Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(68)

The others never found out that she went to look, but Hennessy found out when the property manager called to follow up a week later. Jordan hadn’t said anything to explain herself. Hennessy said, “I’d leave me, too.”

“Professional beauty,” Hennessy said, blowing a smoke ring. She looked disastrous. Black rivulets ran from her eyes. Her ears. Her nostrils. Coated her teeth. She could have passed as ordinary when Jordan found her at the harbor with The Dark Lady a little while earlier. She wouldn’t be able to now.

Now she bled black and monstrous before the real Dark Lady.

Jordan was displeased to find that they’d somehow gotten her wrong when they copied her. Some variation was understandable, given the unideal circumstances they’d been working with—referencing photos and stolen glances at previous public sales. But it wasn’t that the brushstrokes or colors were wrong. It was the atmosphere. The original Dark Lady had a verve and magnetism that the copy completely lacked. Desire oozed from the original.

Hennessy had said it was because it was a dream.

Jordan didn’t know anything about dreams, apart from herself and the other girls. She hadn’t realized they could have feeling attached to them. That seemed like a lot of power for one person to have.

Hennessy gestured with her cigarette at the bullet-holed Madame X, which leaned next to The Dark Lady (“bitches need company,” she’d said). “That’s what they called hens like her. PBs. Pro. Fessional. Beauties. Everything roses and riches as long as her face was in order. She dusted herself in lavender powder, didn’t she, to be that color? Could any of us do what she did? Prepare ourselves for the public eye, ensure that everything about us was ready for nostrings adoration?”

Hennessy had selected one of the mansion’s several master bathrooms to try out The Dark Lady’s influence. Like every other room in the house, it was outrageous: two hundred square feet, marble floors, tufted armchairs, two toilets, fourteen shower-heads, a bidet. Everything that could be black was black. Everything else was gold. The massive jetted tub was sunk into the floor like a swimming pool, and it was in this empty tub Hennessy reclined, fully dressed in lace, leather, and black ooze. Jordan couldn’t figure it out. Hennessy lived a sleep-deprived life, always perched in uncomfortable places, her phone timer carefully set for eighteen or twenty minutes, everything designed to keep her from dreaming. If Jordan had been in the same situation, she would’ve used this opportunity to luxuriate in sleep for once. Do it right. Bath. Pajamas. Best mattress available, piled high with pillows and duvets. Yes, if she dreamt a copy, it was going to be hell on the other side. But at least she would’ve gotten wonderful sleep for once. A lemonade/lemons situation.

But Jordan had always seemed more built for lemonade, and Hennessy more for lemons.

“Jordan. Jordan. Jorrrddaaaaaaaan.”

“I’m listening,” Jordan said. She sat on the edge of the tub, her legs dangling into empty air. She imagined the air was water. She longed for it to be water. One of her strange episodes had begun on the drive from the harbor back here, and now, part of her was once again being made to look at water plunging over rocks, turbulent clouds of smoke rolling over asphalt, moss on rocks, mist ghosting over blue mountains. She felt thirsty for all of it. If she went to the mountains, she thought, she wouldn’t feel like this. Starving. Suffocating. Deprived of something she needed to live.

“Read back the last sentence I dictated.”

Jordan gave Hennessy the finger.

“Did you like your date with Monsieur Declan Lynch?” Hennessy asked. “You’re probably the coolest thing that yob’s scored in his life. It’ll be the topic of his therapy for decades.”

“He gave me a jar of Tyrian purple.”

“How’d he score that overnight?” When Jordan didn’t speculate, Hennessy continued, “His old man was a dreamer. Or signed his name to someone else’s dream. Is that what we’re thinking? Is Declan Lynch a dreamer? Did he dream those snails for you? Does that make them real, if he did? Is anything real if you give it a think? Is some maladjusted god fitfully populating his nightmare with us, praying to his own unnamed god that he’ll wake up? Is—”

“Hennessy.”

She was stalling.

“Jordan.”

She knew she was.

Jordan slid down into the tub beside her, inhaling sharply where the tub was cold against her bare skin. The tub was gritty in the bottom. It hadn’t been used for its intended purpose for years. Maybe ever. It was impossible to discover the mansion’s backstory; squatting here was only possible because the owners and its history were thoroughly absent. It was difficult to imagine it ever being vibrant and loved, vacuumed and lived in. A place like this didn’t seem like it had been built for intimacy.

Hennessy put her head down on Jordan’s shoulder. Jordan stroked her temples lightly as Hennessy’s wide-open brown eyes looked up at the ceiling. Black leaked from the corners. If Jordan looked closely, she could see the darkness leaking into her pupils, too, wicking from the edges like into blotter paper. It wasn’t right, she thought. It just wasn’t right. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fair. She was sure between the two of them they’d done plenty to deserve anything they had coming to them. But it wasn’t right. It was wrong. It looked corrupt.

“Heloise,” she said, “you’re getting to where if you don’t give it away, the man’ll take it from you.”