Ronan called, “Why did you save me?”
Bryde said, “Why do I have to get something out of it?”
This
was
different.
Ronan spun in a circle, looking for someone else in the forest. This voice had not been amorphous, coming from everywhere. This voice had weight and timbre. This voice had moved through space to get to him. This voice belonged to a body.
“I’m not going to show myself,” Bryde said, his voice sharper, either through reality or circumstance.
“I could make you,” Ronan said, and knew it was true. When he felt like this, dreaming on his ley line, dreaming of his forest, he could do nearly anything.
“I believe you,” Bryde replied. Ronan turned just in time to see the edge of a shadow, the movement of mist. Something had just been there. “But do you want to see each other or do you want to trust each other?”
Ronan didn’t know what he wanted.
Overhead, he heard Chainsaw caw. He knew it was not really his Chainsaw; it was another dream version of her. It didn’t matter; he liked hearing her, and he was in no danger of manifesting anything he didn’t want when he was dreaming like this.
“Would you save a dying dreamer?” Bryde asked. “Even if you didn’t know them?”
“Yes,” Ronan answered immediately.
“There are factors affecting that yes. There are costs, you know. Emotional costs. Philanthropy is a hobby for the emotionally rich. ”
Rain pattered down on the leaves around him and onto Ronan’s shoulders. He could feel its wetness but his clothing remained undampened: dream rules.
“Next box,” Bryde said. “Next box. Throw a pebble. Hop. Jump. Closer to the center. There’s another dreamer, and she’s dying. Or she will be. Will you save her?”
Another dreamer. “Yes.”
“Don’t just say yes. Think about it. Think about what it means.”
This was stupid. Ronan was no hero, but he knew fucking right from fucking wrong. It didn’t matter if it was another dreamer. The answer was the same either way. A child knew the answer to this question. “Yes.”
“It is not as easy as you think,” Bryde said. “It’s not pull a lever receive a prize. There are a lot of ways to die.”
Ronan was getting impatient.
“You want me to trust you?” Bryde asked. “Save her. Really save her. It’s going to mean telling her what you are. It will cost you, emotionally.”
“Did it cost you to save me?”
There was a long silence. The mist shimmered darkly in the trees. The rain sighed.
Bryde said finally, “You are the most expensive thing I have ever saved.”
An address dropped into Ronan’s knowledge. Just like that. McLean, Virginia. He could see the shape of the drive there. He could see the house the address belonged to. He could see a red Supra in the driveway. A garden designed by a frantic and frustrated chess set designer. A back door, unlocked, a back staircase, a long hallway, a room entirely in black and gold.
“Is that where she is?” Ronan asked.
Bryde whispered, “Better drive like the fucking wind, boy.”
The air in the bathroom was gone.
It was hard to tell how long it had been gone. Long enough that Jordan was already drowning. She had begun dying at some point before she opened her eyes and she was already well into the process now.
Her lungs were howling.
Water was everywhere. The room was full of it, tile to ceiling, complete with it. Towels undulated like sea slugs, toilet paper kelp thrashed in a receding wave. Jordan was just another thing floating in it. Hennessy, too.
Hennessy looked dead.
She was expressionless. Her arms and legs drifting like a corpse.
But she wasn’t dead, or Jordan wouldn’t be awake. She was paralyzed. She must have brought back a copy.
Focus, Jordan told herself.
Her body screamed for air, but the priority was getting Hennessy air. If Hennessy died, it was endgame for both of them.
She swam to Hennessy, kicking off her boots on the way, pushing off the edge of the shower glass to propel herself. When she gripped Hennessy’s wrist, her pulse was slow and violent, palpable even in this situation. Dreaming another copy was working its foul consequence on Hennessy, even though the paralysis meant she couldn’t react to it yet.
She was dead weight. Jordan had already moved past the lights sparking in her vision part of dying and straight into the darkness shuttering either side of it part. She tried to get some momentum by kicking off the ceiling, but everything was strange and unfamiliar, too hard, too impossible to remember.
Suddenly Hennessy jerked, nearly pulling out of Jordan’s grip. Jordan tightened her fingers and was towed. Forward. Down.
Hennessy’s legs still drifted, paralyzed.
But still she jerked forward through the gritty water.
Then Jordan saw what was pulling her: another girl with her face, dressed as they all were when they were new: white T-shirt, nice jeans, flowers on the ass pockets.
Another copy.
She had been born into this hell and her first conscious act was doing exactly what Jordan was doing: saving Hennessy.
Together they hauled Hennessy to the door—the bathroom seemed enormous.
The door wouldn’t give way.
Was it locked? Was that why this wouldn’t work? No, think, Jordan, she told herself. It was because the door opened in, and the weight of thousands of pounds of water was keeping it shut.
It seemed impossible that the room was still full of water; it had to be escaping under the door and through the air-conditioning vents and down the drains.
But not fast enough.
Jordan had no more ideas.
Her lungs were a thrashing animal. A dying animal.
Jordan had only one thought: No one knew I existed. Her entire life had been spent as Jordan Hennessy, an existence shared with between six and ten other entities at any given time. Same face, same smile, same driver’s ID, same career, same boyfriends, same girlfriends. A flowchart where the only choices available were the ones she could crowd-source to the other girls. Why do you only paint what other people have already painted? Declan Lynch had asked. Because her brush had already come pre-loaded with someone else’s palette.
She’d painted hundreds of paintings with astonishing skill and no one would know she ever existed.
She’d only ever lived someone else’s life.
No one knew I existed.
The new copy had released Hennessy and floated off a little bit away. Her eyes were looking at nothing.
Slam.
Slam.
Was it sound or movement? It felt like the water was shaking, or Jordan was shuddering.
She’d spent all this time thinking the end would come with eternal sleep. She hadn’t thought she might simply die.
Slam.
Then suddenly the water was draining, feeling as it did like Jordan’s skin was peeling from her scalp down.
Jordan sucked in a lungful of air, and then another, and then another. She’d never have enough air again. Beside her, Hennessy was coughing and burbling but making no other movement; Jordan dragged her still-limp body up until she was no longer bubbling. They both were sitting in a few inches of water, but it didn’t matter because there was air, air, air.
Oh, the copy, the copy—Jordan splashed through the water to the new girl. She was dead. Jordan tried to revive her, but she stayed dead. She’d only ever lived in a nightmare.
“Crumbs,” Jordan said.
The door swung in. It was split unevenly down the middle, splinters jutting inward.
A young man stood in the threshold, lit by weak early morning light. In his hand was the tire iron he’d used to split the door. He had pale skin, a shaved head, sharp eyebrows, sharp mouth, sharp expression. His face was unfamiliar but his eyes were a very, very familiar blue.
Jordan demanded, “Who are y
ou, fuck-arse?”
“I know you’re a dreamer,” he said.
All the air she thought she’d gotten into her lungs felt like it had vanished.
He paused. His lips were parted to say something else, but he didn’t. The words were right there, queued up, but he didn’t let them free.
Finally, he said, “And I am, too.”
Jordan had always known there had to be other dreamers out there. J. H. Hennessy had been a dreamer like her daughter, after all, and like they said about mice, where there was one there was four. There had to be other dreamers out there. Maybe lots of other dreamers. Well, probably not lots. The world would look different, she thought, if there were a lot of other people who could manifest their imagination, even if they were all stifled in ways similar to Hennessy.
She didn’t think she’d ever meet another one.
That seemed for the best, really. She figured dreamers were probably like forgers. People forged art for all kinds of reasons. They forged for the money, they forged for the challenge of it, they forged for the lulz. They forged paintings and textiles, drawings and sculpture. What tickled one forger’s fancy might leave another entirely cold. It didn’t seem like they’d have any more in common with each other than with anyone else. They were also a pretty dysfunctional bunch. Forgers lived at the fringes of the art world, if not society in general. Either situation or personality kept them from swimming along with everyone else. They were neither artist nor criminal.
Jordan didn’t see why dreamers should be any different, except with even higher stakes. Might another dreamer have insight into fixing Hennessy? Maybe. Might another dreamer get them all killed? Equally likely.
“Why are you here?” Jordan asked Ronan Lynch. She was sitting, leaned against the wall of the hallway, drenched, dreamlogged. Her leggings felt clammy and unpleasant next to her chilly skin. Her brain was drenched, too—she was just as deep into one of her dreamy episodes as antediluvian Jordan had been, struggling to piece together reality from the foggy images of water and talons and fire. The other girls were all frozen in various artful positions in the hall, having arrived just a few seconds after Ronan had busted the door down. They’d been drawn by the sound of the door’s destruction, rather than any knowledge of Hennessy’s imminent death. If he hadn’t arrived, the other girls would’ve gone to eternal sleep elsewhere in the mansion, never knowing their dreamer had drowned meters away.
Hennessy looked dead, the skin beneath her eyes purpled and her joints loose and unmanned by her consciousness. But she couldn’t be, since all her dreams were still awake and coming forward to pull her limp body free from the pooled water.
“That’s a funny way of saying thank you for saving my life,” Ronan said.
He looked like his brother, in a harder way, like Declan Lynch had been inserted into a pencil sharpener and Ronan Lynch had been taken out after. Declan’s teeth were even; Ronan’s were bared. Declan’s eyes were narrow; Ronan’s were arrow slits. Declan’s hair was curled; Ronan’s was obliterated. Declan looked like the kind of person you forgot you’d ever seen. Ronan looked like the kind of person that made you cross to the other side of the street. It was hard to imagine they’d grown up under the same roof; if Jordan had been told they’d been separated as children, she’d have believed it.
Jordan said, “If I showed up on your doorstep, just like that, don’t you think you’d ask me the same thing?”
Ronan lifted his feet, one, then the other, watching the way the sodden carpet changed in color as he did. The whole hallway had an unappealing odor now that it was wet; it smelled abandoned, moldy, toxic, not really livable. “No, I think I’d start with a solid ‘thanks, man,’ first.”
“Easy, easy, she’s ruined,” June hissed as she and Brooklyn propped Hennessy against the wall beside Jordan. As they did, Jordan saw that a brand-new flower marred Hennessy’s throat. Room for just two more. Jordan felt sick. Genuinely sick, her stomach heaving and warm. Two was only one less than three, but it felt different. It was no longer really a number. It was the second to last copy and then the last.
Hennessy’s head rolled to the side, but she wasn’t entirely passed out; her eyelids fluttered. Even now she battled sleeping. Battled dreaming. Another copy right now would surely be the end of her, no matter what the tattoo on her throat promised.
The Dark Lady hadn’t worked.
Jordan had no more ideas.
The mountains flickered in Jordan’s thoughts. Fire whispered: devour.
Get
it
together.
She was Jordan, and she was the girl who didn’t fall apart.
“Well, thanks, mate,” Jordan said. “Now, why are you here? Did your brother send you?”
It didn’t seem possible that she could feel more bad feeling on top of her current level of bad feeling, but thinking about Declan Lynch discovering that Jordan had played him managed to deftly add a large amount of shittiness to her situation.
“My brother?” Ronan echoed. “Oh—right. I thought you looked … You were the painter at the Market, weren’t you? The one he chatted up. Is your name Ashley?”
Jordan said, “What?”
“I’m pretty sure he only dates Ashleys,” Ronan said. “The stupider, the better. Just in case you were thinking of calling him back. I wouldn’t, personally. It looks like a very boring time. Why are there so fucking many of you? That’s messed up. Which of you is the original?”
All of them looked to Hennessy.
Ronan sounded dubious. “Shouldn’t she have … CPR?”
“If drowning was what ailed her, you’d be right, young man,” said Brooklyn. It was the end of the world, but she still spared a moment to check out his body, because she was Brooklyn. Her face said the moment was worth it. “If only it was drowning what ailed us.”
“I’m after a blanket,” Trinity said, slipping down the hall.
Ronan leaned his head around the corner of the doorway to glance inside the bathroom they’d come from. He made a small hm sound, though it was hard to tell from the back of his head if it was over the ridiculousness of the bathroom, the presence of Madame X, or the dead copy. He was very lackadaisical about the entire experience. Like it was just another day. Like he expected them to also feel like it was just another day. “Bryde told me where to find you. Said you’d be dying and to get my ass moving.”
“Fairy Market Bryde?” Madox said. “The one they were all going on about?”
Jordan removed a long, damp hair from inside her mouth. It was stuck to some damp fuzz, too. Almost-drowning came with all kinds of unpredicted small and large miseries. “How does this Bryde know who we are?”
Ronan pushed his toe against a very ugly satin hand towel that must have been in the bathroom before the flood. “How the hell should I know? I don’t even know how he knows who I am. I’ve only met him in dreams. Maybe your dreamer met him there.”
Jordan had never heard of such a thing, but even if it were possible, it didn’t seem possible for Hennessy. She had only dreamt a dozen times in as many years.
Trinity returned with a blanket to gently roll Hennessy onto. After the girls had assembled her on it, Hennessy murmured, “Set …” She closed her eyes, wincing. “Set my timer.”
“Your phone’s fucked,” said Trinity. “I’ll put it on rice.”
“I got you,” June said. She set a twenty-minute timer on her phone before resting it on Hennessy’s chest. Hennessy gripped it with the neediness of a child handed a favorite toy. As Trinity and Brooklyn picked up either end of the blanket like a stretcher, Ronan ran a hand along his shaved head, looking perplexed. He cast a look around the drenched hallway and the drenched corpse and the drenched décor that had managed to escape the bathroom with Hennessy and Jordan. He remarked, “This is really fucked up.”
Jordan agreed. It was really fucked up.
There’s always another idea, she told herself. You have to just open your eyes, there’ll be another one.
Come on, Jordan.
She climbed to her feet. She felt wobbly as a new colt, like she’d swum a mile instead of across a bathroom. Her throat was sore as if she’d been screaming instead of drowning. Her mind felt stronger standing to face Ronan, but her body resented it. “Dude, we’re grateful. But I mean it in the nicest possible way that I think you ought to tell Bryde to forget he ever knew we existed.”
“You—” Ronan broke off as a framed piece of debris caught his eye. Turning the frame over, he found the Dark Lady peering at him bitterly. She was less damaged than any of them by the events; her glossy varnish beaded water but was otherwise unharmed. “I thought I recognized that. What, as the kids say, the fuck? Why would you copy this?”
Jordan, June, and Madox all exchanged looks. Why indeed.
June’s expression said, Well? Jordan supposed they might as well give it back. There was no point sticking Declan Lynch with a copy when the original wasn’t doing them any good. No point trying to keep Declan Lynch from knowing the others had nabbed it while she was out with him. No point to any of this whole damn business now that The Dark Lady had failed.
No point to—
Jordan had an idea.
“How good of a dreamer are you?” she asked.
Ronan raised an eyebrow.
“If you are one at all. Maybe we should ask you to prove it.”
He grinned. It was a sharp, durable expression, hard-won. “I’m going to need someplace dry to lie down.”
By the next workday, Declan decided he was glad there hadn’t been anything beneath the backing paper of The Dark Lady. Thank God, really. It had stopped him from being stupid. He’d gotten an idea in his head and the obsession with it had carried him through several weeks of increasingly risky behavior, late-night phone calls, trips to Boston, the Fairy Market, everything escalating without him quite realizing it, all common sense tased and tied up in the backseat. Who knew how far he would’ve gone? Far enough for something to get broken, probably. Far enough to throw away everything that he’d done to this point.
Call Down the Hawk Page 22
