Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(87)

Maybe it had been a thump. A thump was a good thing to wake you in the night, Mags thought, a solid choice, classical. Once Dabney had tried to get up to piss in the middle of the night when he was baked more than a potato, and he’d made a thump when he’d tried to go through the mirror in the hall instead of the kitchen doorway.

Olly blinked. Mags could tell she was listening, too. Deciding if it was a thump or a commotion. This neighborhood had never been Leave It to Beaver, as Olly sometimes said, but it was getting even rougher, and last year a commotion had preceded a robbery. The three young men had come in and taken the cash out of the dressers they tossed and the microwave out of the kitchen. They’d roughed Mags up a little bit when she’d tried to keep them from taking Olly’s little television.

Maybe it was that new girl. Mags had been p.o.’d at Olly for the charity case—no point getting some runaway in here because the law would follow—but Liliana had already transformed the house. Mags wasn’t sure how she had accomplished so much in so little time. She was always working, that was for sure, but one person shouldn’t have been able to clean all the mold and repair the stair and find the good dark sheen of the wood floors beneath years of wear and dust in a day. Mags only saw her using Olly’s water and vinegar, but the house even smelled different, like flowers, like summer. She’d had to examine the hallway walls to see if the girl had painted, because everything seemed brighter.

“The girl,” Olly whispered. “She’s crying.”

And now that she said it, of course that was what it was. Low whimpering came from the room above them. Little moans, like a hurt animal. Subtle footfalls with it as well, as if she paced or moved about as she did. It was a sad sound, but also, for some reason—in this dark night, with Olly’s eyes still gleaming white behind her glasses, with the trees shadowing the walls—unsettling.

The two sisters hesitated and then Mags grunted and threw off her covers. Olly followed suit. She’d always do something if Mags did it first. The two crones stood in the middle of their bedroom, shoulder to shoulder, listening. Had it stopped?

No, there it was again.

They put on their bathrobes and shuffled into the hall.

It was louder out here, the weeping. It was so sad. Particularly when one imagined it coming from that sweet-faced girl, her gentle eyes clouded with tears, soft mouth torn with despair.

They turned on the light, but it didn’t do much. It was just a single bulb, and it was barely better than when the hallway was just illuminated by the tepid orange streetlights.

Mags was not fast to climb the stairs, and Olly was even slower. Mags kept pace with her. She still had that feeling of ants running over her arms, and she didn’t like the idea of getting there before her sister.

Liliana’s door was ajar. Through the crack, Mags could see something moving back and forth. A column of light and then dark. Then light. Then dark. It must have been Liliana’s blouse, but it put Mags in mind of a spirit. Her mother said she’d seen one once; it had come up in a jet, she said, a beam from the floor in the old kitchen she’d been working in, gave her a scare that was still chewing her bones years later.

Mags and Olly were nearly to the top of the stairs. The final stair let out a splitting creak.

The column of white froze in the door and then vanished.

There was silence.

Mags hesitated. She wanted to go back down the stairs.

“Child?” Olly called out, which was the first time she’d been braver than Mags in her life.

Liliana sobbed, “Please go away.”

They were both so relieved to hear her voice that they both let out a breath.

Mags said, “—”

But the words were lost because suddenly there was no sound.

It was as if the house had been paused. As if there had never been such a thing as sound. As if this thing they remembered as sound had always been a false memory.

Olly reached out and gripped her sister’s hand tightly.

And then all the sound came back at once.





56

I like your place, mate,” Jordan said. This was a joke, because it was not his place. It was a twenty-four-hour convenience store that Declan had been loitering in for the last fifteen minutes, staying out of the cold.

It was one o’clock in the morning. He was very awake. This was a side effect of not taking his sleeping pill. This was a side effect of Jordan Hennessy calling him at midnight. This was a side effect of him being a fool. The entire place had the feeling only achievable at one o’clock in the morning, when everyone has joined a club, the club of people who are not in bed. A club defined not by being with the other members of the club but rather against everyone else. Jordan Hennessy had just pulled up to the gas station in a red Toyota Supra, and she gazed past Declan to the glowing lights of the convenience store behind him with an approving nod. She didn’t seem to mind that when she’d called thirty minutes before, he’d given her this address to pick him up at instead of his real address. He supposed she was a forger. She was hardwired for suspicion, for criminality, for covering one’s tracks.

What are you doing here, Declan?

“I’ve fixed it up a lot,” he said.

Jordan looked brighter than when he’d seen her in the museum, more alive here in this after-dark world, under glittering midnight fluorescents, behind the wheel of a car, unfettered by walls and opening and closing times and the wakeful expectations of other people.