Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  They ran.

  The Lace was killing Hennessy.

  It was doing what it said, really, what it always did.

  It overlaid her, enveloped her, replaced her. Give in, it urged, and this will stop hurting.

  It had been killing her for ever so much longer than it normally did. Normally she had hurled herself awake by now, arriving with a copy of herself, newly tattooed, a little closer to death.

  But this wasn’t a dream she could stop, this was Lindenmere, and the person who could stop it was—

  “Lindenmere,” bellowed Ronan, in a completely unfamiliar voice, light flashing all around her, “take it away.”

  And then the Lace had released her, and then it was simply gone, and Hennessy was lying in the middle of the clearing on her back. Opal was crying in a frightened way and petting Hennessy’s sleeve carefully. Hennessy couldn’t move because everything hurt. It hadn’t been long enough since the last time to fully recover and now she just felt … extruded. Her throat stung and she knew without checking that the Lace had branded her with another tattoo. Room for just one more.

  It was almost over.

  It was almost a relief to let herself think it.

  Ronan cussed under his breath as he knelt beside her. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t realize it was going to come for you like that, all of a sudden—” He cussed some more.

  “The copy …” Hennessy said.

  “There’s no copy,” Ronan said. “You didn’t bring anything back because it wasn’t your dream, you didn’t wake up, you were never asleep. Lindenmere just stopped it. There’s just you. Shit. Shit damn. Lindenmere, Opal, can you help her—”

  So it really was true. The Lace really would kill her even without the copies. It felt true. It felt like she was almost dead now. It felt like if Opal touched her skin, it would just wipe away.

  Opal laid something cool on Hennessy’s forehead, then repeated her ministrations on the backs of Hennessy’s hands, and then on her exposed ankles. She babbled soothingly in an unrealistic-sounding language. She was still snottily crying herself. Ronan stood and hugged Opal’s head to his leg.

  “I don’t know,” Ronan said. “You need something to drive it away from you, like my light did.”

  Hennessy was about to say she hadn’t seen that, but it took too much work to talk, and anyway, she thought she had actually seen it, now that she thought about it. That flash of light. That momentary retreat of the Lace before Lindenmere had taken it away.

  “Something already in place,” Ronan continued. “Is that helping? What Opal’s doing? Armor. Armor and then something else, like a shield, something you could bring back with you that’s not yourself, until you learn how to not bring things back every time you dream.”

  “I can’t do it,” Hennessy croaked.

  Opal made a sad noise and laid another cool thing on her throat. It felt good in the way that things only can when it was feeling very, very bad before. She could feel that whatever Opal was doing was working a little. She wasn’t going to pass out.

  “I could do it,” Ronan said. “I could go to sleep at the same time as you, meet you in the dream, and manifest something right when I got there.”

  No idea sounded like a good idea when you had only one shot left.

  “Just ask. It’s easy,” Opal said in what was probably supposed to be a soothing tone, but, because of her small, breathy child’s voice, and her big black eyes, and her strange goat’s legs, sounded a little creepy instead. “Shield.”

  And Hennessy had a shield on her chest, weighing her down. She let out a cry of distress.

  “Opal,” snapped Ronan. “Away.”

  The shield vanished. Hennessy gasped for a little bit, and Opal busied herself putting more cool things on Hennessy’s exposed skin.

  “You were only trying to help,” Ronan said to Opal in a conciliatory way. “But it’s true, it is easy here. You only have to ask for something. Try it.”

  Everything Hennessy ever asked for turned into a disaster. A cruel trick. A drowning instead of an ocean.

  “Just a little thing,” Opal said in a wheedly little voice, like a mother baby-talking to a child.

  “Everything I dream turns to shit,” Hennessy said.

  Ronan looked at her, brows furrowed. His mouth was working like he very much disagreed but he couldn’t quite work out how to mount a counterargument. She didn’t think he could do it. He said, “Like Jordan?”

  He could.

  Because of course Jordan was good. Better than Hennessy. The best of all the girls. Hennessy’s best friend.

  Dreamt.

  Opal knelt down very low to lay her cheek beside Hennessy’s ear. She whispered sweetly, “Just a little thing.”

  Hennessy closed her eyes and drew her hands over her chest. She cupped them there, thinking of the lights that had rained down earlier. So kind and perfect and innocent and fine. Hennessy hadn’t been any of those things for so long.

  “Hennessy,” Ronan said, “please don’t let me be the only one.”

  This was the first gap she’d ever heard in Ronan’s armor.

  “Just a little thing,” Hennessy said. She opened her hands.

  A tiny golden light slowly lifted from her palms. Out of the corner of one’s eye, it was just a light. But if you looked at it close enough, it burned with a tiny, almost-not-there emotion: hope.

  She had done it. Ask, and ye shall receive.

  Then Ronan’s phone rang.

  Phones didn’t always work in Lindenmere. Lindenmere was a thing that both used energy—ley line energy—and oozed energy—dream energy—and that seemed to sometimes contribute to phone signal and sometimes rob from it. More often rob from it. It didn’t help that Lindenmere seemed to use time differently than the rest of the world did; a minute in Lindenmere could be two hours outside it, or two hours could be a minute. Under those conditions, it was amazing a phone call ever made it through.

  But this one did.

  “I’m not in the mood for a fight,” Ronan said to the phone.

  “Ronan,” Declan said. “Tell me you’re in the city.”

  “I’m in Lindenmere.”

  The breath Declan released was a more terrible sound than Ronan had ever heard his brother make.

  “Why?”

  “People are coming for you,” Declan said. “To the town house. To kill you. Matthew’s not picking up his phone.”

  For a second, Ronan’s brain provided no thoughts and no words, and then he said, “Where are you?”

  “Stuck in traffic,” Declan said miserably. “I’m trying. No shoulder. No room. I’ve called the cops.”

  Hennessy was struggling to sit up, weakly putting herself together. He could tell she’d heard Declan’s side of the conversation. Lindenmere had, too, because fat raindrops were beginning to splatter the ground, distress weeping from the turbulent sky.

  Ronan asked, “How far away are you?”

  “I can’t get out and run, if that’s what you’re asking,” Declan snapped. “He’s not picking up, Ronan. They might already be there. I … look, they already got … Jordan is …”

  As he broke off, Ronan closed his eyes. Think. Think. He had so much power, especially standing right in Lindenmere, but all of it was useless. He couldn’t teleport himself. He couldn’t make his brother pick up his phone. He could manipulate anything he liked within Lindenmere, but nothing outside of it. Even if he was sleeping, what could he possibly do against an unknown attacker two hours to the east?

  He could make baubles and gadgets. Useless. Useless.

  Hennessy was staring at him. She had heard Declan say Jordan, but he didn’t have time to deal with that.

  “I’ll try,” Ronan said.

  “Try what?” Declan asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” He hung up. He had to think—he had to—

  Lindenmere was whispering all around him. The trees were muttering among themselves.

  G
reywaren, the trees said. We will give you what you need.

  “I don’t know what I need, Lindenmere,” he said. He struggled to imagine a solution. “I can’t get there in time. I need something that will get there. Something secret. I’m trusting you. Give me what I need.”

  Something dangerous, like you, he thought.

  And like you, the forest whispered back.

  Hennessy’s little glowing bauble of hope still remained in the clearing, suspended between raindrops.

  Lindenmere began to work.

  The rain sank into the ground.

  Chainsaw reappeared with a wary cry, accompanied by the soft whuff of her wings through the air. She landed on his arm, her ruff hackled up. She chattered her beak. Her talons clung more tightly to his arm, and where his wrist wasn’t protected by his leather bracelets, they drew blood.

  Hennessy covered her head as leaves exploded from the ground. Birds swirled up around them, one and the same with the leaves. The ground rumbled, the dirt pulling loose from around the roots down below. That low booming growled through the earth, getting higher and louder until it was a pure and clarion note ringing through the air, a purposeful and clean version of Adam’s scream—a sound that meant it was alive, very alive, not the reverse. The leaves were frozen in midfall. The birds were trapped in midflight. Everything was held in that note.

  In this frozen moment, lights swirled and spiraled in between the trees. The lights spooled the darkness around themselves like they were twisting yarn onto a bobbin. The darkness had weight and mass and shape. This was what Lindenmere was making for Ronan, with Ronan.

  The dark new shapes let out no sound except for the dry leaves rustling with the force of their movement as the darkness kept spooling new layers on top of the light, hiding the light away inside.

  Then the trapped leaves fell; the birds flew away.

  The pack was made.

  They coursed toward Ronan and Hennessy, a pack of creatures without definition.

  With a squeak, Opal begged to be picked up, and he did so just as the creatures reached them.

  Ronan saw that they were dogs, or hounds, or wolves. They were sooty, dead black, all mingling into each other, less like distinct animals and more like smoke billowing. Their eyes gleamed white-orange, and when they panted, their mouths glowed and revealed the brilliant furnaces inside each of them.

  Sundogs are as fast as sunbeams, the trees whispered. They’re hungry. Quench them with water.

  “They’re frightening,” wailed Opal.

  “I think that’s the idea,” Ronan said.

  Tell them what to do, the trees said. The sundogs milled before him, black tongues rolling over black teeth, smoke seeping from them.

  Ronan told the pack, “Save my brother.”

  The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. In a way, the Lynch brothers had always been the most important and truest definition of the Lynch family. Niall was often gone, and Aurora was present but amorphous. Childhood was the three of them tearing through the woods and fields around the Barns, setting things on fire and digging holes and wrestling. Secrets bound them together far more tightly than any friendship ever could, and so even when they went to school, they remained the Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. Even after Niall died and Ronan and Declan had fought for a year, they’d remained tangled together, because hate binds as strongly as love. The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch.

  Ronan didn’t know who he would be without them.

  He drove like a demon.

  It wasn’t only in Lindenmere that time did funny things. It took Ronan and Hennessy one hour and thirty-eight minutes to get to Alexandria, a feat only made possible through a combination of illegal speeds and giving very few damns about the consequences of those speeds. But one hour and thirty-eight minutes had never taken up so much space before. Every second was a minute, a day, a week, a month, a year. Every mile took lifetimes to cover. He would not know if the sundogs had made it in time until he got there.

  He called his brothers. They did not pick up.

  “Pick up,” Hennessy muttered, in the passenger seat.

  Ronan was always the one to find his dead family members; it didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t that he wanted his brothers to be the ones to have to bear the emotional wound of discovering the bodies. He just didn’t want it to be him. He had been the one to find his father’s body in the driveway outside their farmhouse, skull, meet tire iron. He had been the one to find his mother’s body in the dying ruins of Cabeswater, a dream, extruded. Those images were his forever now, to the victor the prize, to the discoverer the memory.

  He called Adam. Adam didn’t pick up.

  “Pick up,” Hennessy said.

  Time stretched out long and weird and infinite, a night without end, a city no closer.

  He tried calling his brothers again.

  They still didn’t pick up.

  “Somebody pick up.” Hennessy pressed her hands over her face.

  Finally, they pulled into the sedate, sterile town house neighborhood Declan and Matthew lived in. It appeared quiet and ordinary, the cars sleeping in driveways, the streetlights humming to soothe themselves, the leafless decorative saplings shivering in their dreams.

  The door to Declan’s town house was cracked open.

  Ronan discovered in himself not worry, nor sadness, nor adrenaline, but rather a dead, dull absence of feeling. Of course, he thought. He looked to the dark city street behind him, but it was empty. Then he pushed open the door, Hennessy limping in behind him.

  Inside, the town house was trashed. Not just trashed, but ruined, intentionally destroyed. He had to step over the microwave, which had been thrown into the middle of the entry. Art from the walls was cast onto the stairs, as if it had been shot fleeing. The drawers of the hallway table were pulled out and thrown against the wall. Every light was on.

  Ronan examined himself for feeling again. It had not yet returned. He turned his head and told Chainsaw, “Find them.”

  Silently, the raven took wing, wheeling around a light fixture and swooping up the stairs.

  The last thing Matthew had said to him was that he was a liar.

  He pulled the front door closed and stalked through the first floor, Hennessy following him in a daze. The rooms were unrecognizable. It took him a moment to realize that some things were missing: lamps, statues, some of the furniture. And some things were like the microwave: hurled into a wrong place.

  There were bullet holes in the sofa.

  he

  felt

  nothing

  “Matthew?” he said in a low voice. “Declan?”

  The first floor was empty. He found he didn’t want to climb the stairs. He still had that fuzzy noiselessness inside him, that lack of feeling, but he also sort of thought that if they were dead upstairs, this was the last minute he had before adding the memories of their bodies to his others.

  “Kerah,” Chainsaw called from the second or third floor.

  Okay. Just do it.

  Ronan climbed the stairs. At the top of them he found words painted across the wall that used to hold family photos.

  STOP DREAMING

  A pair of Matthew’s novelty socks were inexplicably tossed in the center of the carpet. The beagles on them peered at Ronan, who peered back.

  He heard a rustling from the master bedroom. It was impossible to place. It sounded busy.

  “Ronan?” whispered Hennessy. She didn’t sound like herself.

  “Stay downstairs,” he whispered back. He knew he didn’t sound like himself, either.

  “Kerah,” Chainsaw insisted, from the master.

  Ronan risked it. “Declan? Matthew?”

  “Ronan! We’re up here!” Matthew’s voice, and every feeling Ronan hadn’t felt for the past five minutes returned all at once. He had to crouch for a second by the beagle socks, fingers pressed into Declan’s carpet, normally perfect but now crunchy with paint splatters. God, God, God. It was both a prayer of gr
atitude and a plea.

  “Did you send these damn monsters?” Declan called.

  Yes, yes he had.

  The mist had cleared; Ronan was able to straighten and continue to the master.

  The sundogs filled it. Their omnipresence made no sense if one thought of them as a pack of dogs, but if one thought of them as a cloud of smoke, it made perfect sense. Like a gas, they expanded to fill the size of the container. They parted around Ronan, mouths gaping and fiery, as he looked in each room.

  “Where are you guys?”

  “Up here,” Declan said in a sour voice.

  Ronan looked up. The voice was coming behind the tiny panel in the ceiling that led to the attic space. “Why the hell are you still up there?”

  “Your monsters are trying to kill us, too,” Matthew’s voice said, but it sounded cheery about it.

  The attic door cracked. Instantly all the sundogs were at Ronan’s feet, piling over one another, trying to get high enough to get in. They made a very good job of it in very short order.

  “Whoa, whoa, shut it,” Ronan said. “Get down!”

  But the sundogs didn’t attend.

  “Ronan,” Declan said, in a warning sort of way.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Ronan said, trying to work it out.

  Lindenmere’s words came back to him. He cast around the second floor until he found Matthew’s sport water bottle rolled underneath his bed. Quench them with water, Lindenmere had said. There wasn’t enough water in here to pour over all of them, but it was at least enough to test a theory.

  But to his surprise, that wasn’t how it happened.

  He unscrewed the top.

  Immediately, the sundogs poured into the bottle.

  One moment the room was full of them, the floor covered by their milling, nebulous bodies. The next, the water in the bottle momentarily darkened and swirled and then went clear again. The only evidence that the sundogs were actually still in there, somehow, was a small wisp of darkness that wouldn’t entirely melt away, like a strand of dark oil.

  Ronan capped the bottle. “All clear. Hennessy, it’s all clear!”

  The attic door disgorged his brothers, first Matthew, then Declan, then Jordan.