Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(99)

At the door, she knocked. Hurry. She tried the knob. It gave way.

She stepped in. It smelled better than she’d expected. The sun was full on outside, but little of the light made its way into the house. There was an odor of old damp below, but overwhelmingly what she smelled was fresh flowers and summer. The lights were turned off. No. They were out of order. Thin lightbulb glass crunched beneath Farooq-Lane’s boots.

Before her were stairs leading up into the gloomy dim. The stairs from the vision.

She went up.

At the top of them she discovered the bodies of two old women, and a note. The note said I stayed untill I got to scared. Shes downstairs. The old women had blood in their ears and their mouths. Their eyes had imploded.

So it wasn’t a Zed who lived here.

It was a Visionary. Parsifal’s last vision had taken her to his replacement.

She didn’t know how she felt about this.

Hurry.

Farooq-Lane checked every room downstairs for evidence of a Visionary. Cautiously at first, because she wasn’t eager to share the fate of the old women on the stairs, and then more boldly, because every room she entered was empty.

Maybe it was like the time they’d followed Parsifal’s vision to the cul-de-sac, looking for the gray BMW. Maybe she was too late. Perhaps she had not hurried enough.

Just as she was getting ready to give up and go back to the car, however, her attention was pulled to a tiny door in the staircase that she’d missed when she’d come in. It had a keyhole. Misshapen. Another piece of Parsifal’s vision.

Pulling it open, she saw that it led to a crawl space.

She clicked on her phone’s flashlight and climbed down the few stairs. Then, bent over double, she peered. The last piece of Parsifal’s vision was a coffin, which she didn’t think was a thing she would find in a place like this. And she was right. She didn’t find a coffin. But she did find a chest freezer. With bags of gravel piled on it to make sure the lid stayed closed. To make sure no one got out from inside it.

Not a coffin. But close enough.

Working fast, she shoved and kicked the gravel bags onto the floor. Dust from the floor and from the bags themselves clouded the air as they landed; her cell phone flashlight, on the floor, cast a searchlight through the billows. She couldn’t see anything clearly.

Finally, Farooq-Lane cracked the lid.

She heard a convulsive gasp for air from the dark interior.

“Is it going to happen soon?” Farooq-Lane asked the unseen occupant.

Several more huge gasps for air, then: “No, not soon.”

“I’m not in danger?”

“Not right now. Don’t be afraid.” This Visionary had just been suffocating in a chest freezer and she was reassuring Farooq-Lane. A limp hand stretched out, resting on the edge of the freezer. The skin was very pale and wrinkly—so completely opposite to what Farooq-Lane had been expecting that she flinched a little. Farooq-Lane got her cell phone and directed the light into the chest freezer. Inside, an old woman with long snow-white hair shielded her eyes with her other hand.

Farooq-Lane had never seen a Visionary so old before.

“What’s your name?” Farooq-Lane asked.

“Liliana.”





64

I had different intentions for our next d … get-together,” Declan said, and Jordan heard him cautiously place his foot upon the word date before deciding it wouldn’t hold him.

“Did you?” Jordan asked. “It seems about par for the course, if you ask me, old friend.”

They were in her car again, through no particular discussion. She preferred driving to riding, and he seemed happier to be able to look out the window and in the rearview mirror in a paranoid way in between studying directions and texts on his phone. He looked handsomer than she remembered, with his good straight teeth and his dark curls and a nice sweater Hennessy would hate. Easy to imagine painting him again, framed as he was in the window, the fall colors rich and deep on this overcast day. Easy to imagine touching him again.

“You remind me,” Jordan said, “of a dog.”

He tapped away at his phone. He had a peculiar way of texting—he used his thumb on one hand, his index finger on the other. Odd. Charming. Without looking up, he murmured, “Thank you very much. Right at the next light.”

“They look different when you know them,” Jordan said. “You know when you see a dog on a street, and it’s just some stray tosser, and when you see a dog on the street, and it’s one you’ve met before?”

“I don’t meet many dogs on the street.”

“I’m saying you scrub up nice,” she said, and he laughed his disbelieving laugh again, the head turned away to hide it.

They were going to see Boudicca.

“I’m looking for my birth mother,” Declan had said, when he called her. “But the people I need to talk to won’t talk to me unless I bring a woman.”

And Jordan had known instantly that he was talking about Boudicca.

Boudicca. Jordan didn’t know if the word itself sounded like a threat, or if she only thought it did because she knew what it stood for. Boo-dih-kah. The first time they’d approached Jordan it had been at a Fairy Market in London. The woman had been as mundane in appearance as one could possibly manage: straightened light-brown hair, wing eyeliner, blouse, blazer. Looking to partner with talented women like yourself, she’d said, as if she was pitching a job fair. Benefits to both parties. Lifelong investment. Taking care of business to allow your creative energies to be directed. Jordan had accepted her card, a durable little square with a logo of a woman with a cross on her face, but she hadn’t really understood what was being offered.