Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(95)
He took out his wallet and thumbed out some bills. He chucked them on the end of the table and rubbed a hand over his face several times.
“Now you know why I said you couldn’t help me,” Hennessy told him. But he sort of had already. It was a little less dreadful to have finally said it out loud.
“And I can’t,” Ronan said. “Not by myself. How do you feel about trees?”
60
Farooq-Lane finally found Parsifal because of the dogs.
Night had passed and morning had passed and it was well into day when she saw them. It was just three scruffy mutts of three scruffy sizes giving all their attention to a trash bin behind a strip mall, and there was no reason to stop except that she thought to herself, Wouldn’t it be awful if they were eating Parsifal?
She had no reason to think they were, but it was such a gruesome idea that she pulled up beside the trash bin. She made an enormous amount of noise when she got out, clapping and stomping her feet, her heart thrumming unpleasantly. Because she was so keyed up, she thought they’d put up a fight, but they were just ordinary strays, not monsters, and they fled immediately with the guilty look of domesticated dogs caught in trash.
And then she saw Parsifal.
Or rather, she saw his legs sticking out from behind the trash bin.
Oh God.
With effort, she made herself take a step, and then another, and then another, stepping into the shadow of the strip mall.
He was not eaten.
It was worse.
Farooq-Lane often wondered if her brother had meant to kill her, too.
He’d clearly timed his attack around her visit to Chicago. According to various eyewitness reports, the weapon went off right as her taxi was seen pulling into the neighborhood. Hard to tell if he had timed it correctly for her to be the first to find the victims, or if he had timed it incorrectly and meant for her to have already been inside the house when it went off.
She’d tipped the taxi driver and rolled out her tiny, attractive suitcase and looked at her parents’ home. It was magazine perfect: a brownstone with big stairs, old bushes and trees planted out front. What people wished city living looked like as they sighed and stacked themselves four deep with roommates in apartments. Her parents were moving to the suburbs at the end of the year, and this was going to be hers. She was the young professional who wanted the city life, they said, and could now take over the mortgage payments.
It was going to be such a handsome life, she thought.
She rolled up the walk, bumped her suitcase up the seven stairs, and found the door open.
As she did, she had three clear thoughts.
One: The cat was going to get out.
Two: There was a pair of open scissors resting directly on the inner floor mat. This was Nathan’s symbol, his obsession. He hung scissors over his own bed as a child, and also over Farooq-Lane’s until she made him take them down. He drew them in his notebooks and on the wall behind his bed. He collected old scissors in boxes.
Three: There were brains on the end table.
She didn’t remember the day well after that. Everything she thought she remembered always turned out to be something someone had explained to her afterward.
“Parsifal,” Farooq-Lane said, and skidded to her knees beside him.
Her hands hovered over him, trying to decide what to do. It seemed foolish that she’d packed him a bag of food now. As if that would fix anything. As if that would ever fix anything. As if anything would ever be fixed again.
“I looked for you all night,” she said. She was shivering, either because she was out of reach of the sun here, or from looking at him. She couldn’t stand looking at him, but she couldn’t stand to not.
His voice was very slight. “I would have killed you.”
“What … what can I do?”
He said, “Could you fix my arms?”
Both arms rested at awkward angles, as if he had been thrown and then been unable to straighten then. Carefully Farooq-Lane put his pudgy young left hand on his chest, and then she put his angular, ordinary right hand over the top of it.
He was two ages at once, split more or less down the middle. His right side was the Parsifal she’d met, a teen, the oldest he’d ever get. And his left side was a much younger Parsifal, all of the right side twisted and warped to match up with how much smaller he was. It was impossible and yet there it was.
This was the first indication she’d seen of what must have been his truth before the Moderators found him and recruited him. Like all the Visionaries, he would have been caught shifting within his own timeline. From baby to child to teen to however old he would eventually get. Over and over he would swap from one age to another, bringing the sound of all those years lived between them with him as he did, killing everyone close enough to hear. Until the Moderators showed him how to turn the shifting inward, creating better visions … and eventually destroying him.
She had never seen it.
She didn’t think this was what it was supposed to look like. This seemed like neither shifting nor having a deadly final vision.
“Can you change again?” Farooq-Lane asked. “Can you go all the way back to young if I leave?”
Parsifal’s uneven, twisted chest rose and fell, rose and fell. With effort, he said, “I stopped it. The vision. Halfway. This is going to be the one to kill me and I …”