Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(86)

Lock called and she, too, ignored it, like Parsifal’s Parsifality was rubbing off on her. Really she couldn’t stand telling Lock that she’d lost their Visionary. That she hadn’t found anything this entire time but the old Zed. She felt as if she had been given a craft project without any tools, a puzzle without all its pieces. A quest with only Parsifal Bauer as her guide. It was unsolvable as currently structured, and yet she was being blamed for it.

For a few hours she tried to research Bryde on forums, looking for any clues that might be helpful beyond what a vision might offer. She made herself some bad coffee. She ate some of the apples Parsifal had found too flavorless.

Finally, she went through Parsifal’s stuff.

This was very bad behavior and she knew it, but so was getting out of a car and walking away when the world was literally depending on you.

Parsifal’s case was neatly packed, which was no surprise. Three days of clothing folded, each day’s outfit folded skillfully into each other so that he could simply remove it as one piece and apply it to his body. Toiletries tucked into a spotless canvas zipper pouch. Two Nicolas Mahler comics. A notebook with a single journal entry started in it. March 14: Ich versucht so zu t.

He’d drawn a very ugly, savage dog in the bottom corner, the lines rigid and unfriendly. She didn’t care for it.

In the webbed flat pouch of the case, she found a chipped old CD case. Opera. It was Wagner’s Parsifal. As she was sliding it back in, she noticed the name of the performers. JOANNA BAUER. Sister? Mother? She flipped it over, looking for a copyright date. It was all in German. She opened it up and inside was a CD and a photograph. It was a posed photograph, and although no one was laughing in it, it was easy to see from their faces they were all finding it hilarious nonetheless. A plump woman (mother?) and three girls (sisters?) all stood on one side of the shot, pointing dramatically at the other side of the photo, where a much younger Parsifal looked dramatically long-suffering, so dramatically long-suffering that it was obvious he was being a parody of himself. It was painterly in its compositions, the four arms all directing the viewer’s attention from their shocked forms to his contrite one.

I killed them all, Parsifal had said.

Uncontrolled Visionaries were frightening in their destructive power, even to themselves. Lock said he’d never known one to come to them without a tragedy already packed in their suitcase.

Here was Parsifal’s tragedy.

He didn’t return.

A few hours into the night, Farooq-Lane’s annoyance turned to concern. He must be lost. Kidnapped. Hit by a car. Any number of things could befall a teen boy with poor social skills and a lack of appetite.

He wasn’t picking up his phone.

She bundled up and packed a small bag of food for him, then went out, making sure the DO NOT DISTURB plaque was still in place.

She drove. She drove all night. She drove to where he’d gotten out of the car, pulling into every café and still-open shop, and then she tried the hotels that were anywhere close to the route, and then she tried the hospitals.

She dreaded telling Lock she’d lost him. She couldn’t really believe that she had. What would Parsifal do if he wasn’t being a Visionary, here in this strange country, no family, no friends? Farooq-Lane was starting to feel like she might have been unkind. If only he’d been easier to like.

The night stretched and pinched in changeable measure: minutes would drag as she coasted through neighborhoods she’d already checked, and then hours would fly by as she leaned on hotel desks asking, Have you seen anyone who looks like this?

It reminded her of the night Lock had found her, the first night she’d lived through after Nathan’s murders. She’d gotten into her car that night, too, because what else was there to do? She wasn’t going to sleep, or watch TV, or read, and the thing about a murder instead of an accident is that there’s no hospital to sit vigil in. There’s just the night, the night, the night. She’d circled and stopped and gone into every place that was open in Chicago in the middle of the night. She collected all the late-night artifacts one could collect: lottery tickets, frothed coffee, old corn dogs, cheap sunglasses like the pair Parsifal had been wearing in the bathtub. Somewhere, she thought, Nathan is out there in this night, and she didn’t know what she would do if she saw him. When she finally got home to her crime-scene row house, Lock had been sitting on the steps waiting for her. I think you need for this to mean something, he’d rumbled.

She was going to find Parsifal. She was not going to have to tell Lock she had lost their only Visionary.

She drove.





55

It was in the middle of the night, and it woke them.

Mags Harmonhouse shared a bedroom with her sister, Olly, just as she had when they were girls: two twin beds a twin-bed width apart, close enough that they had jumped from bed to bed before their mother had put an end to it. There were a lot of years and three husbands between that time and now, but sometimes when Mags woke up she thought they were girls again. It wasn’t a good thought, though. It always made her think, Oh no, now I have to do it all again.

She woke up now and clawed up her glasses. She heard Olly clawing up her glasses as well.

The sisters looked at each other in the dark. Olly’s eyes were bright, glittering beads in the streetlights outside, nothing comforting about that, even knowing her for decades. Anything seemed possible on a night like this when you’d been woken by something and didn’t know what the something had been.