The cool dim of the parking lot melted into the glow of a different afternoon. Farooq-Lane and Parsifal walked beside an interstate packed slaughterhouse-full with cars. Everything shimmered with exhaust and smoke. She could tell from the signs that it was in the United States. From the trees it was probably east of the Mississippi. There was a city ahead of them, and the cars on both sides of the interstate were headed in the same direction: away from it.
It was on fire.
Everything that was not the interstate was on fire. A city, on fire; the world, on fire.
Her face burned with it.
It would never go out, the fire whispered. It would eat everything.
Devour, devour
The fire was doing what it promised. It was eating everything. This was the distant future. This part of the vision was always the same. Every Visionary experienced it the same way.
The vision changed. This part of the vision was the near future, and was always different. This was the part the Moderators chased. Follow this part of the vision to stop the rest of it.
This part of Parsifal’s vision was fragmented. Breaking into bits. Jerking and stuttering, violently thrashing from image to image.
A battered old house. A silhouette of a person on a rearing horse. A strange, pointy, hat-shaped pile of bricks or stones. A staircase. Bodies. A little misshapen keyhole. A coffin, and in it, a mouth parted for air where there was none.
Everything was dying, including the vision.
Farooq-Lane found herself holding Parsifal’s limp hand behind a featureless strip mall in the DC area. There was nothing gruesome outside his body, except that he had thrown up again, but nonetheless one could tell that everything inside his body had gone wrong-shaped, like he’d hosted a car crash inside himself. There were canyons in his form where there should not have been canyons. It seemed quite likely this was some of what he had thrown up. He was very dead.
No, he wasn’t. Not quite.
“Hurry,” croaked Parsifal.
Then he died.
Declan couldn’t believe that Ronan had left him in the lurch again. His BMW had been parked in front of the town house when Jordan dropped Declan off (no point pretending she didn’t know where he lived now), but by the time Declan got up a few hours later, it was gone. Declan texted him: You leaving me to deal with Matthew today? and Ronan answered with only Dad’s working, sweetie.
Declan could’ve put his fist through the wall.
He didn’t know what had come over him.
It felt like going out with Jordan the night before should’ve let off steam and made it easier to ease into another decade of dull hibernation, but it had had the opposite effect.
He made Matthew a weekend breakfast, sausages from the freezer, eggs, fat toast from the organic local bread the farmers’ market people had sent to the senator’s office. Matthew sat silently at the bar in the kitchen, not fidgeting, not kicking his legs, not laughing, not humming, doing absolutely nothing annoying at all. Since he’d moved in with Declan, Declan had often longed for Matthew to be quieter—less chewing with his mouth open, less prattling, fewer jokes read off websites, less dropping and knocking over of things with ooops ha ha, less thundering up and down the stairs as if he were seven instead of seventeen.
But now that he was quiet, Declan hated it.
Declan came to sit next to Matthew. “Are you angry?”
Matthew moved his food around his plate.
“Are you sad?”
Matthew lined up his sausages, then separated them with chunks of egg.
“I can’t help you if you don’t talk.”
Matthew studied his breakfast as if it might wander off if he didn’t. “This is the worst thing you’ve ever done to me.”
It was an interesting way to frame it, but it wasn’t wrong. It was a thing acted upon the creature that was Matthew Lynch. Ronan had imposed existence on him. Declan had decided for him how it would be easiest to bear it, knowing full well it would be disastrous if the truth came out. Yes, they had done it to him. Yes, Declan accepted blame for it.
Declan brushed his younger brother’s curls back from his forehead. This motion was one he’d done so often—ever since Matthew was just a toddler—that sometimes he dreamt of it. His fingers had memorized the texture of his dense curls, his round forehead, the gentle warmth of him.
“Do I have a soul?” Matthew asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do I have magic powers?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Am I invincible?”
“I wouldn’t press it.”
“Are you dreamed?”
Declan shook his head. No, he was human in a family that wasn’t.
“Does this mean that if Ronan dies, I’m going to fall asleep like Dad’s cows and Mom did?”
It was a rhetorical question. There was silence for several minutes. Declan heard the neighbors talking on their phone in the next town house over. They were benevolent shouters. They wanted to cancel their premium stations, they told the phone, they just weren’t home enough to justify it. This was untrue. They were home all the time.
Declan did his best to dispense comfort. “Matthew, everybody dies. We all have to come to grips with that. We all know that it’s life-threatening for us to fall off a cliff or eat poison or step in front of a bus. You just have to also add that it’s dangerous for you if something happens to Ronan. Nothing really has to change. You just know now that Dad bought your social security number on the black market.”
“He did what?”
Declan went on, “And now we can be open with you about why you’ve never had a real school physical or anything.”
“Wait, why?”
Declan regretted saying anything. “In case you don’t have internal organs.”
Matthew made a strangled noise. He dropped his head into his hands. Declan didn’t know what was worse—being caught in the lie, or not knowing if it was even worth the lie all along. Would it have been easier for Matthew to grow up knowing he wasn’t real? That he was a piece of Ronan’s imagination, something so utterly dependent that if Ronan died, he couldn’t go on? That his existence was so subservient that when an invisible external energy source fluctuated, he began to power down like a machine without fuel? Declan had thought he was giving him the gift of reality. Of believing he was true, whole, just as worthy of love as someone who had come into this world by more ordinary means. Not a thing. Not a creature. A human.
In a very small voice, Matthew said, “I’m the fake brother.”
“What?” Declan, the true fake brother, asked.
“You two are real Lynches. You and Ronan. Real brothers. I’m just pretend. I’m just—”
This was awful.
“Matthew,” Declan interrupted. “That’s just not true.”
Matthew’s mouth was crumpled.
This was awful. Declan could feel the awfulness rising in him, combining with that desire to put his fist through the wall, combining with just plain desire for Jordan Hennessy and everything she represented, and he thought about diving deep into The Dark Lady’s turquoise ocean and disappearing and everything that meant.
And he broke. He broke for the second time that year, after being good and dull and invisible for so very long. He had broken the first time by dialing that phone number and asking for the key to Colin Greenmantle’s collection. He broke on that Saturday morning by asking, “So you think Ronan and I are true Lynch brothers?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Matthew said. “Of course you are.”
Declan’s pulse slowly stepped up. “You sure of that?”
“You are.”
“Get The Dark Lady,” Declan said. “From the closet. The one closest to the front.”
Matthew shot Declan a bemused look, but Declan could tell that the puzzle of it had shaken him from his stupor. He slid off the stool and opened the kitchen closet. Inside it were the two Dark Ladies: the original that Declan had just
put away last night after returning with Jordan, and behind it, the copy that she had somehow managed to sneak in there.
“What is this?!” Matthew said, with a bit of his old rollicking tone.
“Front one,” Declan said. “Put it on the dining room table.”
He joined his brother at the table, swiping aside a pile of bills and newspapers so that there was room.
“Facedown,” Declan said.
The two of them looked at the brown backing paper, the tiny printed words: Mór Ó Corra.
Matthew waited for Declan to explain. Declan put a box cutter into his hand instead.
“Cut the paper off,” Declan said.
He crossed his arms tightly over his chest as his youngest brother leaned over the painting and began to cut with the precision of a surgeon, his face deep in concentration. The paper hissed and crackled as it fell away.
Declan realized he’d closed his eyes.
He opened them.
“What is this?” Matthew asked again.
There was a square dark card tucked between the canvas and the stretcher. Durable, rounded edges, printed with the image of a woman with a cross painted on her face. Matthew plucked it out and turned it over. On the back was an Irish telephone number and, in Niall’s handwriting, The New Fenian.
“This painting isn’t of Aurora,” Declan said. “It’s of Mór Ó Corra, and she is my mother.”
Hurry, Parsifal had said. Hurry. There was no hurrying when it came to putting together fractured clues from a dying vision. There was no hurrying when it came to getting across Washington, DC. There was no hurrying when all you could think of was a ruined body behind a trash bin. There was no hurrying when you didn’t know what you were hurrying to.
Farooq-Lane felt as if she had been staring at the same neighborhood for hours. They all had the same atmosphere. Tatty lawns, tired buildings joined at the hip, cars on blocks, heaving sidewalks, blistered asphalt.
None of them were the house Parsifal had shown her in his last vision. The problem with the vision was that it was like a dream—filled with emotional truths instead of actual truths. It conveyed the way a building felt rather than how it looked.
It was hard to focus on anything with Parsifal’s body bundled tenderly in the Zed’s rug in her trunk.
There was the End of the World, capital E, capital W, she knew. She knew she had to focus. She’d just seen why she had to focus. But Parsifal’s world had ended, small w, small e, and it felt very bad, and it was hard to keep things in perspective.
Someone was tapping on her back window and she realized she had let the car drift to a stop in the middle of the road, staring off at the houses. It was an old man with no teeth and a walking stick. He seemed to want a conversation. He was chanting pretty lady, pretty lady.
“You lost, pretty lady?” the old man said. He tapped the walking stick against the side of her rental car. Tap tap tap.
Yes, thought Farooq-Lane. Utterly.
Tap tap tap. She suddenly realized that the top of the walking stick he was using to tap her window was a very familiar shape: a person on a rearing horse. Another piece of Parsifal’s vision.
Rolling down the window, she held up the drawing she’d made of the pointy hat shape she’d seen in the vision. “Do you know what this is?”
He leaned in close. He smelled incredibly bad. “That’s Fairmount Heights, there. That’s that old World War II memorial.” He said it like ol whirr wah tuh morial, but she got the gist.
“Is that close?” she asked.
“Just south, pretty lady,” he said (jussow, pree lady).
She had no cash, so she gave him her unopened coffee beverage instead and he seemed content. Plugging the memorial into her GPS, she discovered it was just minutes away. She didn’t feel like she was hurrying fast enough, but she was doing the best she could.
The memorial was exactly how it had appeared in the vision: a stone monument shaped a little like a witch’s hat. As she drove around it in ever-widening circles, her adrenaline started to flare. She was thinking about what she was really hurrying to. The visions took her to other dreamers. Sometimes other Visionaries. Either way, it could be a dangerous situation, and she never had a very complete picture of what she was walking into. At least before she could have asked Parsifal if they were headed into peril. She wasn’t asking him anything now.
For a fleeting moment, Farooq-Lane thought she heard opera. It was faint, as if from outside the car or as if the radio were turned down nearly all the way. But before she could reach to roll down a window or turn up the music, all at once she saw the old house from the vision. Like the other houses in this neighborhood, it was a run-down building that had probably been quite charming many decades before. There was a sink in the scrubby front yard. The walk was more split than not. It was a good enough place to hide.
At the door, she knocked. Hurry. She tried the knob. It gave way.
She stepped in. It smelled better than she’d expected. The sun was full on outside, but little of the light made its way into the house. There was an odor of old damp below, but overwhelmingly what she smelled was fresh flowers and summer. The lights were turned off. No. They were out of order. Thin lightbulb glass crunched beneath Farooq-Lane’s boots.
Before her were stairs leading up into the gloomy dim. The stairs from the vision.
She went up.
At the top of them she discovered the bodies of two old women, and a note. The note said I stayed untill I got to scared. Shes downstairs. The old women had blood in their ears and their mouths. Their eyes had imploded.
So it wasn’t a Zed who lived here.
It was a Visionary. Parsifal’s last vision had taken her to his replacement.
She didn’t know how she felt about this.
Hurry.
Farooq-Lane checked every room downstairs for evidence of a Visionary. Cautiously at first, because she wasn’t eager to share the fate of the old women on the stairs, and then more boldly, because every room she entered was empty.
Maybe it was like the time they’d followed Parsifal’s vision to the cul-de-sac, looking for the gray BMW. Maybe she was too late. Perhaps she had not hurried enough.
Just as she was getting ready to give up and go back to the car, however, her attention was pulled to a tiny door in the staircase that she’d missed when she’d come in. It had a keyhole. Misshapen. Another piece of Parsifal’s vision.
Pulling it open, she saw that it led to a crawl space.
She clicked on her phone’s flashlight and climbed down the few stairs. Then, bent over double, she peered. The last piece of Parsifal’s vision was a coffin, which she didn’t think was a thing she would find in a place like this. And she was right. She didn’t find a coffin. But she did find a chest freezer. With bags of gravel piled on it to make sure the lid stayed closed. To make sure no one got out from inside it.
Not a coffin. But close enough.
Working fast, she shoved and kicked the gravel bags onto the floor. Dust from the floor and from the bags themselves clouded the air as they landed; her cell phone flashlight, on the floor, cast a searchlight through the billows. She couldn’t see anything clearly.
Finally, Farooq-Lane cracked the lid.
She heard a convulsive gasp for air from the dark interior.
“Is it going to happen soon?” Farooq-Lane asked the unseen occupant.
Several more huge gasps for air, then: “No, not soon.”
“I’m not in danger?”
“Not right now. Don’t be afraid.” This Visionary had just been suffocating in a chest freezer and she was reassuring Farooq-Lane. A limp hand stretched out, resting on the edge of the freezer. The skin was very pale and wrinkly—so completely opposite to what Farooq-Lane had been expecting that she flinched a little. Farooq-Lane got her cell phone and directed the light into the chest freezer. Inside, an old woman with long snow-white hair shielded her eyes with her other hand.
Farooq-Lane had never seen
a Visionary so old before.
“What’s your name?” Farooq-Lane asked.
“Liliana.”
I had different intentions for our next d … get-together,” Declan said, and Jordan heard him cautiously place his foot upon the word date before deciding it wouldn’t hold him.
“Did you?” Jordan asked. “It seems about par for the course, if you ask me, old friend.”
They were in her car again, through no particular discussion. She preferred driving to riding, and he seemed happier to be able to look out the window and in the rearview mirror in a paranoid way in between studying directions and texts on his phone. He looked handsomer than she remembered, with his good straight teeth and his dark curls and a nice sweater Hennessy would hate. Easy to imagine painting him again, framed as he was in the window, the fall colors rich and deep on this overcast day. Easy to imagine touching him again.
“You remind me,” Jordan said, “of a dog.”
He tapped away at his phone. He had a peculiar way of texting—he used his thumb on one hand, his index finger on the other. Odd. Charming. Without looking up, he murmured, “Thank you very much. Right at the next light.”
“They look different when you know them,” Jordan said. “You know when you see a dog on a street, and it’s just some stray tosser, and when you see a dog on the street, and it’s one you’ve met before?”
“I don’t meet many dogs on the street.”
“I’m saying you scrub up nice,” she said, and he laughed his disbelieving laugh again, the head turned away to hide it.
They were going to see Boudicca.
“I’m looking for my birth mother,” Declan had said, when he called her. “But the people I need to talk to won’t talk to me unless I bring a woman.”
And Jordan had known instantly that he was talking about Boudicca.
Boudicca. Jordan didn’t know if the word itself sounded like a threat, or if she only thought it did because she knew what it stood for. Boo-dih-kah. The first time they’d approached Jordan it had been at a Fairy Market in London. The woman had been as mundane in appearance as one could possibly manage: straightened light-brown hair, wing eyeliner, blouse, blazer. Looking to partner with talented women like yourself, she’d said, as if she was pitching a job fair. Benefits to both parties. Lifelong investment. Taking care of business to allow your creative energies to be directed. Jordan had accepted her card, a durable little square with a logo of a woman with a cross on her face, but she hadn’t really understood what was being offered.
Call Down the Hawk Page 30
