Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(72)

Hennessy looked dead, the skin beneath her eyes purpled and her joints loose and unmanned by her consciousness. But she couldn’t be, since all her dreams were still awake and coming forward to pull her limp body free from the pooled water.

“That’s a funny way of saying thank you for saving my life,” Ronan said.

He looked like his brother, in a harder way, like Declan Lynch had been inserted into a pencil sharpener and Ronan Lynch had been taken out after. Declan’s teeth were even; Ronan’s were bared. Declan’s eyes were narrow; Ronan’s were arrow slits. Declan’s hair was curled; Ronan’s was obliterated. Declan looked like the kind of person you forgot you’d ever seen. Ronan looked like the kind of person that made you cross to the other side of the street. It was hard to imagine they’d grown up under the same roof; if Jordan had been told they’d been separated as children, she’d have believed it.

Jordan said, “If I showed up on your doorstep, just like that, don’t you think you’d ask me the same thing?”

Ronan lifted his feet, one, then the other, watching the way the sodden carpet changed in color as he did. The whole hallway had an unappealing odor now that it was wet; it smelled abandoned, moldy, toxic, not really livable. “No, I think I’d start with a solid ‘thanks, man,’ first.”

“Easy, easy, she’s ruined,” June hissed as she and Brooklyn propped Hennessy against the wall beside Jordan. As they did, Jordan saw that a brand-new flower marred Hennessy’s throat. Room for just two more. Jordan felt sick. Genuinely sick, her stomach heaving and warm. Two was only one less than three, but it felt different. It was no longer really a number. It was the second to last copy and then the last.

Hennessy’s head rolled to the side, but she wasn’t entirely passed out; her eyelids fluttered. Even now she battled sleeping. Battled dreaming. Another copy right now would surely be the end of her, no matter what the tattoo on her throat promised.

The Dark Lady hadn’t worked.

Jordan had no more ideas.

The mountains flickered in Jordan’s thoughts. Fire whispered: devour.

Get

it

together.

She was Jordan, and she was the girl who didn’t fall apart.

“Well, thanks, mate,” Jordan said. “Now, why are you here? Did your brother send you?”

It didn’t seem possible that she could feel more bad feeling on top of her current level of bad feeling, but thinking about Declan Lynch discovering that Jordan had played him managed to deftly add a large amount of shittiness to her situation.

“My brother?” Ronan echoed. “Oh—right. I thought you looked … You were the painter at the Market, weren’t you? The one he chatted up. Is your name Ashley?”

Jordan said, “What?”

“I’m pretty sure he only dates Ashleys,” Ronan said. “The stupider, the better. Just in case you were thinking of calling him back. I wouldn’t, personally. It looks like a very boring time. Why are there so fucking many of you? That’s messed up. Which of you is the original?”

All of them looked to Hennessy.

Ronan sounded dubious. “Shouldn’t she have … CPR?”

“If drowning was what ailed her, you’d be right, young man,” said Brooklyn. It was the end of the world, but she still spared a moment to check out his body, because she was Brooklyn. Her face said the moment was worth it. “If only it was drowning what ailed us.”

“I’m after a blanket,” Trinity said, slipping down the hall.

Ronan leaned his head around the corner of the doorway to glance inside the bathroom they’d come from. He made a small hm sound, though it was hard to tell from the back of his head if it was over the ridiculousness of the bathroom, the presence of Madame X, or the dead copy. He was very lackadaisical about the entire experience. Like it was just another day. Like he expected them to also feel like it was just another day. “Bryde told me where to find you. Said you’d be dying and to get my ass moving.”

“Fairy Market Bryde?” Madox said. “The one they were all going on about?”

Jordan removed a long, damp hair from inside her mouth. It was stuck to some damp fuzz, too. Almost-drowning came with all kinds of unpredicted small and large miseries. “How does this Bryde know who we are?”

Ronan pushed his toe against a very ugly satin hand towel that must have been in the bathroom before the flood. “How the hell should I know? I don’t even know how he knows who I am. I’ve only met him in dreams. Maybe your dreamer met him there.”

Jordan had never heard of such a thing, but even if it were possible, it didn’t seem possible for Hennessy. She had only dreamt a dozen times in as many years.

Trinity returned with a blanket to gently roll Hennessy onto. After the girls had assembled her on it, Hennessy murmured, “Set …” She closed her eyes, wincing. “Set my timer.”

“Your phone’s fucked,” said Trinity. “I’ll put it on rice.”

“I got you,” June said. She set a twenty-minute timer on her phone before resting it on Hennessy’s chest. Hennessy gripped it with the neediness of a child handed a favorite toy. As Trinity and Brooklyn picked up either end of the blanket like a stretcher, Ronan ran a hand along his shaved head, looking perplexed. He cast a look around the drenched hallway and the drenched corpse and the drenched décor that had managed to escape the bathroom with Hennessy and Jordan. He remarked, “This is really fucked up.”