Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(75)

Ronan knelt and pushed his fingers into the sand. Feeling it. Really feeling it. The damp abrasion of this coarse sand, the cool pooling of the water when he pushed his fingers down far enough, the itch when the sand had been against the sensitive skin of his wrists for too long. He was far from his forest, but The Dark Lady’s spell was strong enough to invoke the seashore clearly.

“I know you feel anxious on sunny days,” Bryde remarked. “You haven’t said it out loud. You barely think it. They love the sunny days, after all. They love a naked sky with a savage white sun set in it like a killer jewel. It doesn’t worry them. It’s a string of rainy days that makes them grow languid and unsteady. Energy draining, depression eating the marrow out of their bones. Rainy days aren’t for them. Do you think a tree hates a rainy day?”

Ronan straightened, looking around himself. Sand, rocks, a little palm leaf cross like a child would make for Palm Sunday wedged between rocks.

“Think of it this way: Fill a swimming pool and throw a fish in it,” Bryde said. “You wouldn’t do that because no one does. But imagine it. In goes the fish and it swims, swims, swims, all of the pool available to it. Now imagine the same pool without water in it. Throw a fish in it. What happens? You know what the hell happens. This is why there’s nothing so ugly as a cloudless day. What will this world be like for us if they stop the rain? Sometimes I fucking weep for all those dead trees.”

“Shut up,” Ronan said. “I’m trying to work.”

He was trying to hold both his sleeping and waking truths in his head at the same time—to stay conscious enough in the dream to shape the events within it, but not become so wakeful that he woke right up.

Bryde sounded amused. “Someone wants to show off.”

Ronan ignored this; he wouldn’t be goaded by someone who wasn’t even visible.

And so what if he wanted to show off.

Bryde was quiet, in any case, as Ronan hunted up and down the beach; there wasn’t anything impressive he’d want to take back to the mansion. Sand, rocks, some broken shells when he thrust his hand into the chilly water. He took the little palm leaf cross, but he wanted more.

“This is your world,” Bryde said. “Only you limit it.”

Only Ronan and The Dark Lady, really. Because he could feel how every time he pressed on the contents of the dream, something outside him tried to shape it back to this moment on this seashore.

“I’m too far away,” Ronan said.

“I’m not going to help you,” Bryde said. “Not when you can do it by yourself. Hop. Skip. Throw the pebble. What’s in the next box? Surely you know this game by now.”

Ronan thought of his physical body. On the couch, sprawled back, fingers splayed across the gaudy, expensive upholstery. Those paintings leaned up against it—yes.

Bryde laughed.

Bryde laughed. He knew what Ronan was going to manifest before he even began.

Ronan began to dig in the sand, imagining, remembering, projecting the truth of what he wanted with all his might, until his fingers felt a hard edge. He pawed with increasing intensity, pausing only to put the palm cross in his shirt where it wouldn’t get crushed or forgotten. He could feel it scratching against his skin. Good. Then he’d be sure to remember it.

Then he dug and dug and dug until he’d uncovered his prize.

“Fucking A.” He was pleased. Very pleased.

“A king always enjoys his throne,” Bryde noted drily.





48

I don’t do drugs, Salvador Dalí once said. I am drugs.

Ronan Lynch was breaking Jordan’s brain. In the precise same moment that he woke from his dream in the McLean mansion, Jordan realized that she had never really believed that Hennessy had once dreamt things other than herself. She wasn’t sure she’d ever really believed, on a gut level, that Hennessy had dreamt anything, which seemed ridiculous. Of course Jordan knew Hennessy was responsible for the girls with her face. But no one had ever caught her in the act. The only thing they’d ever each been present for was their own creations: coming to life beside a Hennessy paralyzed and agonized from the process. They never saw her go to sleep and wake with anything.

So although they lived this truth every single day, Jordan was astonished to find that she’d never truly believed it.

It was properly morning by now, and the light came in full and colorless through the big, pollen-crusted windows on one side of the room, erasing all shadows, turning the space into a showroom for modern art and urban decay. Above the house, a plane flying into Dulles was audible, the productive roar reminding them all that despite the bizarre night, an ordinary world was continuing for the rest of the greater DC area. The girls were all arrayed in the living room, gathered round the yellow Lexus as if around a warming fire, attention more or less upon Ronan Lynch, who was stretched on the shiny brocade sofa with its bullet holes in the back. He was tall enough that his shaved head wedged up against one corner and his boots crossed over the opposite armrest. While he slept and while Jordan recovered from her dream episode, she’d studied him and imagined how she would paint him. All the dark, angular lines of his clothing, the pale, angular lines of his skin, the coiled restlessness of him apparent even as he slept. What a portrait he and his brother would make, she thought.

Then Ronan woke, bringing his dreams with him.