Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(64)

Ronan dug for the little talon knife.

“I’m sorry,” Ronan said to him, and then he flicked it open.

The talons winged out, clawing, tearing, a chaos of claws, snarling up Adam’s arm.

Blood welled immediately.

Ronan snicked the knife shut and the talons receded, pulling a mighty rasp out of Adam’s chest as they did.

“Oh God oh God oh God—” Adam curled down into himself, his eyes closed, rocking.

Ronan fell back in relief. He hurled the talon knife away from the bed and pressed a hand against his own galloping heart.

“What happened?” he demanded.

Adam’s chest was still heaving for breath. The rest of him quivered. “Oh God oh God—”

“Adam.”

Adam pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, a strange, un-Adam-like gesture, and rolled it back and forth like a child might when tired or anxious. Ronan took it instead, holding it still. Adam’s skin was icy cold, as if he had taken his body to outer space. He didn’t seem to notice that his arm was bleeding from the talon knife; he still seemed a little unaware of his body. Ronan rubbed Adam’s fingers between his hands until they were warm and then kissed them.

“Parrish, that was fucked up,” Ronan said. He laid a palm on Adam’s pale cheek. It, too, was frigid. Adam turned his face into Ronan’s hand, his eyes shuttered.

“It saw me,” Adam said. “Oh God.”

“What is it?”

Adam didn’t answer.

Ronan bundled him close and for several minutes, the two of them stayed like that, tightly wound together, lit by the abandoned dreamt sun, Adam’s skin cold as the moon.

“It’s not Bryde,” Adam said finally. “The something, it’s not Bryde.”

“How do you know?”

Adam said, “Because whatever it is, it’s afraid of him.”





40

No one noticed the teen girl who came into the gallery a few minutes before the event. The gallery was a large and modern Arlington establishment called 10Fox, just five miles outside Washington, DC, come to our showroom and consult with our stylists to make your estate a place of art. The front of the house was currently overwhelmed with many dozens of children. Four hundred, the publicist guessed, not counting the parents. Good call on the early start time, go us, go team. You got this, she told her author. Four-hour signing line, everyone’s home for late lunch, happy ending.

Jason Morgenthaler did not see anything happy about the situation. He was the owner of 10Fox. He was also a very famous picture-book author. His books were so omnipresent that most children who read them assumed that he must be dead. His most popular work, Henderson!, was given to tens of thousands of children by tens of thousands of grandparents each holiday season, and his Skunkboy series had been made into a television series with an extremely annoying theme song. He was currently separated from his wife, who was a famous stand-up comedian. Morgenthaler considered himself a serious artist and a serious art collector and a serious art dealer and he was mostly correct about one of these things.

He did not want to leave the gallery’s back room.

Morgenthaler had never liked children, and recently they had become absolutely repellant to him. Children were tiny anarchists, miniature id-monsters from hell. They did what they wanted whether or not it was a good idea, and whether or not they had permission. When they wanted to eat, they ate; when they wanted to crap, they crapped. They bit, they screamed, they laughed until they puked.

Morgenthaler peered around the corner.

“Oh God,” he said. The adults in the room were vastly outnumbered. Two of them were booksellers, standing at attention behind a table set up with picture books. Another two were dressed in enormous full-body mascot costumes, one a skunk and one an enormous-headed girl, terrifying in her proportions.

The publicist patted his arm. She found his pathological burnout droll. She gestured to the other staff behind him.

“Go time,” the publicist said.

Morgenthaler finger-combed his colorless brown hair before entering from the back of the gallery, flanked by three more adults in mascot costumes: a green dog, an alarmingly large-headed old man, and something that was supposed to be a squid. One of the children in the front row began to cry, though it was hard to tell if it was from an excess of terror or an excess of excitement.

From the back of the room, Lin Draper, mother of three, watched Morgenthaler’s presentation. He had a relentlessly oval-shaped head, she thought, like it had been drawn by someone who’d not seen a real human head for a while. She had expected him to be different, somehow, when she loaded her daughter India into the car to come to the event. More family friendly. He had already sworn twice during his introduction and he seemed a little sweaty. He had dressed himself in a black sport coat and white V-neck T-shirt paired with red Chucks, an outfit that aggressively notified onlookers that he was both collector and artist, both the money and the talent. Morgenthaler was using the sort of jolly voice adults often used on children: “Would you believe I thought I was going to be a famous writer of adult novels? I intended to be a serious painter of representational art. But no, my agent said I was better suited to children, and so here I am still after ten years—”

“Can I hold your hand?” India whispered.

Lin realized with the ground-swallowing shame only made possible through awkward parenting moments that her little daughter was talking not to her, but to a red headed teen girl.