Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(98)

And he broke. He broke for the second time that year, after being good and dull and invisible for so very long. He had broken the first time by dialing that phone number and asking for the key to Colin Greenmantle’s collection. He broke on that Saturday morning by asking, “So you think Ronan and I are true Lynch brothers?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Matthew said. “Of course you are.”

Declan’s pulse slowly stepped up. “You sure of that?”

“You are.”

“Get The Dark Lady,” Declan said. “From the closet. The one closest to the front.”

Matthew shot Declan a bemused look, but Declan could tell that the puzzle of it had shaken him from his stupor. He slid off the stool and opened the kitchen closet. Inside it were the two Dark Ladies: the original that Declan had just put away last night after returning with Jordan, and behind it, the copy that she had somehow managed to sneak in there.

“What is this?!” Matthew said, with a bit of his old rollicking tone.

“Front one,” Declan said. “Put it on the dining room table.”

He joined his brother at the table, swiping aside a pile of bills and newspapers so that there was room.

“Facedown,” Declan said.

The two of them looked at the brown backing paper, the tiny printed words: Mór ó Corra.

Matthew waited for Declan to explain. Declan put a box cutter into his hand instead.

“Cut the paper off,” Declan said.

He crossed his arms tightly over his chest as his youngest brother leaned over the painting and began to cut with the precision of a surgeon, his face deep in concentration. The paper hissed and crackled as it fell away.

Declan realized he’d closed his eyes.

He opened them.

“What is this?” Matthew asked again.

There was a square dark card tucked between the canvas and the stretcher. Durable, rounded edges, printed with the image of a woman with a cross painted on her face. Matthew plucked it out and turned it over. On the back was an Irish telephone number and, in Niall’s handwriting, The New Fenian.

“This painting isn’t of Aurora,” Declan said. “It’s of Mór ó Corra, and she is my mother.”





63

Hurry, Parsifal had said. Hurry. There was no hurrying when it came to putting together fractured clues from a dying vision. There was no hurrying when it came to getting across Washington, DC. There was no hurrying when all you could think of was a ruined body behind a trash bin. There was no hurrying when you didn’t know what you were hurrying to.

Farooq-Lane felt as if she had been staring at the same neighborhood for hours. They all had the same atmosphere. Tatty lawns, tired buildings joined at the hip, cars on blocks, heaving sidewalks, blistered asphalt.

None of them were the house Parsifal had shown her in his last vision. The problem with the vision was that it was like a dream—filled with emotional truths instead of actual truths. It conveyed the way a building felt rather than how it looked.

It was hard to focus on anything with Parsifal’s body bundled tenderly in the Zed’s rug in her trunk.

There was the End of the World, capital E, capital W, she knew. She knew she had to focus. She’d just seen why she had to focus. But Parsifal’s world had ended, small w, small e, and it felt very bad, and it was hard to keep things in perspective.

Someone was tapping on her back window and she realized she had let the car drift to a stop in the middle of the road, staring off at the houses. It was an old man with no teeth and a walking stick. He seemed to want a conversation. He was chanting pretty lady, pretty lady.

“You lost, pretty lady?” the old man said. He tapped the walking stick against the side of her rental car. Tap tap tap.

Yes, thought Farooq-Lane. Utterly.

Tap tap tap. She suddenly realized that the top of the walking stick he was using to tap her window was a very familiar shape: a person on a rearing horse. Another piece of Parsifal’s vision.

Rolling down the window, she held up the drawing she’d made of the pointy hat shape she’d seen in the vision. “Do you know what this is?”

He leaned in close. He smelled incredibly bad. “That’s Fairmount Heights, there. That’s that old World War II memorial.” He said it like ol whirr wah tuh morial, but she got the gist.

“Is that close?” she asked.

“Just south, pretty lady,” he said (jussow, pree lady).

She had no cash, so she gave him her unopened coffee beverage instead and he seemed content. Plugging the memorial into her GPS, she discovered it was just minutes away. She didn’t feel like she was hurrying fast enough, but she was doing the best she could.

The memorial was exactly how it had appeared in the vision: a stone monument shaped a little like a witch’s hat. As she drove around it in ever-widening circles, her adrenaline started to flare. She was thinking about what she was really hurrying to. The visions took her to other dreamers. Sometimes other Visionaries. Either way, it could be a dangerous situation, and she never had a very complete picture of what she was walking into. At least before she could have asked Parsifal if they were headed into peril. She wasn’t asking him anything now.

For a fleeting moment, Farooq-Lane thought she heard opera. It was faint, as if from outside the car or as if the radio were turned down nearly all the way. But before she could reach to roll down a window or turn up the music, all at once she saw the old house from the vision. Like the other houses in this neighborhood, it was a run-down building that had probably been quite charming many decades before. There was a sink in the scrubby front yard. The walk was more split than not. It was a good enough place to hide.