Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #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.

Sometimes, if he let his mind wander, he found himself walking in a perfectly straight line. Toward something? Away from something? This was a secret even to himself.

And Matthew—well, Matthew only had to keep on making sure he didn’t accidentally walk away.

Matthew tried not to let his feet take him someplace he didn’t understand.

There was something else afoot that October, something else stretching and straining and panting, but it was mostly as of yet unseen. Later it would have a name, but for now, it simply agitated everything uncanny it touched, and the Lynch brothers were no exception.

Caomhán Browne had been what the Moderators called a Zed. This is what it meant to be a Zed: Sometimes, when they dreamt, they woke up with a thing they’d been dreaming about in their hands.

“All you have to do is stop dreaming.”

Adam Parrish was the destination of this road trip. Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge? Adam had asked the day he left.

Adam. Ronan missed him like a lung.

It was peaceful, not dead. Like putting down a weight he hadn’t realized he was carrying, the weight of noise, the weight of everyone else.

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. It fucking hates us.

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.

There are two sides to the battle in front of us, and on one side is Black Friday discount, Wi-Fi hotspot, this year’s model, subscription only, now with more stretch, noise-canceling-noise-creating headphones, one car to every green, this lane ends. The other side is magic.

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

The partygoers were all mostly whiter than her, older than her, safer than her.

Copies, Hennessy would say contemptuously, are not art. A true forgery was a new painting made in the style of the original artist.

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.

Ronan felt a little unsteady. There had been no room for this experience in his daydreams.

This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam’s ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam’s narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan’s skull the way it always did when they hugged. His voice was missing his accent, but now it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan’s skin:

“You smell like home.” Home.

It was going to be all right. He was with Adam, and Adam still loved him, and...

Beneath the table, Adam pressed the rest of his leg up against Ronan’s, his expression unchanging as he did.

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.

He and Adam had been making the same memories for so long that he’d forgotten that it didn’t always have to be like that.

“I missed you,” Adam said, voice muffled, face pressed against Ronan’s neck.

Adam felt warm and familiar; he longed for him even while holding him.

No, like it was still happening, always happening, kept fresh in a perfect, savage memory: Adam on his hands and knees outside the trailer, swaying, disoriented, broken, the light from the porch cut into fragments by his strange shadow.

For Adam, it was what it always was: a fight between Adam and himself, between Adam and the world. 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.

“What’s the face for?” “I want it too much,” Adam said.

She liked schedules, systems, things in their place, holidays with specific celebratory rituals, games where people took turns.

How was she supposed to go back to her old life when she was no longer the Carmen Farooq-Lane who’d been living it?

He was in love with it, and it with him.

He had been sleeping, not dead,

“My flag,” Fletcher said. Adam shut the door hurriedly behind him.

“The walls,” Fletcher said. The crab guts were peeling the paint off them and the hoverboard had left several large dents in the plaster. “The beds,” Fletcher said. The sheets were torn and ruined. “The window,” Fletcher said. One of the panes had somehow gotten broken. “A motorcycle,” Fletcher said.

And there she—she, that would teach him to make assumptions

You see how the game gets harder the more pebbles are thrown. The tighter the spiral twists.

“This won’t work, Ronan,” Adam said. Ronan already knew this. He knew this because he knew it was late enough that he was supposed to be seeing one of the apartments and Declan hadn’t called him again. He knew that meant Declan had canceled the appointments. He knew it was over because Adam had signed a piece of paper saying Ronan wouldn’t visit him on campus. He knew that meant Ronan would return to waiting at the Barns for him.

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.

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

You need a routine, Declan had demanded. I have a routine. I thought you said you never lied.

6: 00 P.M.: DRIVE AROUND. 7:15 P.M.: NUKE SOME DINNER, YO. 7:30 P.M.: MOVIE TIME. 11:00 P.M.: TEXT PARRISH.

Look how each week was the same, the routine announced.

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

If he was imprisoned by circumstance, he thought, at least there were worse places than the Barns.

“Bring me the krek! There’s a cookie in it for you! Snack! Beef!” Ronan offered everything in his potential treat arsenal. “Cake! Cheese!”

He felt he’d lived one thousand years, every one of them hell.

Declan didn’t know how much complication was too much complication for Adam Parrish. It wasn’t like Adam was the most straightforward of people, either, even if he was pretending he was at the moment.

L’appel du vide, the call of the void.

But the sun had never felt like a friend.