Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy #1)

by Maggie Stiefvater

He had blue eyes. People generally think blue eyes are pretty, but his were not. They were not cornflower, sky, baby, indigo, azure. His were iceberg, squall, hypothermia, eventual death.

Creatures of all kinds had begun to fall asleep.

“Here’s the situation,” Declan said. This was a classic Declan way to start a conversation. Other hits included Let’s focus on the real action item and This is what it’s going to take to close this deal and In the interest of clearing the air.

They were an eye-catchingly mismatched threesome: Ronan, with his ominous boots and ominous expression; Declan, with his perfectly controlled curls and dutiful gray suit; Matthew, with his outstandingly ugly checked pants and cheerfully blue puffer coat.

Matthew had no interest in driving; he said if he didn’t have enough friends to drive him anywhere he wanted to go, he was living his life wrong. In any case, he’d failed his driver’s test three times.

Maybe I underestimate you. Your head’s full of dreams. They must remember. Does any part of you still look at the sky and hurt?

If you’ve ever looked into a fire and been unable to look away, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the mountains and found you’re not breathing, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the moon and felt tears in your eyes, it’s that. It’s the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning.

Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.

For Ronan, it was what it always was, too: a fight between truth and compromise, between the black and white he saw and the reality everyone else experienced.

It felt like sadness was like radiation, like the amount of time between exposures was irrelevant, like you got a badge that eventually got filled up from a lifetime of it, and then it just killed you.

Declan hated that he loved someone who wasn’t real.

Most men do not go to Mass every Sunday and most men do not fall in love with other men. And no one brings dreams to life. No one brings dreams to life. No one brings dreams to life.

Somehow, objectively troubling truths about their parents had been unable to mar Ronan’s feelings for them. Declan envied him. His love and his grief both.

Ronan dreamt of summer, of Adam.

But thus spake Zarathustra or whatever and now they gave us spirituality and took actuality for themselves. The audacity of it.

He’d nearly forgotten his father’s Northern Irish accent. What a ridiculous thing to forget.

She was beginning to see that the expression that was always on his face might be pain. She was beginning to understand he might want to control everything he could because of the things he couldn’t.

It was possible that no two students at Aglionby had ever come away with such a thorough understanding of Latin (or, possibly, of each other).

I’ll utter your name when I paint something with it.” “Say it now,” he said, and he nearly let himself smile. Nearly. “Declan,” she said, but had to cut her eyes away because she could feel herself grinning, and not the slick grin she normally gave away. Fuck, she thought.

this was a man who had been fed stories at some point and remembered how it was done.

She wanted to ask him when he was going to punch a judge,

But joy is a small, tenacious crop, especially in soil that hasn’t grown any for a long time, and so it lingered with him as he checked his watch to see when Matthew was due back from soccer and hung up his coat and his keys and toed off his shoes.

He always looked at home in it; it was all the same colors as him, washed out and faded and comfortable.

Morgenthaler considered himself a serious artist and a serious art collector and a serious art dealer and he was mostly correct about one of these things.

He had dressed himself in a black sport coat and white V-neck T-shirt paired with red Chucks, an outfit that aggressively notified onlookers that he was both collector and artist, both the money and the talent.

There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved.

What is a dream without its dreamer? It’s an animal in a room without air. It’s man on a dead planet. It’s religion without a god. They sleep without us because they must.

“I know you feel anxious on sunny days,” Bryde remarked. “You haven’t said it out loud. You barely think it. They love the sunny days, after all. They love a naked sky with a savage white sun set in it like a killer jewel. It doesn’t worry them. It’s a string of rainy days that makes them grow languid and unsteady. Energy draining, depression eating the marrow out of their bones. Rainy days aren’t for them. Do you think a tree hates a rainy day?”

Maybe there was a version of her who believed in love, maybe there was a version of her who gave a toss about anything, maybe there was a version of her who slept eight hours a night. Or maybe not.

Declan wasn’t a huggable Lynch, but Matthew had never cared. He’d hugged him anyway.

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.

“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.”

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.

He whispered, “I am not tired of you.”

Opal leaned against Hennessy, chewing on a watch Adam had given her long ago. She spoke around it. “She is trying.” But she couldn’t be trusted. She had a soft spot for the downtrodden, being one of them.

He was absurdly pleased that she knew. He was absurdly pleased to be here with her. He was absurdly pleased. This entire day, this entire week, what a disaster … but he was absurdly pleased.

He couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t have it in him to love another dream. It hurt too bad. Loving anything did.

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.

She was so afraid. “Hennessy?” Ronan said, in a slightly different voice. “Lynch.” “I’ve been alone a long time,” he said.