Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(96)

He had done this to himself?

He muttered something in German. Then he swallowed and finished: “… I need you to see the last vision when I do, so it hasn’t been for nothing.”

“Oh, Parsifal.”

Parsifal closed his eyes. It was a little easier to look at him that way. He’d lost his glasses somewhere and his eyes already looked strange and naked without them, even without them being two different sizes. “The vision will be important to you.”

“To everyone,” Farooq-Lane said.

“To you,” he said again. “Someone important to you. Oh—are—you—are—you—are—” His legs jerked.

Farooq-Lane took his right hand. “I’m here.”

He whispered, “I am not tired of you.”

Then he began to have the vision.





61

Farooq-Lane had seen the end of the world once before. It was after the Moderators had tracked Nathan to Ireland, but before they had organized the attack on his location. When the current Visionary found her, Farooq-Lane had been sitting in the tatty old hotel bar holding an untouched pint of beer a man had bought for her. She didn’t know what her benefactor looked like. He’d asked if she wanted a drink, and she’d looked right through him without answering, and he’d told the bartender: Get this woman a drink and a priest and left her to her own devices. Before they’d gotten into the car, though, the Visionary had come to her. Cormac was his name.

She was going to go kill Nathan. For what he had done: kill a lot of people. And for what he might do: kill a lot more.

The hotel was busy that night, she thought. There was a television playing sports, and men and women watched it and were rowdy. They moved around her like planets orbiting a burned-out sun.

They were going to kill Nathan.

Cormac had found her at the bar and asked her if she wanted to know why they were doing all this.

I can show you, he said. You won’t be able to forget it, though.

Cormac had been the Moderators’ Visionary for months by then, and he was well-practiced at it. If he had ever been an out-of-control Visionary, it was hard to imagine. He was a solid-looking middle-aged man with trustworthy crow’s-feet around his dark eyes. She hadn’t known then that was the oldest he would ever get.

Is it the truth? she’d asked.

Unless we stop it.

So she had let him show her. Life was already something she couldn’t forget. She might as well know.

He’d drawn her into a side hall. The carpet was old green wool worn to nubbins and the wallpaper was scalloped brown and white worn to memory.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “It’s not real yet.”

He put his arms around her. She could smell an unfamiliar shampoo, old perspiration, and a bit of onion. It was a hug with a stranger, which was always peculiar because unacquainted arms and ribs and hips don’t fit together correctly.

And then she felt something else. Something … ephemeral. Something quite outside their bodies.

It was coming.

Her body hummed with strangeness.

She could tell it was coming.

Maybe I should change my mind, she thought.

But she couldn’t change her mind.

It was coming.

Is this—

She only had time to wonder if it was already happening and she was missing it, and then the vision struck her.

Parsifal’s vision hit her the same in that parking lot behind the strip mall.

The vision was like she was being dissolved from her feet up. Her toes numbed, then her legs, then her body. There was no pain. There was no feeling.

There was nothing at all.

The cool dim of the parking lot melted into the glow of a different afternoon. Farooq-Lane and Parsifal walked beside an interstate packed slaughterhouse-full with cars. Everything shimmered with exhaust and smoke. She could tell from the signs that it was in the United States. From the trees it was probably east of the Mississippi. There was a city ahead of them, and the cars on both sides of the interstate were headed in the same direction: away from it.

It was on fire.

Everything that was not the interstate was on fire. A city, on fire; the world, on fire.

Her face burned with it.

It would never go out, the fire whispered. It would eat everything.

Devour, devour

The fire was doing what it promised. It was eating everything. This was the distant future. This part of the vision was always the same. Every Visionary experienced it the same way.

The vision changed. This part of the vision was the near future, and was always different. This was the part the Moderators chased. Follow this part of the vision to stop the rest of it.

This part of Parsifal’s vision was fragmented. Breaking into bits. Jerking and stuttering, violently thrashing from image to image.

A battered old house. A silhouette of a person on a rearing horse. A strange, pointy, hat-shaped pile of bricks or stones. A staircase. Bodies. A little misshapen keyhole. A coffin, and in it, a mouth parted for air where there was none.

Everything was dying, including the vision.

Farooq-Lane found herself holding Parsifal’s limp hand behind a featureless strip mall in the DC area. There was nothing gruesome outside his body, except that he had thrown up again, but nonetheless one could tell that everything inside his body had gone wrong-shaped, like he’d hosted a car crash inside himself. There were canyons in his form where there should not have been canyons. It seemed quite likely this was some of what he had thrown up. He was very dead.