Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy #1)

by Maggie Stiefvater

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

There were three of them, and if you didn’t like one, try another, because the Lynch brother others found too sour or too sweet might be just to your taste. The Lynch brothers, the orphans Lynch. All of them had been made by dreams, one way or another. They were handsome devils, down to the last one.

Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.

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.

Adam. Ronan missed him like a lung.

thudding in his jaw. He could hear it in his ears. It sounded like everyone else’s heartbeat, he thought. Just like Adam’s heart when his head was resting on his chest. Ronan wasn’t that different. Well, he could seem not that different. He could move to follow the guy he loved, like anyone else. He could live in a city, like anyone else. It could work.

The opposite of magical is not ordinary. The opposite of magical is mankind. The world is a neon sign; it says HUMANITY but everything’s burnt out except MAN.

You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.

What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning, Ronan, sure that he wouldn’t find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school.

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.

OS AMO MTO

They knew who they were. Adam, a scholar. Ronan, a dreamer.

“You smell like home.”

You could not, Ronan thought, give all of yourself away to many people, or there would be nothing left.

“Just a second,” Adam told Ronan. Leaning in close, he added, “Don’t kill anyone.” The words were only an excuse to breathe in Ronan’s ear; it made a marvel of his nerve endings.

They were also more openly and gleefully queer than any Aglionby student Ronan had ever met.

Ronan, who’d spent most of his high school years assuming other people were rich assholes and being the only gay person he knew, found these developments somewhat unsettling.

Gansey texted back: don’t make me get on a plane I’m currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon With a sigh, Ronan took a photo of his elbow bent to make it look like a butt, texted it over, and got up.

At the end of the day, this was the difference between Hennessy and Jordan. While Hennessy imagined flinging herself from a roof and falling, Jordan imagined flinging herself from a roof and flying.

“Ink on your skin means you’re hiding things,” he told Ronan. “That’s what breathing means,” Ronan replied.

She had scars, stains, and blisters from art.

you drew stars around my scars but now im bleeding

We gave the world to them back before we knew any better. Already they were telling stories about us and we were believing them. The story was this:

The trade-off for being a dreamer was emotional infirmity. We could dream, but we couldn’t stand being awake. We could dream, but we couldn’t smile. We could dream, but we were meant to die young. How they loved us still, despite our weaknesses, our unsuitedness to all things practical. And we believed them. A benevolent, wicked fairy tale, and we believed it. We couldn’t run the world. We couldn’t even run ourselves. We handed them the keys to the goddamn car.

So he just texted him: dreamt of you.

<3

‘Boudicca is the original goth. Ronan Lynch wishes he was that badass’

Black. It’s harder when you’re far away. Everything was black. Not black. It was whatever you called the absence of light. Ronan’s throat full of it, choking

“Every day. If something always works, why would you change it?”

“She’s dead,” he said, in his stiff, affectless way. “I killed them all the first time I saw the end of the world.”

But once he’d begun to explain the day to Adam, he couldn’t stop, not only because he needed to hear it said out loud, but because he needed to say it out loud to Adam.

It had been over a year since either had sat in a Latin class, but it lingered as their private language.

“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. “Jordan,” he said, trying it, and she blinked up, surprised. But of course he would call her by her first name. He hadn’t come to her from the world of forgery, of late-night grudge matches, of her introducing herself as Hennessy. He’d looked her up, and had found the full name: Jordan Hennessy.

Belonging in more than one world means that you end up belonging in none of them.”

Hennessy would rather bleed out than date a boring white man in last year’s suit.

“Jesus, Ronan, it’s me!” The kitchen overhead light came on and revealed Adam Parrish, removing a motorcycle helmet. He eyed the gun. “You know how to take a surprise well.”

The idea of Adam Parrish on a motorcycle was more than enough birthday present for Ronan; he was senselessly turned on.

Adam Parrish was uncanny. Perhaps standing next to Ronan Lynch, dreamer of dreams, he looked ordinary, but it was only because everything uncanny about him was turned inside instead of out.

While on the phone with Gansey or Blue, he’d take out his deck of haunted tarot cards and read one or three cards for them.

“Say something in Latin.” Ronan thought.

“Inuisus natalis adest, qui rure molesto et sine Adam tristis agendus erit.”

Some ancient poetry bitching about spending one’s birthday without ...

Memories rose up. He expected it to be horror, as it often was. Guts and blood. Bones and hair. Closed-casket funerals. The scream.

Instead it was every time Ronan had been alone. There was no gore. No shrilling with terror. There was only the quiet that came after all those things. 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.

And then Ronan was through and swiping away the tears before Adam joined him by the shoulder, emerging from the dark with the bright dreamt light cupped in his hands. “Break will be here in just a few days,” Adam said. He kissed Ronan’s cheek, lightly, and then Ronan’s mouth. “I’m coming back. Be here for ...

“Did you like your date with Monsieur Declan Lynch?” Hennessy asked. “You’re probably the coolest thing that yob’s scored in his life. It’ll be the topic of his therapy for decades.”

Greywaren,

This was Lindenmere’s name for him. It knew his real name as well, and sometimes called him that, but Ronan hadn’t figured out why it sometimes chose one or another. Greywaren, he is here.

“No more games,” Ronan said impatiently. He lifted his hand. Snapped his fingers. The motorcycle was gone. The bridge was gone. The creek was gone. The dream was exactly as he wanted it. He had worked hard to be able to control his dreams so well, and it was easy to forget how good he was at it when he was in DC or farther afield, in Cambridge, or half-dead with nightwash. It was easy to forget how much he loved it.

Dreamers are dying. Dreamers are being killed. We are not immortal. And the things we dream … What is a dream without its dreamer?

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.

“What does a dream want?” Ronan opened his eyes. “To live without their dreamer.”

Cormac was his name.

TA BRINCANDO