Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Don’t think, Hennessy,” he said. “Just be.”

  She let herself be led.

  They walked by an unforgiving field that grew only swords, blade-down, the hilt two or ten or thirty inches above the ground. They walked by a cave entrance guarded by an enormous white stag with horns tipped with blood. They walked by a meadow that was actually a lake, and a pond that was actually flower petals.

  Lindenmere was beautiful and complicated in ways that the real world was not. Air and music were two different things in the real world; in Lindenmere, they were not always. Water and flowers were similarly confused in this forest. Hennessy felt the truth of it as they walked. There were creatures you didn’t want to meet in person if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch. There were places you might get trapped forever if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch. It was feral and confusing, but in the end, it followed one rule: Ronan Lynch. His safety, his desires, his thoughts. That was Lindenmere’s only true north.

  She could feel it: Lindenmere loved him.

  “Kerah!”

  “Opal, finally, you little puke,” Ronan said.

  A creature capered from between the woods, a scrawny, hollow-eyed child. She wore an oversized cable-knit sweater and a skullcap pulled down low over her short white-blond hair. Someone might have mistaken her for a human girl if not for her legs, which were densely furred and ended in hooves.

  “I told you, that’s Chainsaw’s word. You have lips. Call me Ronan,” he told her. The little creature threw her arms around his legs and then pranced around him in a hectic circle, her hooves leaving divots. He lifted a foot. “That was my foot, come on.”

  Hennessy sat down, hard. She was just staring at Opal’s furry legs, the twinkling lights falling around her. All her bravado was quite stripped from her.

  This immediately caught Opal’s attention, and she spooked back behind Ronan.

  “Easy, shithead,” Ronan said. He wiped a little dirt off her cheek with a thumb. “That’s Hennessy.”

  “Kruk?” Opal asked.

  “I told you, stop using Chainsaw’s words, you have English. She’s a dreamer, like me.”

  No, Hennessy thought, feeling quite drunk. She was not a dreamer like this. Not at all.

  Opal stalked over to Hennessy, who held quite still. She knelt beside her, her posture decidedly unlike Hennessy’s, since her goat legs bent the opposite direction. She smelled quite wild and animally. She babbled in a language Hennessy didn’t understand.

  Ronan said, “You could say hello to her.”

  Opal asked Hennessy, “Do you eat meat?”

  Ronan looked impatient. “She’s not going to eat you. Don’t be a coward.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Opal said, but in a surly way that meant she had been.

  Hennessy, who’d also been afraid, snapped her teeth at Opal.

  Opal leapt back, catching herself on her hands, and then righted herself as Hennessy grinned at her.

  “It’s good,” Opal decided inexplicably. With a sly look, she drew in close again and tried to pluck one of Hennessy’s tattoos off. She was waiting to get in trouble.

  “Slap her,” Ronan advised. Hennessy didn’t, but Opal skittered away as if she felt she might. “She’s a psychopomp, like Chainsaw. She’ll focus things, keep stuff from going to shit.”

  “Going to shit?”

  “Usual dreamfuckery,” Ronan said, as if that explained anything. “Opal, we have an important task today—will you help us, or do I have to ask Chainsaw?”

  Opal shot a suspicious look up at the sky and hurriedly began to shake her head. “Nope nope nope!”

  “Okay,” Ronan said. “Hennessy, are you ready?”

  Hennessy blinked up. She was overwhelmed in a way she had no language for. “For what?”

  He said, “To dream.”

  Ramsay was in town.

  Farooq-Lane had just been up all night, had just dragged one dead body into a rental car and added another living one, and now, Ramsay was in town. Ramsay of all people.

  Farooq-Lane’s feelings on J. J. Ramsay were uncomplicated: She hated him. She thought he sounded like an overgrown frat boy. All the people who worked with Lock had their complicated reasons, but it was hard to imagine Ramsay having a complicated anything. Farooq-Lane had been disconcerted to learn that he had a really high-powered job. When he was not packing up a drone next to a dead body, he apparently consulted for corporations that had gotten themselves into trouble with other countries’ governments. According to LinkedIn, he could sound like a frat boy in the five different languages most commonly used in the global business market. Farooq-Lane could also speak in the five different languages most commonly used in the global business market, but she suspected the two of them sounded very different when they did.

  “Heyyy, I don’t make the rules,” Ramsay said, sounding Ramsayish over the rental car’s speakers. Even Liliana, the new Visionary, frowned a little in the passenger seat. Douchebag was a universal language. Farooq-Lane hoped she wasn’t going to regret picking up this phone over the Bluetooth. “Lock does.”

  He’d just told Farooq-Lane that he’d landed and that she needed to meet him, Lock’s orders. Now? Farooq-Lane had asked, her fingers tight enough on the steering wheel that they felt wrapped around it a few times. I have a new Visionary. She hadn’t added: And I haven’t slept all night, and I watched someone die, and I have already been across the greater DC area on a treasure hunt for someone who might explode into another age and kill me at any time.

  But she was thinking it.

  “No time like the present,” Ramsay said. “Lock ’n’ load. And I hear you got a body to put in the back forty, so you need me anyway.”

  He hung up.

  After he did, as they cruised southward toward Springfield, Farooq-Lane took just a few seconds to attempt a reconstruction of the Carmen Farooq-Lane who had originally joined the Moderators. That young woman had been a sea of calm. She had been the picturesque statue in the airport as chaos seethed around her. She had been the member of the meeting who sat elegantly on the other side of the table, listening to heightened voices and watching wringing hands, and then quietly broke in with a cool-headed solution. When she was a child, she’d once seen a feather drift down and touch lightly on the surface of a pond. The feather had not sunk, nor even really broken the surface tension. Instead, it had landed light as a butterfly, trembling just enough to look alive, and slowly turned end over end in the breeze. She’d recalled that image again and again and again in her teens. Farooq-Lane was that feather.

  She was that feather.

  She was. That. Feather.

  Then she tried to explain to the ethereal old Visionary in the passenger seat. “We’re a task force. He’s part of the task force. We …”

  “I remember a little,” Liliana said.

  She was the opposite of Parsifal in many ways, and not just because she was very elderly, though she was. Once she’d been pulled free of the chest freezer, Farooq-Lane had seen that the Visionary was even older than she’d originally thought. She was agelessly old. Her long hair, now gathered back into two long braids, tricked one into thinking she was younger, but the depth of the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth spoke to many years behind her. She had a far-eyed look about her, as if she was seeing beyond the traffic and buildings to something more important. Farooq-Lane had immediately gotten her some chicken and rice and tea, and, in a low voice, Liliana had thanked the meat for feeding her before quietly and neatly eating the entire thing without comment. So unlike Parsifal.

  I am that feather, Farooq-Lane told herself.

  “You remember what?” Farooq-Lane asked. “A … vision?”

  “No, just a memory,” Liliana said. “It’s been a very long time, though, so I don’t remember it well. You are hunting dreamers?”

  “Zeds. Yes.”

  “Right,” Liliana said. “Yes, and you are Marchers. No. Moderators. Yes? See, it comes back to me. You are trying to stop that fire.�
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  It still gave Farooq-Lane a jolt of adrenaline to hear it confirmed. Yes, the fire. The fire that would eat the world. She risked a glance over at her as she drove. “How does this work? What age are you really right now?”

  Liliana rested her head back, stroking the ends of one braid absently. “At this age, I know that’s not a useful question for someone like me. I do so like being this age, it’s very peaceful.” She sensed that Farooq-Lane wasn’t satisfied, so she added, “I think I must spend more of this year as one of the younger ages, because my memories are very distant now. I remember the moment we met well. I knew you were coming.”

  She set her hand on top of Farooq-Lane’s with such fondness, fingers slid familiarly through Farooq-Lane’s, that Farooq-Lane flinched.

  “I forgot,” Liliana said, going back to fussing with her braids instead. “You’re still very young. I’m grateful you rescued me.”

  It was too outside of Farooq-Lane’s understanding of time to make easy sense. For a few miles, she navigated traffic and thought about it, and then she said, “So you know the future right now.”

  “I suppose that is a way of looking at it. I remember my past, which includes some of your future. I think I am very old right now, though, so these are decades-old memories.”

  “If they’re decades old,” Farooq-Lane said, “that must mean that we did it. That we stopped the end of the world. Isn’t that how it works? If you’re looking back at this from someone who becomes decades older than this memory? It means you are still alive after all this.”

  Liliana frowned, and for the first time, something like distress flitted across her face. “I think I am harder to kill than humans.”

  That completely silenced the car. Before Parsifal, Farooq-Lane wouldn’t have been shocked to hear this said out loud. She would have completely cosigned the concept of Visionaries as something human-shaped but not human. Their abilities, after all, defied all understanding of life as everyone else understood it; human seemed like an unuseful classification for them, just as it was dubiously useful for the Zeds. But then she’d spent time with Parsifal, aggravating, dead Parsifal, and he just seemed like a kid born under an unlucky star. She’d sort of begun to decide that the Moderators doubted the Visionaries’ humanity in order to feel less bad about their deaths.

  But Liliana’s words reversed all that.

  Liliana said in a soft voice, “It still troubles me how fragile you are.”

  “Badda boom, badda bing,” J. J. Ramsay remarked, zipping the top of the drone’s case, speaking loudly to be heard over the booming music, thundering tribal beats. “This puppy does it all.”

  Farooq-Lane should have recognized the address, but she supposed she had come to it by a very different way the last time she was here. Ramsay and Farooq-Lane stood just inside a familiar split-level house in Springfield, surrounded by colorful teapots and rugs.

  The old Zed’s house.

  “You didn’t wait for the others,” Farooq-Lane told Ramsay.

  Between them was the body of the old Zed who had given Parsifal three pieces of biscotti he’d actually liked. Ramsay had shot her before Farooq-Lane arrived. The body was laid out in a very undramatic way, on its stomach, arms by its side, head turned, as if the woman had decided to sleep in the middle of the floor. The only sign that she might not have opted voluntarily for this was that one of her ballet flats had come off and was parallel parked beside her foot instead. That, and she was missing the back of her head.

  “Wait for the others?” he said. “You are the others.”

  Farooq-Lane crossed the carpet to turn down the speakers on the cheap boom box. It, too, had been painted, as if this Zed couldn’t help but splash color on everything she saw. “And it was already done when I got here. Why did you even call me?”

  Ramsay didn’t hear the irritation in her voice. He was not particularly tuned to the subtleties of life. “Confirmation so that Lock doesn’t get on my back.”

  “You didn’t even confirm she was a Zed before you did this?” demanded Farooq-Lane.

  This he heard. Hooking his thumbs in the belt loops of his khakis, he swiveled to her, pelvis first. “Gimme some credit, Carmen—”

  “Ms. Farooq-Lane.”

  He grinned at her. “Some credit, Carmen. My drone friend and I caught her dreaming before I busted in. But I need you to do your little cataloguing job with everything else here. Lock said you found another Visionary? ’Bout damn time. Where’s he at?”

  “She’s waiting in the car.”

  “Not a flight risk?”

  “She’s invested in our mission,” Farooq-Lane said, even though she hadn’t even begun to try to recruit Liliana. “Saving the world.” She said this to remind him their mission was not having a good time shooting people.

  “Saving the w-w-w-wonderful world!” trilled Ramsay, to a tune she was probably supposed to know. “Carmen, you’re a gas.”

  The most infuriating thing about Ramsay was that he knew she hated the way he talked to her and didn’t bother to alter it. It felt as if there should be consequences for being a boring, grown frat boy who enjoyed making people uncomfortable, and yet there did not seem to be. For a moment they stared at each other over the limp body, and then she told herself, Just do your job so you can figure out someplace safe to house Liliana.

  Silently she catalogued all the dream objects in the Zed’s home. They were similar to the crafts in the living room and the colorful thing she’d seen through the kitchen door. Brilliantly colored, confusing, fluid. There were not many. They were placed on the back of the toilet, on the windowsill by the cactus, the bedside table, the way you’d put pottery you’d done in college that you were proud of.

  Parsifal had been right. This Zed was never going to be the kind of dreamer who dreamt the end of the world into being.

  I am that feather, Farooq-Lane thought.

  When she returned to the living area, Ramsay was sitting backward on a chair right next to the body, talking to Liliana, who stood in the doorway, her eyes gentle and regretful. He held up a finger as if Farooq-Lane had been about to interrupt him and finished his thought. “All these fuckers know each other, that’s what we’re learning, so it’s best to hit them fast and close together, or they’ll warn each other.”

  “I thought you were waiting in the car,” Farooq-Lane said.

  “I wanted to see if you were all right,” Liliana said.

  “Aw, honey,” Ramsay said, “you want to help us out, you can get that next vision coming when you get a chance. World to save and all that.”

  I am that feather, Farooq-Lane thought.

  She was not that feather.

  She punched J. J. Ramsay hard enough that he fell ass over tits, chair wailing right over backward, depositing him flat on his back with his legs all tangled around the chair’s legs.

  There was complete silence. Ramsay had had his breath and idiotic words knocked right out of him. His mouth moved as if he was trying out some of the idiotic words he was going to say when he got back enough breath to say them.

  Farooq-Lane’s fist smarted as if it had just been smashed against a douchebag’s face, because it had just been smashed against a douchebag’s face. Biting her lip, she risked a glance at the new Visionary, the Visionary she was, according to Moderator guidelines, trying to recruit to their noble cause.

  Liliana looked from Ramsay to Farooq-Lane and said, “I’ll follow you anywhere.”

  Because Hennessy was so clearly scared shitless, Ronan hadn’t let on his reservations about his plan. Lindenmere, after all, was sensitive to all thoughts, and the last thing he wanted to do was give voice to something it would manifest for them.

  But it was dangerous.

  Opal and Hennessy sat cross-legged in the middle of a clearing in Lindenmere, on top of a pretty little hummock sprouting the kind of thin, hairy grass that grew in the shade. A fairy ring of dull white mushrooms encircled them. A little brook, dark with leaf tannin, mumbled by at
the edge of the clearing. Opal sat behind Hennessy, back to back, looking self-important. Ronan was relying heavily on Opal’s ability to act as intermediary between him and Lindenmere.

  Because Ronan could accomplish what he needed in dreams back at the Barns, and because he preferred to have all dream consequences happen far away from his physical body, he didn’t usually use Lindenmere like this. He came to Lindenmere to feel understood, to feel the power of the ley line rush over himself, to feel connected to something bigger, to make sure it did not need him, or vice versa.

  He did not usually come here to dream.

  Dreaming in Lindenmere meant making one’s thoughts reality immediately. The monsters were there the moment you bid them. The ocean rose around your very real waking body. The copies of yourself were fact until you or Lindenmere destroyed them.

  But he didn’t know how to show Hennessy how to dream otherwise.

  The only other way might have been to meet her in dreamspace as Bryde had met him, but he wouldn’t have had the same kind of control. The consequences of Hennessy waking with another deadly tattoo were too dire to risk without the big guns.

  “Lindenmere,” Ronan said out loud, “I’m going to need every bit of you for this.”

  And Hennessy began to dream. Not truly dream, because she was awake. But rather, Lindenmere began to have her dream for her.

  It was dark.

  The light became dim in the clearing.

  There was music playing. It was an old jazz recording, some woman’s voice pitching and lilting along as the sound fuzzed and popped. Hennessy hadn’t mentioned this to Ronan when she described the dream.

  A woman stood in the glen, only it was no longer a glen. It was a closet. The lights were out. The only light came from a small, high window, and the light was gray. The woman was dressed in a bra and underwear and a robe. She did not look like Hennessy, but she didn’t not look like her. Mascara was drawn down her face. She was holding a gun.