Call Down the Hawk

Adam muttered, “I do. Me closing my eyes doesn’t make the monster go away. I’d rather know. And I don’t trust anybody else to spot me. You know what I’m supposed to look like.

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.

Adam said, “What about …” but he didn’t add anything else. He just frowned more deeply than he had during the entire exchange, his mouth all crumpled with consternation.
“What’s the face for?”
“I want it too much,” Adam said.
That sentence, Ronan thought, was enough to undo all bad feeling he might have had meeting Adam’s Harvard friends, all bad feeling about looking like a loser, all bad feeling about feeling stuck, all bad feeling, ever. Adam Parrish wanted him, and he wanted Adam Parrish.

The first thing breezy Eliot had said when they met Ronan was “Oh, you’re scarier than I expected!”
Fucking nice to meet you, too, Ronan had thought.

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.

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.

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?

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?

Now a copy was the least impressive thing to him. He could copy anything he put his mind to. That just made him a very ethereal photocopier. A one-man 3-D printer.

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