Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “What’s the dream?”

  Wendy slid their food in front of them. She leaned in close, conspiratorially, and asked if she could get them any condiments. Ronan looked at her with his heavy silence. It said, Get the fuck out of here we’re having a private conversation.

  She patted his hand. “You remind me of my boy,” she said fondly, and withdrew.

  Ronan turned that silence on Hennessy, leveling it over the top of a waffle that Wendy had sprayed a whipped-cream smiley face on.

  Hennessy looked down at her plate, which had four triangles of French toast, all pointing in the same direction, toward the door. She swallowed.

  “It’s,” she said.

  She tried to not even think about it while she was awake. It felt contagious. This was the closest she had gotten in a decade and it felt bad. Incredibly bad.

  She didn’t say anything else. She couldn’t do it. She’d just have to let down Jordan and the other girls. Jordan didn’t know what it was like.

  Ronan turned his arms over so that his hands lay palm up on the table between them and for a moment, she thought he was making an elaborate gesture for come on. But instead he said, “Those are from nightmares.”

  She had to lean to look. Crazed white scars traveled up his forearms, carved by a sizeable weapon.

  “Night horrors,” he said. “Claws like this.” He formed his fingers into talons, and then mimed them ripping him open, fingers skipping over the top of the leather bracelets that hid the worst of it and right up to his elbow. “Two days in the hospital.”

  He didn’t add anything sentimental like We’ll beat this thing or I’ve been there, you can trust me. He just withdrew his arms and smashed the whipped-cream smile on his waffles with the back of his fork. He said, “They all thought it was something easy as razor blades. And they couldn’t fucking understand even that.”

  Ronan was not Jordan. Not a dream. He knew what it was like.

  “The Lace,” whispered Hennessy.

  She could feel her ears ringing. Little sparks danced around the corners of her vision. She had to put down her coffee cup because her fingers couldn’t hold it; they were weak and tingling. She was so afraid she thought she would pass out. She needed her timer—

  Snap.

  Ronan had snapped his fingers in front of her face. She focused acutely on his fingers, right in front of her.

  “You’re awake,” he said. When she didn’t say anything else, he handed her one of the overturned coffee cups and added, “Breathe into that.”

  While she breathed into the cold mug, he cut his waffle into four enormous bites and ate two of them.

  “It’s just me,” Hennessy said. Her voice was very quiet. He had to lean on his elbows to hear her. “And it.”

  In her mind, it was unfolding, clear as the dream. Hennessy, small, insubstantial, fragile, every skill and power and cleverness she had ridiculous and human. It, however, was huge in ways her human mind couldn’t fully understand. It was dark, but again, dark was an incomplete description of it. Shape and color were three-dimensional concepts and it was something beyond that. Where it was closest to her it looked like geometric slants and cutouts, through which she could see light behind it. Or perhaps included in it. It looked like a hectic, looming lace.

  “It sees me,” Hennessy said, in an even quieter voice. Her hands were shaking. God, it could see her now, she was sure of it, because she’d said it out loud, and that was enough to bring it into the waking world. “The dream begins, and it’s there, and then it sees me—”

  Her shoulders were quivering now, too. She could feel tears smarting in her eyes, but she couldn’t quite convince them to go away.

  Ronan was watching her closely, pensively.

  “What does it look like?” he asked.

  “The Lace,” Hennessy whispered. “Like lace. It’s huge. I can’t explain it. It’s something …”

  Wendy reappeared. She was holding a coffee carafe, but she stood there with it hovered above the table, looking at Hennessy, with the tears caught in her lashes and her shaking hands and uneaten food.

  Ronan eyed Wendy with his heavy silence, but it was not complex enough to offer an excuse for Hennessy.

  “Honey, you okay?” asked Wendy comfortingly.

  Through a hiccup of shaky tears, Hennessy managed to say, “I’m having his baby. Can I have an orange juice?”

  Wendy shot Ronan a look that was less maternal before vanishing.

  Ronan shook his head, with equal parts admiration and disbelief. “You’re a real shithead. Look at you. You can’t help it. You’re out of your mind. You’ll be a shithead on your deathbed.”

  Hennessy laughed shakily and stuffed French toast in her mouth. She wasn’t bleeding. She had said it out loud, and she wasn’t bleeding. She didn’t have another tattoo choking her throat. Ronan was right. She was awake. She was awake. She was awake.

  Her timer went off. She restarted it.

  “My boyfriend saw something like that,” Ronan said. “I don’t know if it’s the same thing you’re seeing. But he’s a psychic, and he described something similar to that. Scared the shit out of him, too.”

  “What’d he call it?”

  Ronan stabbed his third waffle quarter. “Nothing. He screamed. Like he was dying. When I asked him why, he said it was because it saw him. Seemed like that was probably the worst thing he could imagine.”

  “Sounds like a match,” Hennessy said. She was still shaking, but she could drink some coffee. Wendy brought her orange juice, patted her hand, and left again. “I like that old bag. She rolls with it.”

  “How does it hurt you? The Lace?”

  This was harder to describe, not because it was any more fearful, but because it was not a process that followed waking logic. It was a process that followed dream logic, and waking language wasn’t right for it. “It wants … it wants to come out. It wants me to bring it out. It knows I can. So I … fight it, I guess. I resist. And I know that when I do, the Lace will hurt me for it. It says if I don’t let it out, it’ll kill me.”

  “It speaks?”

  “Not really. It’s like … dream speech? I’m supposed to believe it’s out loud, but it’s not.”

  He nodded. He got it.

  “It tells me it killed my mum and it will kill me, too.”

  This made Ronan look quite sharp-eyed, hawkish, all of a sudden. He said, “Did it kill her?”

  “She shot herself in the face,” Hennessy said.

  “So it’s lying. Or rather, your subconscious is lying.”

  Hennessy snapped, “What?”

  He looked up, his final waffle quarter dropping from his fork. “It could be real, or it could be your subconscious, like my night horrors.” He paused, though, frowning, as if something about his own words had puzzled him.

  Hennessy said, “So is your Bryde your subconscious, then?”

  “Bryde knows things I couldn’t know, like you drowning,” Ronan pointed out. “What does the Lace know?”

  Hennessy thought, and then she said, “Your boyfriend.”

  That arrow neatly landed in its target.

  “Bryde told me to stop saying that,” Ronan said. “Asking if something in my dreams is real. He said for dreamers, it’s always real, because we belong in both worlds. Waking and sleeping. One’s not more true than the other.”

  “Do you believe that? When you dream of being naked in front of the class, that’s real?”

  Instead of answering, Ronan said, “There’s a big part I’m not getting here, though. Where do the copies come in?”

  “Well, I have to bring something back,” Hennessy said. “And I can’t bring the Lace.”

  His phone buzzed. A text from DBAG LYNCH. He ignored it. “Hold up. Why don’t you just bring nothing back?”

  She didn’t understand.

  “Are you telling me you don’t know how to keep dreams in your head?”

  Hennessy flicked her phone with irritation. “Why do you th
ink I’ve set a timer for the last decade? Do you think I just enjoy it?”

  “Before the Lace, though,” Ronan said. “You didn’t bring something back every time you dreamt then, surely.” He saw the answer in her face. “Shit, man. You mean you’ve never been able to help it?”

  “Are you taking the piss out of me?”

  “I’m dead serious. You can’t keep your dreams in your head?”

  “I didn’t know anyone could,” Hennessy said. “I’ve tried. The girls are my best solution. There’s only me and it in the dream, and I can’t bring it, so I bring me—that’s the copy—and it hurts me as I wake up. And gives me this classic little brand.”

  She pointed to the tattoo on her throat, careful not to touch it; it was still tender.

  “And you’ve never told anyone this before,” Ronan said. “All the girls think it’s just the copies killing you. They don’t know you’re stopping yourself from manifesting a demon.”

  “When you put it that way.”

  Ronan let out a long breath. “Fuck, Bryde. What do you want me to do here?”

  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?”

  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 …”

  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.

  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.