Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Jordan said, “I think I know how to do that.”

  No, thank you.”

  It was one thing to be victimized by Parsifal Bauer’s uncompromising, tactless nature. It was yet another thing to watch someone else be victimized by it. Several someones. An entire room of someones. The entire staff of Pfeiffer’s German Pastry Shoppe in Alexandria, Virginia, had come from the back room and behind the counter to watch Parsifal Bauer take his first bite of Bienenstich in years. Lock, who’d found the bakery, had apparently laid it on thick when he called to secure the cake. They only made Bienenstich as a seasonal special, but he’d explained that Parsifal Bauer was a very sick young man in the country seeking medical treatment far from his family, who were too unwell to travel themselves, a family who used to make him the treat to encourage him to think of the sweeter things in life.

  Pfeiffer’s had risen artfully to the challenge. Give us a few hours, they had said gallantly, as we make sure we have the almonds, the pastry cream, the yeast dough, the mettle!

  “You don’t want a box for the rest of it?” one of the staff members asked.

  Parsifal Bauer sat on the edge of a cheap café chair as he always sat, long hair tucked behind his ears, body bolt upright, as if his bones had all been assembled only with much effort and were likely to fall apart if he unbalanced the structure too much. The square of Bienenstich cake sat on a plate in front of him. He was the only customer in the shop. Bakers had come from the back room to watch his first bite. Cashiers had come from behind the pastry case. Cameras were ready for filming. Candles were involved. Something peppy and German played overhead.

  Farooq-Lane felt bad for them the moment she stepped in. She already knew how this was going to go.

  “We won’t take this piece from you,” the cashier said, misunderstanding his no, thank you. “We mean the rest of the cake! We made a whole cake! For you!”

  Parsifal looked at that single square of Bienenstich on the plate again. It looked back at him. He did not move toward the cake or away. He looked as if his head were a glass of water and he was trying very hard not to spill it.

  “No, it is not entertaining for me,” Parsifal said again, politely.

  “Not entertaining?” echoed the second baker.

  He reddened a little. “Perhaps that is not the way to say it in English.”

  One of the other staff members laughed in a jolly way and said, “Oh, son, we have German here! All the German! You’ve come to the right place!” And he began to speak to Parsifal in a flow of it. All of them pitched in, newly excited, as if this, they knew, would be the true gift for him, hearing his native tongue after so long away from home. They pattered on around him while Parsifal listened motionless.

  It had not been a good day. Farooq-Lane and Parsifal had arrived at the lone cul-de-sac in time to see what indeed looked like a charcoal-gray BMW parked in the exact middle of it, but before they could get close enough to get a plate number or see the driver, a little white sedan had backed out of a driveway into the side of their rental car. The apologetic driver had waved frantically, working hard to dislodge his car from theirs, but by the time he’d managed to disentangle himself, the BMW was long gone. He’d babbled on in some foreign language that neither Parsifal nor Farooq-Lane got, but they figured out the gist: He didn’t have insurance, he was sorry, he was going now.

  Farooq-Lane had just let him go. There was already a bullet hole in the rental. What was one more dent?

  She became aware that the bakery staff had fallen silent, waiting for Parsifal to reply. He said a few words in German. Farooq-Lane could tell from their faces that they did not like him any better in German than they liked him in English. Camera phones were being lowered. Bilingual muttering was happening. They were drawing close to Farooq-Lane as if she were his caretaker and might explain him.

  “Perhaps he’s overtired and will change his mind later,” one of the staff members said to her in a low voice, as another staff member began to lower the lights and yet another held up her keys to remotely start her car.

  “I think you’re probably right,” Farooq-Lane lied. “He’s so overwhelmed. Tomorrow he’ll feel differently. We appreciate all that you did.”

  A week before she probably would’ve been mortified, but now she knew him too well. Of course he didn’t like it, Farooq-Lane thought. He didn’t like most things. She collected the white box of Bee Sting Cake—that was the translation of Bienenstich. Someone had drawn a little cheery bee on it with a thought bubble that read PARSIFAL! GET WELL! She thanked them again and took both box and boy to the beleaguered rental.

  In the car, he said, “I won’t feel differently tomorrow.”

  She dropped her hand from the ignition and gave him a withering look. “I know you won’t, Parsifal. That’s a thing that you say to someone to make them feel better about spending a lot of time making something for someone and then having that someone just stare at their food like it’s going to give them a disease.”

  “I did not like it,” he said.

  “I think they got that.”

  “I was not trying to offend them.”

  “I don’t think they got that.”

  “It was not like my mother’s,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t be. I told you so. I did not ask anyone to do this for me.”

  “Sometimes,” Farooq-Lane said, feeling her temper playing round the edges again, “people still try, even if they don’t think a thing will work. Sometimes there are nice surprises in this world, Parsifal.”

  He sat just as he had in the café, straight up, box on his lap, looking straight ahead at the dark lot. His jaw was set. Eventually, he said, “She would make it every single month on the first day, always from the same recipe, and she would freeze it, so that I could thaw it and have a piece every single day for breakfast.”

  “Every day?”

  “Every day. If something always works, why would you change it?”

  They sat in the dimming gray evening there, the car chilly and smelling of toasted almonds and sweet, yeasty cake. She didn’t know where they were going to go next. After the cul-de-sac failure, Parsifal had been unwilling to brainstorm about anything else he might have experienced in his vision. Morale was low for everyone involved. Farooq-Lane. Parsifal. The bullet-ridden rental.

  “Do you have the recipe?” she asked. “Your mother’s? Can I ask her? Or someone who speaks German? Can you ask her?” It occurred to her only after she asked this that she had not seen Parsifal call or text anyone since she had been with him. She hadn’t seen him do anything with his phone but use it to play his ever-present opera.

  Parsifal looked out the side window at the closed pastry shop, holding very, very still.

  “She’s dead,” he said, in his stiff, affectless way. “I killed them all the first time I saw the end of the world.”

  Most people pretended not to notice the woman at the gas station. The gas station, about thirty minutes west of Washington, DC, was one of those interstate oases common on the eastern corridor, always busy because of strong branding promising sandwiches that didn’t smell bad and toilets you wouldn’t stick to. The woman was lovely, with pale skin and long red hair, and she was clean, with a nice trench coat over a pretty flowered dress, but she looked lost—not in space, but in time—and that meant that no one could meet her eyes.

  Shawna Wells had been watching the woman for the past twenty minutes. Shawna was waiting for her husband, Darren, to stop sulking and return to his new truck, parked beside her, so that they could continue their caravan back home to Gaithersburg. Possibly he was waiting for her to stop sulking. She couldn’t tell, and in any case, she wasn’t going to leave the van to get him. She had two occupied car seats in the back, in case he had forgotten, and she was not about to unbuckle them just to end a quarrel.

  She watched the woman instead. At first Shawna thought the woman was asking for money, but the longer she watched, the more she thought that she was instead trying to hitch a ride.
What woman hitches a ride these days? she wondered. Wasn’t every woman told it was dangerous to get into a stranger’s car? After a while, though, Shawna realized her question had morphed into a different one—What kind of woman takes on a hitchhiker?—and she also realized that she was about to ask the woman which direction she was headed.

  The quarrel between Darren and Shawna had been about whether or not Shawna was selfish to be angry about him purchasing the new truck for himself. She’d wanted a new deck for parties. He’d wanted the new Raptor for his commute. She hardly saw how that made her selfish. He said that was the point.

  She decided that if the woman asked her before Darren returned, she would say yes.

  As minutes dragged on, however, and it seemed increasingly likely that Darren would soon give in, she grew impulsive. She put the van in gear. The children muttered. As she pulled out of the spot, she saw both Darren and the woman look up. The first in confusion, and the woman in something like recognition.

  Shawna rolled down the window. The old van didn’t always work quite right, so the window stopped halfway, but that was enough to ask, “Are you looking for a ride?”

  The woman was very lovely up close, with green-glass eyes and a coral-colored mouth and freckles all across her translucent skin. Sometimes looking at a beautiful woman can make another woman feel self-conscious about her appearance, but Shawna felt the opposite—she was suffused with a new awareness of the things about her body that she found beautiful.

  “I’m trying to get to Washington, DC,” the woman said.

  “I’m going that way.” Shawna darted a glance to Darren, who was watching with bewilderment. “Hop in.”

  The woman smiled then, and Shawna remembered even more things that she liked about herself—her eyes, for instance, always looked like she was happy, even if she wasn’t laughing, and Darren sometimes said that just looking at them made him happy, too. He really wasn’t a dirtbag, most of the time, shame about that truck.

  The woman got in.

  Shawna held Darren’s gaze for a second (he was making the universal gesture for What the hell are you doing, Shawna?) before heading out of the station.

  “I’m grateful,” the woman said.

  “No problem,” Shawna replied, as if she did this all the time. Her phone, attached to a holder by the radio, was buzzing rapidly with texts. What are you doing? Another buzz. You have our children in the car. “What’s your name?”’

  “Liliana.”

  They pulled onto the interstate. The old van wasn’t fast, but it got to the speed limit eventually. Shawna considered herself a safe driver.

  “That’s a really pretty name,” Shawna said. The woman didn’t seem to have an accent, but the way she said Liliana seemed to imply that she came from a place that did.

  “Thank you. What are your children’s names?”

  Shawna reached up to click the button on the side of the phone to turn the screen off. She didn’t want the woman to see Darren’s texts and feel unwelcome. “Jenson and Taylor. They’re my babies.”

  “Bless you, Jenson, and bless you, Taylor,” the woman said softly, and Shawna felt as if she could feel the words, like a real blessing, as if even though the woman had only just glimpsed her children in the backseat, she truly loved them.

  For a while, they drove in silence. Shawna did not normally care for silence, but the fact of the woman, this strange woman, this hitchhiker, in the van was so loud that she didn’t notice the lack of conversation. Traffic grew heavier and lanes multiplied. The evening sun was bold and golden behind them; the sky before them was darkening with night and with a bank of storm clouds.

  “So what’s in DC, Liliana?”

  “I’m looking for someone.” The woman gazed out the window. She had such a lot of long red hair, and Shawna remembered suddenly how full her own hair had gotten when she was pregnant. You didn’t lose hair when you were pregnant, and so there had just been a lot of it, big and fantastic and glorious, until the hormones changed and she started shedding again after Taylor was born. Shawna had not thought about having another baby, but now, right now, in this moment, the idea appeared and was compelling. She’d enjoyed pregnancy so much, and Darren loved the babies. She’d felt so purposeful when she was growing life.

  She asked the woman, “And this person’s in DC?”

  The woman shook her head. “But I might discover how to find them there. I hope.” When some people say I hope, they mean that they have none, but the woman said I hope like hope was a holy thing, or an occupation.

  What do you do?

  I hope.

  In the rearview mirror, Shawna saw the profile of Darren’s new truck catching up, trapped behind several rows of fast-moving traffic, but there nonetheless. She found that she no longer resented the truck. Yes, she would have preferred the deck, but the truck was evidence that Darren was still volatile, still prone to youthful fits of desire. Wasn’t that what she loved about him?

  Up ahead, the thunder rumbled, audible even over the sound of the minivan. Lightning jerked from cloud to cloud. Shawna had been afraid of thunderstorms when she was a girl. At first it had been an ungrounded fear, but later, she had been lying in bed when lightning arced through the window to the light switch on her bedroom wall. The new understanding that there was lawless electricity in the world meant that even the slightest cloud cover would send her darting indoors to a windowless room. She had gotten over it a long time ago, but looking at the storm now, she discovered that she was just as afraid of that power as she used to be.

  It felt stupid that she and Darren had fought over something so pointless. They were good together, and they were going to have another child.

  The lightning darted again, charging the atmosphere, and she looked in her rearview mirror for Darren’s truck. She wanted it to be close. She wanted to see his face.

  It was close. He’d caught up and was right behind them, making a phone gesture to her in her mirror. She regretted not making up with him before they’d left.

  The sound sucked out of the minivan.

  It rolled back to nothing, to dead air, like the knob had been spun on reality’s volume. The minivan ghosted forward through soundless traffic.

  Shawna tried to say Lord! but that required noise, and there was none.

  Then there was all the sound. A cacophony of every sound of every kind and every volume screamed inside the minivan. It was decades of sounds layered on top of each other.

  It was an assault.

  The noise bludgeoned the occupants of the car. If there was screaming, it could not be heard amid the rest of the sound. The windshield burst; the windows burst; blood splattered from somewhere. The minivan suddenly stopped moving forward, and the truck careened into it from behind. That sound, too, was absorbed by the howl of sound in the minivan. The two vehicles spun, spun, spun, and were hit again, and again, and again, and still the sound carried on.

  Then all the vehicles were motionless in the farthest right lane, and the world resumed its ordinary score.

  In the truck, Darren was crumpled over the steering wheel. The minivan seeped antifreeze. Shawna was draped sloppily back against her seat, blood running from her eyes and ears, her body battered. Everything in the interior of the minivan appeared to have been tumbled and crushed—the epicenter of a personal earthquake.

  In the backseat of the minivan, Jenson and Taylor wailed. They were soft and unharmed, though the backseat was pounded out of shape and their car seats were compacted and split.

  A teen girl climbed out of the passenger seat of the minivan. She was as untouched as the children in the backseat. She had long red hair, freckles all across her skin, and green-glass eyes, and she was quietly crying.

  She crouched on the shoulder of the road and rocked with her knuckle pressed against her teeth until she heard the sound of an approaching siren. Then she stood and began to walk toward DC.

  It started to rain.

  It was well after dark when Ronan
arrived at the Barns. The driveway was difficult to see, a tunnel of foliage to a hidden warren, but it would’ve been difficult to find even under the full sun because of the newly dreamt security system. The dream had taken him weeks to perfect, and even though he was normally a slob in his workshop, he’d painstakingly cleaned up after finishing this particular project. He’d destroyed every draft; he didn’t want to ever run across one accidentally. It had been designed to work upon waking emotions, a sort of dream object Ronan ordinarily avoided. Fucking with free will felt distinctly uncatholic to him—one of those slippery slopes one is warned about. But he wanted the Barns to be safe, and every other idea he had relied on physical harm. Hurting intruders meant exposure, and killing intruders meant cleanup, so mindfuck it was.

  The dreamt security system confused and saddened and obscured, tangling the intruder in nothing more or less poisonous than the terrible truths in their own histories. It didn’t precisely block the view of the driveway, but once caught, one simply couldn’t remember the present well enough to ever notice the entrance among the trees. It had been monstrous to install; it had taken Ronan the better part of a day to endure stretching it the few yards across the driveway. He’d had to stop every few minutes to put his head in his hands until the dread and regret passed.

  That night, even knowing full well that his family home was on the other side of the driveway threshold, even having spent most of his life here, Ronan still had to give himself a firm talking-to when his GPS reached the coordinates of the house.

  “Just get it over with,” he told himself.

  He charged at the drive. Doubt and unpleasant memories swept through him and then—

  The BMW was through and heading down the driveway on the other side. His headlights picked out a motionless cow here or there. Far on the other side of the deeply folded fields, dreamt fireflies winked in the woods.

  Then the lights illuminated the old white farmhouse in the gloom, and beyond it, the glinting sides of numerous outbuildings, like silent attendants. Home.