Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(94)

Wendy reappeared. She was holding a coffee carafe, but she stood there with it hovered above the table, looking at Hennessy, with the tears caught in her lashes and her shaking hands and uneaten food.

Ronan eyed Wendy with his heavy silence, but it was not complex enough to offer an excuse for Hennessy.

“Honey, you okay?” asked Wendy comfortingly.

Through a hiccup of shaky tears, Hennessy managed to say, “I’m having his baby. Can I have an orange juice?”

Wendy shot Ronan a look that was less maternal before vanishing.

Ronan shook his head, with equal parts admiration and disbelief. “You’re a real shithead. Look at you. You can’t help it. You’re out of your mind. You’ll be a shithead on your deathbed.”

Hennessy laughed shakily and stuffed French toast in her mouth. She wasn’t bleeding. She had said it out loud, and she wasn’t bleeding. She didn’t have another tattoo choking her throat. Ronan was right. She was awake. She was awake. She was awake.

Her timer went off. She restarted it.

“My boyfriend saw something like that,” Ronan said. “I don’t know if it’s the same thing you’re seeing. But he’s a psychic, and he described something similar to that. Scared the shit out of him, too.”

“What’d he call it?”

Ronan stabbed his third waffle quarter. “Nothing. He screamed. Like he was dying. When I asked him why, he said it was because it saw him. Seemed like that was probably the worst thing he could imagine.”

“Sounds like a match,” Hennessy said. She was still shaking, but she could drink some coffee. Wendy brought her orange juice, patted her hand, and left again. “I like that old bag. She rolls with it.”

“How does it hurt you? The Lace?”

This was harder to describe, not because it was any more fearful, but because it was not a process that followed waking logic. It was a process that followed dream logic, and waking language wasn’t right for it. “It wants … it wants to come out. It wants me to bring it out. It knows I can. So I … fight it, I guess. I resist. And I know that when I do, the Lace will hurt me for it. It says if I don’t let it out, it’ll kill me.”

“It speaks?”

“Not really. It’s like … dream speech? I’m supposed to believe it’s out loud, but it’s not.”

He nodded. He got it.

“It tells me it killed my mum and it will kill me, too.”

This made Ronan look quite sharp-eyed, hawkish, all of a sudden. He said, “Did it kill her?”

“She shot herself in the face,” Hennessy said.

“So it’s lying. Or rather, your subconscious is lying.”

Hennessy snapped, “What?”

He looked up, his final waffle quarter dropping from his fork. “It could be real, or it could be your subconscious, like my night horrors.” He paused, though, frowning, as if something about his own words had puzzled him.

Hennessy said, “So is your Bryde your subconscious, then?”

“Bryde knows things I couldn’t know, like you drowning,” Ronan pointed out. “What does the Lace know?”

Hennessy thought, and then she said, “Your boyfriend.”

That arrow neatly landed in its target.

“Bryde told me to stop saying that,” Ronan said. “Asking if something in my dreams is real. He said for dreamers, it’s always real, because we belong in both worlds. Waking and sleeping. One’s not more true than the other.”

“Do you believe that? When you dream of being naked in front of the class, that’s real?”

Instead of answering, Ronan said, “There’s a big part I’m not getting here, though. Where do the copies come in?”

“Well, I have to bring something back,” Hennessy said. “And I can’t bring the Lace.”

His phone buzzed. A text from DBAG LYNCH. He ignored it. “Hold up. Why don’t you just bring nothing back?”

She didn’t understand.

“Are you telling me you don’t know how to keep dreams in your head?”

Hennessy flicked her phone with irritation. “Why do you think I’ve set a timer for the last decade? Do you think I just enjoy it?”

“Before the Lace, though,” Ronan said. “You didn’t bring something back every time you dreamt then, surely.” He saw the answer in her face. “Shit, man. You mean you’ve never been able to help it?”

“Are you taking the piss out of me?”

“I’m dead serious. You can’t keep your dreams in your head?”

“I didn’t know anyone could,” Hennessy said. “I’ve tried. The girls are my best solution. There’s only me and it in the dream, and I can’t bring it, so I bring me—that’s the copy—and it hurts me as I wake up. And gives me this classic little brand.”

She pointed to the tattoo on her throat, careful not to touch it; it was still tender.

“And you’ve never told anyone this before,” Ronan said. “All the girls think it’s just the copies killing you. They don’t know you’re stopping yourself from manifesting a demon.”

“When you put it that way.”

Ronan let out a long breath. “Fuck, Bryde. What do you want me to do here?”