“It’s always so nice here,” Matthew said as he got out of the car, shoes crunching on gravel.
The three brothers were on the Virginia side of Great Falls, a densely wooded national park only miles away from Declan’s town house. The attraction featured both a pleasant walk along a historical canal and the opportunity to witness the Potomac holding its nose and jumping over a seventy-foot ledge as it churned busily from West Virginia to the Atlantic. The sky hung down low and shaggy and gray, intensifying the late fall colors. Everything smelled of the nostalgic, smoky scent of dead oak leaves. It was pleasant, particularly if you had never been there.
Declan had been there many, many times.
“I always like coming,” Declan lied.
“It’s a regular carnival,” Ronan said, slamming the passenger door. Why shut anything, seemed to be his motto, when you can slam it. The Harvard debacle had shoved him deep into a black mood. It was not always easy to tell how bad it was with him, but Declan had become somewhat of a connoisseur of Ronan’s moods. Slamming meant the heart was still pumping blood. Silence meant danger moldered slowly in his veins. Declan had been afraid of the idea of a Ronan who moved to Cambridge. Now he was afraid of a Ronan who couldn’t.
There were, Declan thought, so many damn things to be afraid of.
“My car didn’t do anything to you,” Declan said blandly, easing his own door shut. “Matthew, the bag.”
Matthew retrieved the take-out bag of burritos. He was in a great mood. He was always in fine spirits, of course—that was what it meant to be Matthew—but he was in even better spirits when allowed to come to Great Falls. He would come every day if he could, a fact Declan had found out earlier that summer. He took his role as substitute parent seriously. He read articles on discipline, motivation, support. He established curfews, enforced consequences, and served as adviser rather than friend. His promotion to legal guardian meant he could no longer be just a brother. He had to be Law. It meant he’d been quite strict with Ronan after their parents died. With Matthew, however—well, Matthew was so happy that Declan found he would do anything to keep him that way. That summer, however, he’d requested to come day after day until eventually Declan, for the first time, had to turn him down.
Declan thought he still felt worse about that conversation than Matthew did.
“Give me my burrito,” Ronan said. “I’m so hungry I could eat it twice.”
It was clear to Declan that Ronan wasn’t remotely in the mood to joke, but he, too, would do anything to make Matthew happy.
And it worked. Matthew burst into his easy, infectious laugh as he slapped on an ugly hat. He had ghastly fashion sense. The kid was the entire reason why school uniforms had been invented.
“My hiking hat,” he said, as if the manicured, flat trail could possibly be construed as anything more severe than a stroll.
They walked. They ate—well, Ronan and Matthew did. Ronan, in big wolfing bites. Matthew, with the barely checked delight of a child at Christmas. Declan left his untouched because he hadn’t brought an antacid and his stomach was a ruin as usual. The only sounds were their footfalls and the continuous rush of the falls. Damp yellow leaves sometimes fell here or there, deeper in the trees. Puddles on the walk sometimes trembled as if rain had fallen in them, though there was no sign of rain. It felt wild. Hidden.
Declan cautiously stepped onto the topic at hand. “Your teachers say you’ve been sitting on the roof.”
“Yup,” Matthew said cheerfully.
“Ronan, Mary mother of God, chew some of that before you choke.” To Matthew, Declan persisted, “They said you were looking at the river.”
“Yup,” Matthew said.
Ronan tuned in. “You can’t see the river from the school, Matthew.”
Matthew laughed at this, as if Ronan had cracked a joke. “Yup.”
Declan couldn’t probe the motivations of Matthew’s mysterious pull toward the river too hard, because that might tip Matthew off to his dreamt origin. Why did Declan withhold this bit of truth? Because Matthew had been raised as human by their parents and it felt cruel to take it from him now. Because Declan could only handle one brother in crisis. Because he was so thoroughly trained in secrets that everything was one until proven otherwise or stolen from him.
“They said you keep leaving class,” Declan said. “Without explanation.”
Matthew’s teachers had said that and a lot more. They’d explained that they loved Matthew (an unnecessary statement; how could they not?), but they worried he was losing his way. Papers were turned in late, art assignments forgotten. He lost focus during class discussion. He asked to use the restroom in the middle of the period and then never returned. He had been discovered in the unused stairwells, empty rooms, on the roof.
On the roof? Declan had echoed, tasting bile. He felt he’d lived one thousand years, every one of them hell.
Oh, not like that, the teachers had hurried to explain. Just sitting. Just looking. At the river, he said.
“Whatdya gonna do?” Matthew said, with an amiable shrug, as if his behavior were something puzzling even to him. And probably it was. It was not that he was stupid. It was more that he had a deliberate absence of intellectual skepticism. Byproduct of being a dream? Deliberately dreamt into him?
Declan hated that he loved someone who wasn’t real.
Mostly he hated Niall. If he’d bothered teaching Ronan a damn thing about the dreaming, life would look very different right now.
Matthew seemed to have clued in to the idea, at the very least, that he was troubling his brothers, because he asked, “Whatdya want me to do?”
Declan exchanged a look with Ronan behind Matthew’s head. Ronan’s look said, What the hell do you want me to do? and Declan’s look back meant, This is far more your territory than mine.
Ronan said, “Mom would’ve wanted you to do a good job.”
For a brief moment a cloud passed over Matthew’s expression. Ronan was allowed to invoke Aurora because they all knew Ronan loved her as much as Matthew had. Declan, whose skeptical love was imperfect, could not.
“I’m not untrying,” Matthew said.
Ronan’s phone buzzed. He swept it up at once, which meant it could be only one person: Adam Parrish. For a few minutes, he listened to it very hard, and then, in a very quiet, very small, very un-Ronan voice, he said, “Alter idem” and hung up.
Declan found it all worrisome, but Matthew just asked with breezy curiosity, “Why don’t you just say ‘I love you’?”
Ronan snarled, “Why do you wear your burrito on your shirt instead of in your mouth?”
Matthew, unbothered by his tone, flapped some of the lettuce from his clothing with a hand.
Declan had complicated feelings on the topic of Adam Parrish. There was no way Declan would ever tell a significant other the truth of the Lynch family; it was too dangerous for someone disposable to know. But Adam knew everything, both because he’d been there when certain things had gone down, and because Ronan shared everything with him. So theoretically the relationship was a weak link.
But Adam Parrish was also cautious, calculating, ambitious, intensely focused on the long game, so therefore a good influence. And one only had to spend a minute with the two of them to see that he was deeply invested in Ronan. So theoretically Adam was more positive than negative in the safety department.
Unless he left Ronan.
Declan didn’t know how much complication was too much complication for Adam Parrish.
It wasn’t like Adam was the most straightforward of people, either, even if he was pretending he was at the moment.
The Lynch brothers had reached Matthew’s favorite vantage point, Overlook 1. The sturdy, complex decking jutted out toward the falls, cleverly fit around boulders larger than men. If one was less nimble, one could observe from the railing. If one was more nimble, one could scramble up the boulders for a higher view. Matthew always preferred scrambling.
Today was the same
as all the others. Matthew pressed his burrito wrapper into Declan’s hands. His ugly hat tumbled from his head, but he didn’t seem to notice it as he clambered across the rocks, getting as high as he could get, as close as he could get.
He was transfixed.
The Potomac was unsettled and fast and wide through here as it clawed over the rocks. Leaning on the railing, Matthew closed his eyes and sucked in huge breaths of air, as if he’d been suffocating until now. His brows released until-then-unnoticed tension. His Adonis locks lifted in the wind off the river, revealing not a kid’s profile, but a young man’s.
“Matthew—” Declan began, but stopped. Matthew had not heard him. The falls had him in their grip.
After many minutes, Ronan simply breathed fuck.
It was true that it was eerie—their normally ebullient brother transformed into this enchanted prince. Matthew was not prone to introspection; it was bizarre to see his eyes closed and his mind elsewhere. And it got worse the longer the minutes dragged on. Five minutes, ten, fifteen—that felt long to stand around waiting for him, but not uncanny. One hour, two, three—that was something else. That raised the hairs on the back of your neck. It was, Declan thought, becoming more obvious what he truly was, his existence reliant on Ronan and perhaps on something beyond even that. What powered Ronan? What had powered Niall? Something related to this surging water.
It seemed like only a matter of time before Matthew figured it out.
Ronan sucked air in through his mouth and released it slowly out his nose, such a familiar Ronan gesture that Declan could have identified him just by the sound of it. Then Ronan asked, “What’s the Fairy Market?”
Declan’s stomach heard the question before his brain did. It seized up in hot anxiety.
Damn it.
His thoughts rapidly followed the flowchart of secrets, of lies. How did Ronan even know to ask that question? Had he found something of Niall’s at the Barns; had someone approached him; was their secrecy in question; what had Declan triggered when he made that phone call, when he picked up that key, when he went to that house in Boston while Ronan met up with Adam—
Declan said blandly, “The what?”
“Don’t lie,” Ronan said. “I’m too pissed off for bullshit.”
Declan looked at his younger brother. The more natural brother of the two, but not by much. He had grown up to look exactly like their father. He was missing Niall’s long curls and Niall’s effervescent charm, but the nose, the mouth, the eyebrows, the stance, the simmering restlessness in the eyes, everything else was the same, as if Aurora had had no part in the transaction at all. Ronan was no longer a boy, or a teen. He was turning into a man, or a mature version of whatever he was. A dreamer.
Stop protecting him, Declan told himself. Tell him the truth.
But a lie felt safer.
He knew Ronan was failing alone at the Barns. The farm he adored wasn’t enough for him. His brothers weren’t enough for him. Adam wasn’t really enough for him, either, but Declan knew he hadn’t gotten that far yet. There was something strange and yawning and hungry inside Ronan, and Declan knew that he could either feed it or risk losing Ronan to a far more mundane ending and, by extension, lose his other brother, too. His entire family.
Declan clenched his teeth, and then he gazed at the river as it threw itself over the rocks. “Want to come with me?”
Sometimes Hennessy imagined flinging herself off the roof.
She imagined how, for just a collection of seconds, she would be ascending as her initial jump brought her a few feet above the roof level, before the sucking sensation of gravity wrapped itself around her body. Only then would she be officially falling. Nine point eight one meters per second squared, that was the speed of a fall, all other variables taken out of the picture. Air resistance, friction, balanced and unbalanced forces, six other girls leaning over the edge of the roof shouting Hennessy come back.
The French had a term for it. L’appel du vide, the call of the void. The urge even non-suicidal people felt to jump when confronted with a high place. Fifty percent of people thought about hurling themselves from heights, much to their shock. One in two. So it wasn’t only Hennessy who would imagine her body plummeting into the junipers three stories below.
Hennessy stood on the concrete balcony at the McLean mansion’s roof, the toes of her boots poking over the edge, looking at the yard far below. Music spat in the background, something murmuring and sensual and restless. One of the girls sang along with the song even though it was in a language Hennessy didn’t speak—had to be Jordan or June. Conversation spiked and lulled. Glasses and bottles clinked. Somewhere, a gun went off, once, twice, three times, distant and percussive in the house, sounding like distant cue balls on a pool table. It was a trash party. A secret party. A party for people who had so much dirty laundry they could be trusted to not air anyone else’s.
“You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream,” said a voice beside her.
It was Hennessy’s voice, but out of a different body. Not a different body. A distinct body. Hennessy had to look to tell which of the girls it was, and even then, she wasn’t sure. Trinity, maybe. Or Madox. The newer ones were harder to place. They were like looking in a mirror.
The girl eyed Hennessy’s body language and continued, “You jump, I jump, we all jump.”
Everyone at this secret party thought Hennessy’s big reveal was that she was one of the most prolific art forgers on the East Coast. The real secret was this: Hennessy, Jordan, June, Brooklyn, Madox, Trinity. Six girls with one face.
Hennessy had dreamt them all.
Only two of the girls were allowed to be seen at the same time. Twins were understandable. Triplets a little more novel. Quadruplets, quintuplets—any number above three became increasingly noteworthy.
Hennessy’s life was shit-complicated enough. She had no desire to be extorted further by someone who knew the real truth about her.
“This place was landscaped by a drunk Italian Tim Burton fanboy,” Hennessy said, looking down at the intricately hardscaped backyard. It had not been kept up, but the geometry of it had not yet been lost to untamed growth. Frantically intricate planters and boxwood labyrinths and moss growing between delicately tiled paths. Then, to hide that she couldn’t tell which copy the girl beside her was, she asked, “What do you want, bitch?”
“Madox, asshole,” said Madox; she could tell Hennessy’s tricks right off because she was Hennessy. “The vodka. Where did it get to?”
“It’s not in the Porsche?”
Madox shook her head.
“Which devils got into it, one wonders?” Hennessy said lightly. “You go spin and spoil in these mortal pleasures on my behalf and I’ll look. Which rooms are already overflowing with me?”
“Only the kitchen,” Madox said. “I think June and Trinity are in there.”
Hennessy stepped off the ledge and rejoined her own party. As she glittered through the house, people she’d forged for and people she’d gotten cash from and people she’d hidden bodies with and people she’d slept with nodded at her or touched her elbow or kissed her on the mouth. She was not looking for the vodka. Madox didn’t care about the vodka. It probably was still in the Porsche. Madox had gone up there to get her off the ledge. Been sent, more likely.
Hennessy stalked into one of the side hallways, stepping over broken glass and blood from Breck’s break-in until she got to the room Jordan used for most of her forgery. Jordan, like Hennessy, liked to work after dark, which meant she didn’t need a room with windows; she needed a room with power outlets so she could sit close to the canvas with her OttLites as brilliant as stage lights. She always double-checked her colors by natural light later. Hennessy wasn’t sure why they both preferred to work at night; it was bad art practice, surely. But the sun had never felt like a friend.
“I wasn’t going to,” Hennessy said as she walked into the windowless studio.
Sure enough, Jordan was installed there am
ong the big, dark canvases and the turpentine and the rags and the brushes stored bristle side up with paint dripping in rich luxurious colors down their handles. She was working on their invite for the Fairy Market. Beneath the microscope on the desk was Breck’s original invitation, a delicate, peculiar square of linen, like an arcane handkerchief. Several discarded drafts were strewn about it. Jordan currently had her fingers gripped round a very small Copic marker as she tested yet another spare textile.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jordan said, not looking up from her work.
Hennessy stepped up on a chair to view the desk from above. “Well, that looks like absolute horseshit.”
Jordan used a handheld microscope to assess the bleed of the mark she had just made. “I’ve nearly got it.”
Jordan had been the first of the copies Jordan Hennessy had dreamt into being many years before. She kept Hennessy for herself. She gave away Jordan to this new girl. Because she was the first copy, and the oldest, Jordan was the most complex of all of the copies—even if Hennessy had dreamt the other girls with as much complexity as she had dreamt her, Jordan had over a decade of her own memories and experience.
Sometimes Hennessy forgot that Jordan was actually her.
Sometimes she thought Jordan forgot, too.
“Your undying optimism should be bronzed,” Hennessy said. “It should be displayed in a museum someplace where schoolchildren can see it, read the plaque, and learn from it. It should be cut into smaller pieces and placed in rich soil with plenty of sunlight so that each piece might grow into new optimism ready to be harvested by—”
Jordan turned her linen and made a mark with a different pen. “How long do you think we have?”
Once upon a time, Hennessy had wondered if she’d share this face—this life—with two dozen girls. Fifty. One hundred. One thousand. Now she knew that would never happen. Every time Hennessy dreamt a copy of herself into being, it physically cost her something, and it was getting worse.
But she couldn’t stop. Neither dreaming, nor dreaming herself.
Call Down the Hawk Page 8
