Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(90)

Matthew had sent a text: please come home I

It was the plaintive text of a child to a parent, sent to Declan because Matthew had no parent, and because it was the middle of the night, and he’d woken, if he had slept at all, and remembered that he was a dream.

“I …” he began.

Jordan smoothly anticipated the cue. She retreated another step back to her canvas, and there, with the side of one of her brushes, she scraped all of her work away.

“Why—?”

Jordan’s slow smile spread once more. “You’ll have to come back for another sitting.”

He had told himself it would only be for that night, and he had meant it, he had, but he was a liar, even to himself, and so he said, “Yes.”





57

Dabney Pitts had never done anything heroic in his life until that day. No one had really asked him to. No one had ever really asked him to do anything. He was twenty-eight years old and neither very clever nor very stupid. He was neither very handsome nor very ugly, tall nor short. He was just a guy, and before that, he’d been just a kid, and before that, he’d been just a baby. No one really asked him to do anything. They mostly didn’t remember him. He didn’t make waves.

But now he’d made waves.

He’d barricaded that strange woman in the freezer.

The old ladies looked pretty bad. When he’d come home from getting high with Welt, he’d found them careened across the stairs in an unnatural way. Mags’s mouth was open, and there was a little bit of blood in it. On her tongue. Slicked, sort of. She didn’t have as many teeth as he did. He wasn’t sure if that was a new situation. Olly looked a little better, but one of her eyes looked wrong. Collapsed wasn’t the word for it, but it was better than crumpled, because it was hard to crumple something as wet as an eyeball.

He’d found a woman who looked a lot like a more mature version of the old ladies’ new tenant hiding in the bedroom with blood spattered on her. He’d forced her into the freezer with a kitchen knife. He had an idea that otherwise she might crawl out a window. The broom closet might have worked, but he didn’t have a way to lock it, and in any case it was too much work to get all the stuff out of there she might use as a weapon. She was obviously dangerous.

Easier to put her in the empty chest freezer in the crawl space and set some shit on top of it.

She’d said, “Please don’t do this.”

“It’s unplugged,” he’d told her.

“Just let me go.”

“Shut up,” he’d replied, and the rush of bravery to his head had been nearly too much for Dabney Pitts. He wasn’t entirely sure he was built for it. He’d been doing all right, he thought, until this recent downward turn had brought him to a spare room at Rider House after he used the last of his rent money for pot and a Redbox rental of that new comedy that involved a beach house and that one actress he thought was cute as a rabbit.

“Help’s coming,” he told Olly now. This probably wasn’t true. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood and house that cops hurried to, not like nice white suburban neighborhoods where they didn’t expect bad things to happen. People, cops included, expected bad things to happen at Rider House. It didn’t make them less bad; it just seemed to make them less of an emergency.

He wasn’t sure if Olly was even awake to hear him. He noticed Mags had a little bit of blood coming from her ears. That didn’t seem good.

He guessed he could have marched the new woman at knife-point to the cops. Maybe. Just the idea made him feel ill. Even if he hadn’t had open warrants, his courage had already been overextended; he was starting to feel distinctly uneasy in this dark house with these two women who looked less alive than he would’ve liked, with a woman who had visited some kind of violence barricaded in a warm freezer downstairs.

He was going to be a braver person from now on, he thought. He was going to call his sister and tell her he was sorry about taking her cash out of the coffee can while she was out. He was going to swim upstream a little. Maybe he wasn’t built for it, but he wasn’t built for this, either. He could get muscles.

He sat down next to Olly and took her hand. It was very cold. He said, “Just hold on.”





58

Ronan was a cloud, and he was raining.

“Everyone thinks their world is the only one. A flea believes a dog is the world. A dog believes the kennel is the world. The huntsman thinks his country is the world. The king believes the globe is the world. The farther out you get, the wider you get, the higher you get, the more you see you have misunderstood the bounds of what is possible. Of what is right and wrong. Of what you can truly do. Perspective, Ronan Lynch,” Bryde said. “That is what we must teach you.”

It was a confused dream, lacking all the clarity of his dream at the mansion. Within the dream, he couldn’t remember what he’d successfully dreamt about, only that it had been sharper than this one. Mostly he remembered being a cloud. It was very peaceful. No one expected much from a cloud but for it to do what it was made to do. He could hear the little pattering of the precipitation down below.

“Are you going to do that all night?” Bryde asked.

Ronan didn’t reply, because he was a cloud. He was glad to be spared the conversation, really. Words felt exhausting and he was relieved to find he didn’t have the necessary parts to form them. He spread through the colorless sky and rained some more. He thundered a little.