Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  She didn’t know if the failing was her or Parsifal.

  After a space of time, Farooq-Lane made a second cup of bad coffee and brought it to the bathroom door as a resentful offering, full of badwill. She knocked. “Parsifal.”

  The only answer was a vague sound from inside, something moving against tile, possibly. She put the mug on the ground.

  The phone rang. It was Lock.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We understand. It happens to all of us. You were on enemy territory. You had no reinforcements. We don’t blame you. At least you got a name.”

  She sighed. “Should I be doing something to make Parsifal have a vision?”

  “Nothing you can do,” Lock said. “We know he’s fragmented. We’re searching for another Visionary on our end, so we won’t be without when he’s finished. But Bauer is still the most likely to find another. Tell him to focus. Get him whatever he needs. Use that budget we sent you. Keep him happy. Keep him productive.”

  Farooq-Lane wasn’t remotely sure that happy was a word she’d ever use to describe Parsifal, but she promised to try her best. Hanging up, she returned to the door. “Parsifal?”

  No answer. She felt an uncertain pang. She tried the doorknob. Unlocked.

  “I’m coming in,” she said, and pushed it open.

  A reek rolled out.

  Inside the bathroom, she found Parsifal lying in the empty bathtub with all his clothing on. He was also wearing her oversized sunglasses (his little round glasses looked sad and vulnerable folded on the edge of the sink). There was vomit down the outside of the tub and all over the floor; it was like he’d climbed inside the tub as a boat against a vomit ocean. His legs were buckled up to fit into the tub, and his face was colorless.

  “Oh,” Farooq-Lane said, falling back.

  He rolled his head toward her, and she thought he would say something, but he just blinked. For the first time she remembered how old he was. Not in an I can’t believe I have to live with a teen boy way but in a This is a person who will die before they hit twenty way.

  It was one thing to hear Lock talking in his clinical way about how troubling it was to have to replace Visionaries after they burned out. It was another thing to be looking right at a burning-out Visionary.

  Farooq-Lane left the bathroom, put her coat on over her silk pajamas, took her keycard, and went out to the hall. A few doors down she found housekeeping and traded them a twenty-dollar bill from her Padma black market buyer fund for some extra towels and cleaning supplies.

  Back in her room, she rolled up her pajama bottoms and sleeves and put on her boots before dropping a lemon in a glass of water and wading across the vomit to set it next to Parsifal’s limp hand. Then she put in her earbuds and turned on her music, and as hip-hop barked at her, she silently cleaned the floor and the outside of the tub. Once the bathroom was clean, she put Parsifal’s glasses within his reach, bundled up everything dirty, and took it outside to housekeeping again.

  “My friend has the flu,” she told them, and gave them another twenty dollars because that felt appropriate.

  When she came back, the empty water glass with the lemon in it was on the kitchenette counter and Parsifal was sitting straight and proper on the sofa, glasses on, neatly dressed, as if he had never been otherwise. His mouth looked stiff and cranky as it ordinarily did. She was beginning to see that the expression that was always on his face might be pain. She was beginning to understand he might want to control everything he could because of the things he couldn’t.

  She was beginning to see why the other Moderators had been eager to give this job away.

  He didn’t thank her for cleaning up his vomit, and she didn’t ask him how he was feeling.

  “I had a vision,” he told her.

  Ronan didn’t go home right away.

  He was oozing black slowly from his right nostril, and he really should have begun the two-hour drive back to the Barns to take care of it, but instead, he lingered in the city. He felt less like putting miles between him and the Fairy Market and more like hunting Bryde’s rabbits.

  He had time, he thought. He could play those odds.

  He felt like a hero from one of his parents’ old stories. When Niall had been home, he’d spun wild adventure tales of children turned into swans, crones simmering wisdom in cauldrons, and kings felled by powerful knights and poor decision-making skills and lovely daughters. When he was gone, Aurora had retold these stories, but from the points of view of the swans, the crones, the queens, and the daughters. Aurora’s stories were kinder, in general. Softer. But she didn’t soften the heroes’ taboos. Their geasa. All the heroes had them. Some were acquired along their journeys; some were given to them by other heroes; some were inherited. All were peculiar. Some heroes couldn’t refuse food from a woman, and others couldn’t be struck three times in a row without a word spoken in between; some couldn’t kill a boar, and others couldn’t pass an orphan without helping them. The penalty for defying one’s geis was deliciously terrible: death.

  In Aurora’s versions, a poignant, soft-focus death. In Niall’s, a complex and several-minute-long finial.

  On long car trips, Ronan and Matthew sometimes invented new geasa to pass the time. A hero who had to pet every dog he saw. Clap his hands every time he entered a church. Say exactly what he was thinking as he said it. Wear a gray suit every day.

  Your father has the geis of blarney, Aurora often said. He has to tell stories or he’ll die.

  Geis of bullshit, Declan had replied once, and had promptly gotten sent to the cow shed to muck stalls in the cold.

  Here was Ronan’s geis, he thought: Dream things into being, or dissolve into nothing.

  He was headed back to the Carter Hotel. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping to find there—Inspiration. Evidence. A staff member who remembered something, anything. In the back of his head was a bit of advice Uncle used to say. If you’d lost things, he’d say you should retrace your steps to where you last had them. He’d been a great treasure trove of these clickable bits of potpourri-scented wisdom, searchable apple-cider proverbs, cross-stitched country kitchen words to live by. If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the kitchen. Why fit in when you were born to stand out? You have to be odd to be number one. Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see a little farther. Make your life a masterpiece; you only get one canvas. He wondered what happened to him and Aunt. As a kid, he’d never thought to ask for their real names. As a kid, he hadn’t thought there was any other kind of name.

  Declan texted as he got closer to the hotel. Tell me when you get that taken care of.

  Ronan knew that the real meaning of the text was Tell me when you are safely installed at the Barns instead of chasing things I told you not to chase.

  He didn’t reply. He sat in traffic. He wiped his nose. He edged close to the hotel. The sun glared down, touching everything, brilliant and caustic.

  Declan called.

  “What?” Ronan demanded. “This is a fucking stick shift.”

  “You’re going home, right?” Declan asked. There was some kind of terrible youthful singing audible in the background.

  “Don’t harass me just because you’re having a bad time.”

  “Are you?”

  Ronan didn’t care for lying, but he also didn’t care for a lecture. He grunted noncommittally.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Declan said, and hung up.

  Here was Declan’s geis: to never pull the stick out of his ass.

  “You have arrived at your destination,” remarked the GPS.

  But Ronan hadn’t. He had to pull over and roll down the window to get a better look, because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  The Carter Hotel was gone.

  Caution tape lay limply over the entrance to the parking lot like dispirited birthday streamers. Beyond it, the lot was empty except for a single anonymous little white sedan and scudding gray tumbleweeds of ash. The hotel building its
elf was just a black, flattened ruin.

  It was still smoldering in places.

  Ronan wiped his nose. He stared. He wiped his nose again. He stared some more.

  It was simply gone.

  He could smell its remains, the complicated, toxic smell of things that melted instead of burned, combined with the appetizing, feral scent of burned wood and paper.

  Ronan wondered if this was the cost of hosting the Fairy Market. Perhaps every location was burned to the ground the day after. Perhaps this was yet another thing Declan had known and Ronan hadn’t known to ask. Helluva one-night stand.

  Well, there went that lead.

  He tasted the inky nightwash as it dripped over his lip. It was acrid. The sort of flavor you smelled as well as tasted, the sort of flavor you recoiled from, instantly understanding its toxicity. Impatiently, he fumbled in his glove box for some napkins. He didn’t have any; he had gas receipts. He used them to wipe his face and spat nightwash out the window until his mouth no longer puckered. When he straightened up again, he saw two figures picking their way from the wreckage to the white sedan parked in the lot.

  As they got in, he just had time to see that one of them had familiar, glinting golden hair.

  Uncle had been right.

  Already Ronan was negotiating with himself, telling himself all the reasons he was allowed to chase instead of finding a safe place to dream and banish the nightwash again. He didn’t have to make it all the way back to the Barns. He could stop somewhere around Warrenton and find a quiet field. It would be good enough.

  Happy hunting.

  The white sedan would have to come right by the BMW in order to leave the lot. Ronan fumbled to get the car in gear. The gearshift knob was slick with black inkiness. He scuffed his palm against his jeans and got a better grip. He could feel himself bracing for the shock of seeing his mother’s face again, tensing in the way one does on a roller coaster so that the stomach doesn’t sail up unpleasantly. It didn’t entirely work. His guts snarled up again when he saw her face behind the wheel of the sedan.

  And that wasn’t even the most astonishing part.

  When the car pulled out of the lot beside the BMW, for the first time, Ronan got a good look at the passenger seat’s occupant.

  He sat in the passenger seat. Ronan Lynch.

  He was looking at his own face. An uncanny mirror. Not elevator doors opening to reveal a woman who looked eerily like his mother, but Ronan looking at Ronan.

  You’re awake, he told himself. You’re awake.

  After the first picosecond of shock, he realized that it wasn’t a perfect likeness. The hair was wrong. Ronan’s was buzzed, and this other Ronan had curled hair down to his shoulders. This Ronan was smooth shaven, and that Ronan had darkened scruff across his chin. This Ronan was shocked. That other Ronan was not.

  The two of them looked at each other.

  Then the little white sedan tore off with a howl of its tires.

  It was just an unassuming little import, not a sports car, but it nonetheless got the jump on Ronan. It had the advantage of going balls-out from the get.

  Ronan had not realized he was going to chase until they ran.

  And run they did. Flat-out for a few quiet blocks, straight through stop signs, barely pausing as the intersections got busier.

  Ronan didn’t realize the stakes until the sedan cut in front of an oncoming car to leap the curb. It rambled up the sidewalk for a few yards before shooting through the corner lot of a gas station to avoid a light.

  Horns wailed.

  Ronan hadn’t thought there was someone less cautious in a car than he, but it turned out there was. He couldn’t bring himself to throw the BMW directly in front of an oncoming delivery truck. He sat at the light, agonizingly, counting down the seconds until he was freed, and then shot after them again. They hadn’t made enough progress to get out of his sight, so when they pitched off into a neighborhood, he was able to follow a few seconds later.

  His mouth tasted like garbage, like rot. He knew if he looked in the mirror and opened his mouth, his tongue would be coated black.

  Fuck.

  He negotiated with himself again. He could go back to the town house after this. Declan had forbidden him to dream there, but he could dream something small. He could be in control. Declan would never know. He could keep going.

  The white sedan rocketed across a four-lane highway, shooting the gap between oncoming cars in a way that, again, Ronan didn’t feel he should replicate. Not with all the creatures and brothers who would fall asleep if something happened to him. He made up for it by throttling the BMW as high as he could once he’d crossed; their car had less caution, but his father’s dreamt Beemer had more horsepower.

  The chase battled through more neighborhoods. With each mile, Ronan crept a little closer to the sedan, and with each mile, he bled a little more black. It was dripping down his neck from his ears and splattering the steering wheel. His body begged him to dream. It was a feeling like no other, a feeling that he didn’t have to be taught. When he was tired, he knew he had to sleep. When he was hungry, he knew he had to eat. This feeling—the feeling of being unmade, undone, unstitched in ways that other bodies had never been sewn in the first place—had no name, but he knew it meant he had to dream.

  Up ahead, the sedan faltered; it had unknowingly entered a cul-de-sac. The only way out was past Ronan. He’d won.

  But Ronan couldn’t breathe.

  The nightwash was choking him, drowning his heartbeat, filling his lungs with black.

  The best geasa in Niall and Aurora’s stories were the ones that collaborated to agonizingly trap the heroes at the end. Even the most invincible heroes could be trapped by conflicting geasa. The mighty Hound of Ulster, one of the boys’ favorite heroes, had a geis to never eat dog (“Shame,” Niall said, “it’s very tasty.”) and a geis to never refuse hospitality, and so when he was offered dog meat by a host, what other choice had he but to spiral into tragedy?

  Poignant, ungory tragedy in Aurora’s version. Complex, lengthy horror in Niall’s.

  And here was Ronan, trapped between his two geasa: the geis that was growing inside him, demanding that he dream, and the geis Declan had put on him, the need to stay hidden.

  The little white sedan pulled round to face him. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to pull the BMW across the road to block them. They were trapped. At his mercy. He could still do it, but his heart—his—

  The BMW coasted to a stop in the middle of the cul-de-sac.

  Shit, he thought, not here—

  You were right,” Farooq-Lane said, with wonder.

  “Of course I was,” Parsifal said stiffly.

  The two of them sat in her rental car, looking at the still-smoking ruin of the Carter Hotel. He’d told her that he’d seen the Carter Hotel burned to the ground in his vision, and so he promised, so it was. It seemed unbelievable that there had been enough time for the entire hotel to burn since she’d run from it. There should be chunks, she thought. Columns. Chimneys. Skeletal bones of hotel reaching up toward the blue, blue sky. But there was just a thorough, blackened expanse with tire tracks through it. One could not have done a better job obliterating a building if one had tried. And surely someone had, she thought. This couldn’t have been an accident.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Farooq-Lane said. “It was more about me than you.”

  She could feel him watch as she sipped her coffee. She’d asked him if he wanted to stop for coffee (“If you want to.” “Will you drink it?” “That seems unlikely.”) and then gone out of her way to find a good roaster anyway. She missed her routine of good coffee, good work, good life, and she felt the appearance of a successful vision merited the return of at least one of those things.

  Now she had a nice espresso and she was feeling more like herself than she had in ages, and Parsifal had a cocoa and looked like a load of laundry that had been taken out of the dryer before it was done. Nothing about his
body language indicated that he was enjoying the beverage in his hand.

  She asked, “Did you see how it happened? Was it intentional?”

  Parsifal didn’t reply. He rolled down his window and sucked in some air. It smelled ashy. Noxious. His sour face matched it.

  “Lock asked me if there was anything we could do to make you happy,” Farooq-Lane said. “Anything to improve your comfort. Is there something you’d like?”

  He turned to the radio and began silently punching buttons.

  She refused to let him ruin her good mood and good coffee. “I have a good budget.”

  “All I would like is a piece of Bienenstich the way my mother made it for me,” Parsifal said, managing to sound as if she had somehow maligned his mother. His long fingers constricted from the radio like a dying spider’s legs: He had found opera. A chesty man cooed from the rental car’s speakers. “And that is not to be had.”

  Farooq-Lane swiftly googled Bienenstich, intent on proving him wrong. This was America, you could Uber Eats or overnight anything in a metropolis if you had a solid credit card and a can-do attitude. It took her only a few minutes, however, to discover that can-do attitudes didn’t apply to Bienenstich. It was a kind of a dull-looking German cake that did not seem to have found an audience in the DC area, nor among the kind of bakeries that would drop ship a cake to a hotel room. It didn’t seem to have an American counterpart, either.

  Why couldn’t he just want to drive in a fast car or to get laid or whatever it was that boys were supposed to want, she thought with annoyance.

  She furtively texted Lock. Find me Bienenstich.

  Then she asked, “Can I do something to help you remember what you saw in the vision? Give me some ideas. Let’s brainstorm. Jog something loose.”

  He looked out over the ash. “Why do you do this?”

  “The same reason you do,” she replied.

  Parsifal blinked back at her, his eyes confused and surprised behind his glasses. “What?”