Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  She was going to find Parsifal. She was not going to have to tell Lock she had lost their only Visionary.

  She drove.

  It was in the middle of the night, and it woke them.

  Mags Harmonhouse shared a bedroom with her sister, Olly, just as she had when they were girls: two twin beds a twin-bed width apart, close enough that they had jumped from bed to bed before their mother had put an end to it. There were a lot of years and three husbands between that time and now, but sometimes when Mags woke up she thought they were girls again. It wasn’t a good thought, though. It always made her think, Oh no, now I have to do it all again.

  She woke up now and clawed up her glasses. She heard Olly clawing up her glasses as well.

  The sisters looked at each other in the dark. Olly’s eyes were bright, glittering beads in the streetlights outside, nothing comforting about that, even knowing her for decades. Anything seemed possible on a night like this when you’d been woken by something and didn’t know what the something had been.

  Maybe it had been a thump. A thump was a good thing to wake you in the night, Mags thought, a solid choice, classical. Once Dabney had tried to get up to piss in the middle of the night when he was baked more than a potato, and he’d made a thump when he’d tried to go through the mirror in the hall instead of the kitchen doorway.

  Olly blinked. Mags could tell she was listening, too. Deciding if it was a thump or a commotion. This neighborhood had never been Leave It to Beaver, as Olly sometimes said, but it was getting even rougher, and last year a commotion had preceded a robbery. The three young men had come in and taken the cash out of the dressers they tossed and the microwave out of the kitchen. They’d roughed Mags up a little bit when she’d tried to keep them from taking Olly’s little television.

  Maybe it was that new girl. Mags had been p.o.’d at Olly for the charity case—no point getting some runaway in here because the law would follow—but Liliana had already transformed the house. Mags wasn’t sure how she had accomplished so much in so little time. She was always working, that was for sure, but one person shouldn’t have been able to clean all the mold and repair the stair and find the good dark sheen of the wood floors beneath years of wear and dust in a day. Mags only saw her using Olly’s water and vinegar, but the house even smelled different, like flowers, like summer. She’d had to examine the hallway walls to see if the girl had painted, because everything seemed brighter.

  “The girl,” Olly whispered. “She’s crying.”

  And now that she said it, of course that was what it was. Low whimpering came from the room above them. Little moans, like a hurt animal. Subtle footfalls with it as well, as if she paced or moved about as she did. It was a sad sound, but also, for some reason—in this dark night, with Olly’s eyes still gleaming white behind her glasses, with the trees shadowing the walls—unsettling.

  The two sisters hesitated and then Mags grunted and threw off her covers. Olly followed suit. She’d always do something if Mags did it first. The two crones stood in the middle of their bedroom, shoulder to shoulder, listening. Had it stopped?

  No, there it was again.

  They put on their bathrobes and shuffled into the hall.

  It was louder out here, the weeping. It was so sad. Particularly when one imagined it coming from that sweet-faced girl, her gentle eyes clouded with tears, soft mouth torn with despair.

  They turned on the light, but it didn’t do much. It was just a single bulb, and it was barely better than when the hallway was just illuminated by the tepid orange streetlights.

  Mags was not fast to climb the stairs, and Olly was even slower. Mags kept pace with her. She still had that feeling of ants running over her arms, and she didn’t like the idea of getting there before her sister.

  Liliana’s door was ajar. Through the crack, Mags could see something moving back and forth. A column of light and then dark. Then light. Then dark. It must have been Liliana’s blouse, but it put Mags in mind of a spirit. Her mother said she’d seen one once; it had come up in a jet, she said, a beam from the floor in the old kitchen she’d been working in, gave her a scare that was still chewing her bones years later.

  Mags and Olly were nearly to the top of the stairs. The final stair let out a splitting creak.

  The column of white froze in the door and then vanished.

  There was silence.

  Mags hesitated. She wanted to go back down the stairs.

  “Child?” Olly called out, which was the first time she’d been braver than Mags in her life.

  Liliana sobbed, “Please go away.”

  They were both so relieved to hear her voice that they both let out a breath.

  Mags said, “—”

  But the words were lost because suddenly there was no sound.

  It was as if the house had been paused. As if there had never been such a thing as sound. As if this thing they remembered as sound had always been a false memory.

  Olly reached out and gripped her sister’s hand tightly.

  And then all the sound came back at once.

  I like your place, mate,” Jordan said. This was a joke, because it was not his place. It was a twenty-four-hour convenience store that Declan had been loitering in for the last fifteen minutes, staying out of the cold.

  It was one o’clock in the morning. He was very awake. This was a side effect of not taking his sleeping pill. This was a side effect of Jordan Hennessy calling him at midnight. This was a side effect of him being a fool. The entire place had the feeling only achievable at one o’clock in the morning, when everyone has joined a club, the club of people who are not in bed. A club defined not by being with the other members of the club but rather against everyone else. Jordan Hennessy had just pulled up to the gas station in a red Toyota Supra, and she gazed past Declan to the glowing lights of the convenience store behind him with an approving nod. She didn’t seem to mind that when she’d called thirty minutes before, he’d given her this address to pick him up at instead of his real address. He supposed she was a forger. She was hardwired for suspicion, for criminality, for covering one’s tracks.

  What are you doing here, Declan?

  “I’ve fixed it up a lot,” he said.

  Jordan looked brighter than when he’d seen her in the museum, more alive here in this after-dark world, under glittering midnight fluorescents, behind the wheel of a car, unfettered by walls and opening and closing times and the wakeful expectations of other people.

  “Well, it really shows,” she said. She unlocked the car door. “Ready to roll?”

  What are you doing here?

  Getting into a car with a girl from the Fairy Market.

  Just for tonight, he thought. He’d go back to being dull as soon as the sun came up.

  When he opened the passenger side door, The Dark Lady looked back at him. The painting rested across the seat so that it would be the first thing he saw; it was meant to shock him. He stood there, the door in his hand. The Dark Lady’s expression was bitter, wary, intense.

  He knew at once that this was the real painting. The seething desire leaked from the brushstrokes in a way it hadn’t for the one still hidden in the closet by his kitchen. This was why he had not dreamt of The Dark Lady’s shore these past nights.

  “When?” he asked. He shook his head a little. He could figure that part out; he knew the last time he’d had The Dark Lady’s dream.

  “We’ve both got things we can’t say,” Jordan said. “That’s just who we are, isn’t it? This was the only one that made me feel ugly to not say it.”

  He asked the question he couldn’t guess. “Why did you do it?”

  Jordan’s expression was frank. “Here’s the deal: You don’t ask me why I had it, and I won’t ask you about the man who made it. I can’t do any better than that right now. It’s all I got on a”—she looked at the car’s clock, which was clearly wrong—“Friday night at four p.m.”

  He could feel his mouth quirking at the absurdity of it a
ll. He felt like laughing. He didn’t know why. If it was because she was funny, or if it was because he was laughing at himself because he was an idiot, or if it was the way her wide grin was so infectious when she made a joke.

  “So what I have is a fake,” he said.

  “Fake is a strong word. Replica is gentler, don’t you think? Limited edition print, finished by hand?” Jordan said. She was not nearly as apologetic as one might expect in the circumstances. “You can take it back and walk away, no hard feelings. Or you can shove that old bag in the back and come with me for a little while.”

  If this was the real painting, that meant there was still backing paper to be pulled from the canvas, still swords to be pulled from stones. He wouldn’t think about that. He was shivering there standing in that open door, though he didn’t know if it was from the cool night, or the lateness of the hour, or the difficulty of the day, or the Dark Lady’s scowl, or Jordan Hennessy’s grin.

  What are you doing here, Declan?

  “Do you have a preference?” he asked.

  Jordan said, “This car’s a two-seater, Mr. Lynch.”

  He would be dull again tomorrow, he told himself again.

  He maneuvered The Dark Lady into the back and slid into her place.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked.

  She put the car into gear with the thoughtless certainty of someone who has been in cars so often they are just another part of their body. “How do you feel about being the first Jordan Hennessy original?”

  They drove to Georgetown, which he wasn’t expecting, to go with this wild girl to one of the most cultivated and comely neighborhoods in Washington, DC. Here, historic townhomes crowded like close friends behind mature trees, everything handsome and polite. He longed for a Georgetown town house like he longed for a Senator or Congressman before his name—he longed for it because he liked the look of them, but he also longed for it because he liked the look that followed when people heard that you were a congressman or lived in Georgetown.

  Jordan parked along a quiet, dark street and got a bag from the back. “Sorry, it’s a bit of a jog. I hope you have your Crocs.”

  Together the two of them walked a few quiet blocks to a neighborhood picturesque even in the middle of the night: warm streetlights, lacy dark leaves before them, gentle brick townhomes, wrought iron, ivy. Jordan sidled between two tall buildings, past parked bicycles and rubbish bins, to a low back garden gate. It had a small padlock. Jordan rested her bag on the other side of the gate, climbed, and then waited for him to climb after her.

  Trespassing was not on Declan’s ordinary menu.

  He did it anyway.

  At the back door, Jordan leaned into a keypad and punched a few digits. The door hummed and unlocked. She stepped inside, gestured for him to follow, and then closed the door behind him.

  They stood in a dark hall that was nonetheless incompletely dark in the way of city darkness. The streetlights came in red-gold through the front windows and made big squares of comfortable city night light across the wood floor. The house smelled of lemon verbena and stale old house.

  “It’s empty?” he guessed.

  “They rent it sometimes,” Jordan replied. “You just have to gander the calendar online to make sure no one’s coming. It’s too spendy for the area, though, so mostly it’s empty.”

  He didn’t ask her how she’d gotten the keycode, and she didn’t offer it. She gestured for him to follow her, and he did, moving quietly toward the staircase.

  “You don’t live here.”

  “No,” she said, “but I gave it a look when we—I was finding a place in the city. And now I just come every so often to paint. Not as much as I used to.”

  They were climbing now, one flight, to a second floor that was mostly a single large room that must have been quite bright during the day, because it was quite bright during the night. The streetlight was looking right in the window at them, and its attention was illuminating. The room had a beautiful tattered Persian rug on the floor and a clawfoot desk that looked as if it would walk up for a pet and a biscuit. Easels were set up everywhere. A concrete greyhound sniffed the air. It was very chic and specific.

  “I don’t know who lives here,” Jordan confessed, “but I love them. In my mind, they’re old lovers who can’t stand to live with each other but can’t stand to live entirely without, and so they keep this place as a sort of pact to see each other for one week each season.”

  As she began to unpack her bag, Declan wandered from easel to easel, looking at the paintings on them. Landscapes, mostly, some fiddly cityscapes of DC-area landmarks. The walls behind them had photos of places all over the world in black and white. He looked for evidence of the old lovers who couldn’t stand to live with or without each other but saw only one older woman smiling at the camera. She seemed in love with her surroundings, not with the picture-taker.

  “I’m going to paint in the dark,” Jordan said. “Even I don’t want to see what I create left to my own devices.”

  He turned to find her standing at one of the easels, a blank prepared board propped up, her little paint palette open with eight colors squeezed on it within brush’s reach on a spindly table beside her. The jar of Tyrian purple was there, too, unopened. He just looked at her there, standing with her things and her canvas waiting for his face, and he thought of the town house back in Alexandria with his brothers in it.

  “You don’t really mean that this is your first original,” Declan said. “It can’t possibly be.” He remembered how quickly she had copied the Sargent at the Fairy Market. How thoroughly he’d been fooled by The Dark Lady. One didn’t get that good at being other people without a lot of practice.

  Jordan loaded her brush with paint. “I learned by copying. And then I copied for a living. I think some forgers would say their paintings ‘in the style of’ are originals, but they’re telling themselves bedtime stories. So you’re my first. Park your bum,” she said, and gestured to the armchair opposite her.

  “How?”

  “With your arse and glutes.”

  He laughed, explosively, turning his face to do it, and she laughed, too.

  He sat.

  “How still do I have to be?”

  “You can talk.” She looked at the blank canvas. She let out a breath and shook out her hands.

  “Whoo.”

  She began. He couldn’t see what she was doing, but it was no hardship to sit quietly and watch her work. Her attention flicked from her canvas to him, checking reality against her creation and vice versa. It was a strange feeling to be studied after years of attempting to avoid it. He wasn’t sure it was good for him. It was like dabbling in his father’s criminal machinations; he could tell that there was a large part of him that secretly liked it.

  “There are letters from Sargent’s sitters,” Declan said eventually.

  The corners of her mouth rose, although her eyes stayed on the painting. “Tell me about them.”

  He did. He told her about how the people who would be the subjects of future Sargent paints wrote that they would come for sitting after sitting only to watch him face an empty canvas, doing nothing. Hours upon hours spent in the company of a painter who wasn’t painting. Just facing down that empty canvas. Staring at them. A wizard without magic. An orchestra quiet in the pit. He told her about how they wrote that after a certain point, Sargent would suddenly attack the canvas, painting with ferocious energy, dashing at the canvas to slam paint down before retreating to eye it, circling for the next round. He told her how the letter-writers said he’d shout and curse at the canvas as he painted, how it was as if he was possessed, and they were half-frightened of him and his genius. He told her about how if he put down even a mark he didn’t like on the subject’s face, he would scrape the whole thing away and begin again. The only mark worth keeping was the spontaneous one.

  “Is it really spontaneous, though, if you’ve done ten spontaneous marks and erased them before it?” Jordan asked. “
I think that’s just not showing people the work in the margins, isn’t it? You’ve practiced spontaneity. You want the viewer to respond to the unfretful line, even though it took fretting to get there. You’re making it about them instead of about you. True performance. What a master.”

  She was telling him something about herself.

  “No one knew him,” Declan said. He was telling her something about himself. “All those letters and all the records we have about him. He was such a public figure, he lived not long ago, but they still don’t know for sure if he had any lovers.”

  Jordan put her brush into the turpentine and pressed the bristles against the side of the jar until the paint billowed dark.

  “He had at least one,” she said. “Because I love him. Here now. Come see yourself.”

  He got up, but before he got to the canvas, Jordan stood to interrupt him with a hand flat on his belly. He was very still. The room smelled of turpentine and the warm, productive scent of the paints; probably they should’ve cracked a window. The concrete greyhound kept sniffing the air and the friendly city night light kept sneaking in around the drapes and Jordan’s palm stayed flat against his skin, not through his shirt.

  He felt a bright humming energy all through him, something he hadn’t felt in a very long time. His stomach was a ruin. His life in black and white; this moment in color.