corrected himself. “Ten. I can always go back.”