Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(67)

Then he headed through the gauzy dreamt security system.

Memories rose up. He expected it to be horror, as it often was. Guts and blood. Bones and hair. Closed-casket funerals. The scream.

Instead it was every time Ronan had been alone.

There was no gore. No shrilling with terror.

There was only the quiet that came after all those things. There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved.

And then Ronan was through and swiping away the tears before Adam joined him by the shoulder, emerging from the dark with the bright dreamt light cupped in his hands.

“Break will be here in just a few days,” Adam said. He kissed Ronan’s cheek, lightly, and then Ronan’s mouth. “I’m coming back. Be here for me.”

“Tamquam—” Ronan said.

“—alter idem.”

They embraced. Adam put on his helmet.

Ronan stood there in the dark long after the taillight had disappeared. Alone.

Then he returned to the house to dream of Bryde.





42

There was a time when Jordan used to fantasize about living on her own. When she turned eighteen, the idea of it was like a crush, an obsession, something that dully ached during the day and frothed her to sleeplessness at night. She’d even gone to look at an apartment one day, telling the others she was going to work at the NGA and then secretly going to the appointment she’d set up.

The property manager had shown her a unit that reeked like chlorine and dog urine, had rooms the size of elevators, had only one parking space, and was a dispiriting fourteen miles from the city.

“I’ve got a lot of interest in this one,” she’d said.

Jordan thought about how she would capture the line of the property manager’s heavy-lidded eyes, how they never opened all the way, how that weight was signaled by the skin between her eyebrows, tugged by the longtime burden of staying awake. Her painter’s mind catalogued the color gradient between her subtle dye job and her lighter roots. Her fingers twitched by her side, already blocking out the negative space behind the manager’s profile.

The manager said, “So if you want to be in consideration, I’d get an application and fee in ASAP. A. SAP.”

Jordan didn’t like thinking about applications, because she didn’t like thinking about prison. She really didn’t want to go to prison. It might not have appeared that way—seeing as she spent much of her time doing things that were against laws of all shapes and sizes—but she spent a considerable amount of time thinking of ways to avoid it. For instance, she was careful with what she forged. She forged art, not checks. Lithographs, not money. Paintings, not certificates of authenticity. Historically, the law was kinder to those who forged brushstrokes of all kinds instead of pen marks of any kind.

The manager looked at Jordan. She was standing directly next to a stain on the beige carpet. She had not even bothered to stand in front of or on it in an attempt to hide it. The apartment was not at a price point that required her to. “It’ll be just you?”

“Yeah,” Jordan lied.

“I’ve got some one-bedrooms that are cheaper than this, honey.”

“I need the extra room for my studio,” Jordan said. “I do the old nine to five from home.”

The manager tapped on the counter. “You want to look around some more and fill the pre-application out here, honey, you can drop it back off at the office on your way out.”

A Post-it note was stuck to the top of the unforgiving application with the appointment time and a name: JORDAN HENNESSY. As if Jordan owned both those names equally. Jordan looked at it for thirty seconds, thinking about how she would re-create the shadow just under the curled edge of the Post-it note, how she would evoke the sense of distance from the paper below, what it would take to replicate the limpid yellow of the note.

Then she had taken a walk around the town house, trying to imagine what it would be like to live there. The little bedrooms with their flimsy closet doors, their cheap light fixtures overhead—she had to take out her phone to snap a photo of the dead flies caught in the globe of it, because there was something angelic and ephemeral about the way the light came around their bodies in a soft nimbus. She imagined the Supra parked out front, her never having to wonder if one of the other girls had taken it and broken it. She imagined painting here. She imagined painting her own work, not forgeries.

She stood in the tiny bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Hennessy’s face looked back at her.

She was just playing pretend. No matter how clearly Jordan could paint the picture in her head, she would never be able to replicate it in real life.

She knew the numbers. One thousand, two hundred, seventy-eight. Number of square feet. One thousand, three hundred, ninety-five. Dollars per month for rent. Two thousand, seven hundred, ninety. The first month’s rent plus security deposit.

But those weren’t the damning numbers.

The damning number was this: six (this was right before Farrah, the fourth copy, had shot herself). The number of girls she lived with: six. The number of girls she shared a face with: six. The number of girls she shared a social security number with: six.

The number of girls she shared an entire life with: six.