Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(80)

The bed itself was on a pedestal accessible by marble steps on three sides. It was barely made: someone had spread two comforters on top of the bare pillow-top mattress.

Hennessy was a small dark smudge in this shapeless nest.

She was neither sleeping nor cussing. She was quietly crying. Not sorrowful sobs, but small, splintered noises of pain. One hand covered her mouth, as if she didn’t want even the empty room to hear her.

He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him come in.

“Is that bullshit?” Ronan asked.

The crying stopped.

Her eyes came open. Focused on him. They were dark, intelligent, skeptical.

“It’s just me,” Ronan said. “Your girls are in the living room. So if it’s bullshit, you can cut the act now.”

Hennessy sat up. It appeared to take a great deal of effort, particularly to do it without making a sound. Once she had finished it, she took a moment to pull herself together. She didn’t look angry about being accused of putting on an act. She looked appraising.

She asked, “Why are we having this conversation?”

Ronan handed her the palm cross he’d taken from The Dark Lady’s shore. Hennessy’s fingers shook as she held it. Her knuckles were white. She said nothing. She ran her thumb across the papery knot that held the cross together.

“I knew there had to be another one,” she said, her voice small and tight. “Statistically. And here you are, aren’t you? I killed the latest one, didn’t I? I drowned her.”

He just held her gaze.

She nodded a little, bitterly. “And you gave them a little run round the showroom. Were they impressed?”

He shrugged a little as if to say, who wouldn’t be.

“And you didn’t drown any of them with that ocean,” Hennessy said. It wasn’t a question. “Because you’re not a rubbish dreamer. You’re good at it.”

He shrugged a little again.

“And now they’ve sent you in here to ask you to save me,” Hennessy guessed.

“I know you’re lying to them. I just can’t figure out why,” Ronan said. “Is it that you want them to feel like shit? Do you get off on them feeling guilty?”

“My poor girls,” Hennessy said. She put her fingers to the tattoo on her throat, gingerly. She had one more flower there than all the other girls had in their choker, and it was a little brighter than all the others. When she touched it, he saw pinprick bits of blood well up. Not just within the shape of the new flower, like a fresh tattoo, but all across her throat and her cheeks, as if her skin was permeable. Her eyes rolled back.

This wasn’t fake.

As she slumped toward the edge of the bed, Ronan vaulted forward to catch her. He propped her against the headboard as the expression returned to her face. He saw now that the comforter beneath her was smeared with blood. Not a lot. But enough.

Her phone was faceup beside her. It ticked down a timer. Eleven minutes.

Even now she’d been keeping herself from dreaming again.

“So it really is hurting you,” he said. Maybe he was wrong, he thought. Maybe his experience of dreaming copies wasn’t universal. Maybe there was a cost to copying yourself more than once that he hadn’t experienced, even if he couldn’t think of why it would be true. Maybe—

“That part is true,” Hennessy said. “I really am dying.”

Ronan left her there in the bed and rummaged in the bathroom for towels. The lights were all burned out and there were no windows, so he had to make do with the roll of toilet paper he could glimpse in the light through the open door.

He returned with it. She took it and dabbed her strange, damaged skin.

“Dying, but not from making copies,” he said. “Why make them go to all the work of hunting down The Dark Lady, then?”

“It’s not the copies killing me,” Hennessy said. “It’s the dream itself.”

“No,” Ronan said.

“Yes, Ronan Lynch,” Hennessy said. “You’re gonna have to trust me on this one. This is the truth. If I could change my dream, I wouldn’t be dying.”

“It did change your dream, though. You dreamt an ocean.”

“I dreamt that cursed ocean and the same dream I always do,” she said. “And look at me: another step, step, step, waltzing toward death.”

He puzzled this out. “But if the copies aren’t killing you, how do you know how close you are?”

She gestured to that choker of flowers around her throat, careful not to touch it. “I’ve got my countdown, don’t I?”

It is not as easy as you think, Bryde had said.

Ronan frowned at her. He tried to imagine if he could dream her something to conclusively alter her dreams. The Dark Lady’s spell was strong, though, and if she’d managed to dream her recurring dream even over the top of The Dark Lady’s seashore, she needed something incredibly powerful. And with space for only two more flowers around her neck, there wasn’t room for error. Perhaps he could dream something that would eat her dreams as soon as she had them. It was hard once one got into the very abstract dreams; they sometimes had unexpected side effects, like a fairy bargain from an old story. He didn’t want something that would eat all her dreams and her thoughts as well, or something that would eat all her dreams and then her living dreams, too. Perhaps—