Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(79)

Three: June. Poor June. She was marred forever in Hennessy’s mind by being the girl who proved that the copies weren’t a one-time occurrence. It wasn’t like Hennessy hadn’t known, though, deep down. Because after the first time it happened, she’d started setting that timer every time she closed her eyes. It had taken her years to fuck that up, and June was her punishment.

Two: Jordan. The first would always be a miracle and a curse. The girls didn’t know how long it was after Jay died that Jordan came along, but they knew it was within days. Close enough that Hennessy had asked Jordan to go to the funeral for her, and Jordan had. She didn’t want to go to her own mother’s funeral? Ronan asked. You really don’t get how Hennessy feels about Jay, the girls said. Anyway, of course Jordan would do it. Jordan would do anything for Hennessy, and vice versa. They were basically the same person, after all.

One: Hennessy. Who was there to say who Jordan Hennessy would have been if she hadn’t split? If Jay hadn’t died? Maybe there was a version of her in art school now. Maybe there was a version who was too good for art school, maybe there was a version of her who had already stormed out of her classes and was grinning from a London studio dripping with celebrities and cameras. Maybe there was a version of her who believed in love, maybe there was a version of her who gave a toss about anything, maybe there was a version of her who slept eight hours a night. Or maybe not. Look at J. H. Hennessy. Sometimes it was better to just pour a glass of vodka on the grave and accept that the heart had always churned poisoned blood. The girls tapped their drinks together and grudgingly agreed.

Every version of Jordan Hennessy was probably born to die.

After the girls told him their story, Ronan didn’t say what he was thinking, which was this: Jordan Hennessy was a liar.

He didn’t know why she was, and he didn’t know exactly how far down the lie went, but he’d spent enough time with Declan to know one. Liar, liar.

Those copies weren’t killing her.

Ronan had dreamt a copy of himself before. It had been an accident. It was long after he had begun to get a handle on dreaming but far before he’d begun to get a handle on his life, and he’d been trying for too much at once. The stakes were high: Ronan had been assembling materials to bury the reputation of the man who’d had Niall Lynch killed and make sure that he never came after the Lynch family again. Ronan had a filthy laundry list to check off in the dream: paperwork, photos, and electronics. The photos were detailed. Distasteful. Some of the materials had been more awful to acquire than others. He’d managed to manifest some with just a nudge of his subconscious, a desire to be holding it in his hand already, but the photos were stubbornly blank. He couldn’t make them work without manifesting the hideous scene within the dream, before snapping a photo of it with a phone.

The images were meant to be awful. Breathtakingly awful. Blackmailing someone of Colin Greenmantle’s clout required more than standard-issue skin pics. They needed to feature body horror and youth. He needed to bring back a body part in an envelope. He needed premeditation documented in texted photos.

He had to live it to manifest it.

Ronan had felt as if he would never be clean again.

Even in the dream he was disgusted with himself, and with that disgust and shame came his old enemies, the night horrors. Ronan’s night horrors were a lot like the things he liked to dream about—they had wings, beaks, claws—but with an important difference: They hated him.

They’d come for him just as he’d bundled up all his foul evidence in his arms, prepared to wake with it. He’d been faced with a choice: wake without manifesting anything and know that he would have to try this all over again … or give the night horrors something else to aim for while he woke with the goods.

He’d asked the dream to make another Ronan. The dream had manifested one so quickly that it was as if it had been waiting for him to ask.

The night horrors fell upon him.

Ronan remembered seeing himself attacked from the outside, everything about the copy’s reactions precisely the same as his would have been. The sounds were the same. His body buckled the same. His hands clawed out the same. His face looked at Ronan and understood why he had done it, the same as Ronan would have for another Ronan.

“Get the fuck out,” the other Ronan had snarled, in Ronan’s voice. “Don’t let it be for noth—”

Ronan had woken.

He’d woken with an armful of disgusting photos, paperwork, and electronics. And on the carpet beside him was another Ronan Lynch. Bloody, bent nearly backward, his spine a horror-bridge, a hand pressed to a neck wound that would never close, gasping.

It had taken him so long to die.

It had been one of the worst things Ronan had ever seen.

But it hadn’t taken anything from him physically.

Dreaming copies shouldn’t be killing Hennessy. So she was either faking that she was dying, or something else was killing her.

But he didn’t say any of this to her dreams. He just told them he had to talk to Hennessy herself. One of them—he couldn’t tell any of them apart except for Jordan and June—warned: “She’ll just be sleeping or cussing right now.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Ronan said.

The girls had taken her to one of the mansion’s many bedrooms, selected, presumably, because it had blinds. They were drawn, and the room was the peculiar gray of a blinkered room in full daylight. It was silent when he let himself in. Like every other room he’d seen in the mansion, it was enormous, ridiculous. Because of his time at Aglionby and his friend Gansey, he’d seen plenty of wealth in his high school years, but it had never looked like this. The windows had satin love seats built into their sills. Three zebra rugs added dimension to the floor, which was otherwise covered with high-piled white carpet. White sculptures of voluptuous women poured urns of water into troughs that led into an en suite bathroom; stagnant water was gray and scummy in them.