Dreamfever (11 page)

Davita smiled faintly. “I've been waiting eighteen years to help you, Miss Mirren. But I'm concerned that you don't know how dangerous Peregrine Borgenicht is.”

Mirren laughed. “I don't know how dangerous the man who killed my parents is?”

“I'm sorry.” Davita blanched, her blush standing out against her pale cheeks. “That's not what I meant to say.”

“I know it wasn't. And it doesn't matter. What I need, and what I would ask you to do, is to assess the political situation and figure out the best way for me to get involved. Should I run against Peregrine or try to sabotage him? Who else has a chance of winning and how can I support them? Do I need to come out publicly as the former princess, and will I get arrested and executed if I do?” Mirren tugged her earlobe. “And, if there's any way to convince Aunt Collena to let Katia join me in the World, I would like that. I hate thinking of her stuck back in the Hidden Kingdom. And I miss her.”

Davita gazed down into her teacup, tapping one red fingernail against the gold rim. When she lifted her face, its color had returned, and she nodded resolutely. “If this is what my sovereign intends, it will be my honor to help her achieve it.”

Mirren gritted her teeth, but they spoke a while longer, Davita taking notes on her tablet before departing. When she left, she took the tension in the kitchen with her, and everyone else began breathing easier.

Josh set her knife on the table and put four sugar cubes in her cold tea. “So, that went about as well as it could have.”

“Yes.” Mirren's shoulders slumped, and she pretended to sag with relief against Haley's side, which made him smile shyly.

Okay,
Will admitted to himself.
They're kind of cute together.

“Thank you all again for your help. I had no idea how nervous I was.” Mirren threw back the rest of her tea like it was a much stronger drink, and Haley refilled her cup. “I realized, as I was making demands, that I've taken your support for granted, and I shouldn't have. I can't fully predict how much trouble my actions could stir up for you, and I don't want to make your relationship with your grandfather any worse, Josh.”

Josh released a sharp laugh. “I thought I explained this earlier. My relationship with Peregrine is
over
. We aren't going to end up on
Dr. Phil
crying and hugging each other. I think he's a power-hungry monster who wants to control me—and,” she added, catching herself, “everyone else. So if you need support with keeping him from grabbing even more power, I'm on board.”

Mirren's reply was, as usual, diplomatic. “Regardless, I'm grateful.”

Since Haley was obviously now on Team Mirren, Will supposed that meant it was his turn to decide where he would throw his hat. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Josh told me that the monarchy shot down staging proposals for hundreds of years before the issue came to a head with Peregrine and your parents. She also told me that your family refused to give an explanation for why they wouldn't allow staging.”

Mirren nodded, giving away nothing.

“I guess…” He wet his lips. “I guess my question is, are you sure you're doing what's in the best interest of the World and not just following in your parents' footsteps?”

Instead of taking offense, Mirren chuckled. “Allow me to explain as much as I can. Something most people don't know is that the earliest dream-walker kings and queens weren't heads of government, but of religion. They oversaw the seers, and since religion and science were tightly tied together back then, they controlled the knowledge of both dream mysteries—the spiritual elements—and what we call dream theory.

“One of their functions was the keeping of dangerous knowledge—because there
is
dangerous knowledge in the World, and in the Dream. Some knowledge must be protected.”

Will remembered the terrible discoveries Feodor had made, the soul-destroying inventions, and he understood what Mirren was saying.

“With staging, the situation is such that if I explain to you
why
staging is so dangerous, I will be giving you the knowledge to make it far, far more dangerous. So I can't tell you why I have to keep staging from becoming standard practice. But I can tell you that—based on what I know—staging is one of the most serious threats to the balance of the three universes ever discovered. And that's more than I've ever told anyone, even my family, so I would appreciate it if you wouldn't repeat it.”

Will believed her. She hadn't lived long enough in the World to be a great liar.

“Okay,” he said. “I can live with that. But since I'm sticking my neck out for you, I need a favor.”

Mirren tilted her head as if intrigued. Josh just looked confused.

“Four months ago, Josh and Haley and I had an encounter with Feodor Kajażkołski. It ended with him dead and a lot of people hurt.”

Her gray eyes widened. “Yes, of course, I read about it. That was you three?”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “And in case you're wondering, it sucked.”

Mirren's lips parted with something like awe. “I had no idea I had recruited such powerful allies.” She gazed at Haley, and it was apparent that she was as drawn to him as he was to her.

“What we need,” Will said, trying to regain her attention, “is your help to save a friend of ours. One of Feodor's minions sucked her soul into a canister, and we need to put it back in her body.”

That
got Mirren's attention. “How did he suck out her soul?”

“Violently,” Josh put in.

Haley, who had kept his eyes on Mirren throughout most of their discussion, stared at the floor then. Will wondered if courting a girl was harder when one's ex was wasting away in a coma.

“We don't know how Feodor did it,” Will said. “From what I've discovered, he began developing the technique he used before he was exiled. The Gendarmerie probably confiscated his notes as evidence, then turned them over to your grandparents. Is there any chance his papers might have survived the fire at the palace?”

Mirren tugged her earlobe. “Feodor's house burned to the ground with his papers inside it the night before his arrest. However … he was the one who built the pocket universe where I grew up. It was meant to be a safe haven my grandparents could retreat to—I think they sensed that the tides were turning against them. Please don't spread this around, but they filed thousands of documents in an underground vault in the Hidden Kingdom for safekeeping.”

“That must be a lot of paper,” Josh said.

“It's massive,” Mirren agreed. “I can't guarantee that any of Feodor's things from Maplefax are down there, and I don't know how we'd convince my aunt to let me leave once I set foot inside the Hidden Kingdom, but I would be glad to see if there's anything filed away that might be of use to you.”

Josh crossed her arms over her chest.

“Then I'll do what I can for you,” Will told Mirren. He raised his teacup. “Long live Queen Mirren.”

“I've gotta go work out,” Josh said, and stood up. “Let me know what you need when you need it, Mirren.”

“Thank you,” Mirren said, but Josh was already striding away. Mirren looked at Haley with a raised eyebrow.

“Not you,” he said, shaking his head.

“No, it was definitely me,” Will agreed, and he got up to go after her.

By the time Will caught up to Josh, she was already in the basement throwing punches at a rubber boxing dummy.

“Josh,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

She ignored him; sometimes she tried to avoid confrontation by literally refusing to acknowledge what was happening.

“Come on, talk to me.”

“I'm busy,” she said, and landed a spin kick so hard that the dummy rocked on its stand.

Before she could throw another punch, Will stepped between her and the dummy. “This will go easier on both of us if you just tell me how you feel.”

Reluctantly, she dropped her arms and released her fists. “I just wish you would stop obsessing over him,” she said. “It's … it's creepy! I mean, you have all these pictures of him and news articles about him and you spend hours every day thinking about him and you go to those meetings. And now you want to dig through Mirren's archives for
more
stuff about him? I think you need to … try to let go or something.”

I can't,
Will thought.
I have to …

“We have to help Winsor,” he said. “We have to undo what he did.”

“Yeah, I know. And I'm completely on board for that. I just wonder if, once she's better, you'll stop.”

“Of course I will.”

But he was already imagining the future differently, and he knew he wouldn't stop until he had collected every known piece of information about Feodor and built them up around himself like armor, so that when Feodor came back—

“I just want things to go back to normal,” Josh said.

Did she still think of the first six weeks of his apprenticeship as “normal” time? To him, the four months that had passed since their encounter with Feodor had redefined “normal,” shaped the time before it into something naïve and full of unseen dangers. Sometimes he felt like he'd been living in the Dream since February.

“It doesn't work like that,” he told Josh. “Things don't get undone. All we can do is try to learn from what happened so that we'll be better prepared the next time.”

Josh hugged him tightly. “Will,” she whispered. “Don't you get it? Feodor is
dead
. There isn't going to
be
a next time.”

 

Nine

The next day,
Mirren met Winsor.

Josh could count the number of times she had visited Winsor on one hand. She hated going. She hated the perfume of piss that permeated the nursing home, the false cheer of the nurses' scrubs, and, most of all, the silence of the patients.

Winsor's room was a little less depressing than the rest of the place. There, the scent of urine was somewhat mitigated by a vase of lilies and irises, and silver-framed photographs lined the windowsill. A rocking chair sat on a rag rug, and a patchwork quilt in blue and white covered the bed … and the patient within it.

Not only had Winsor lost a great deal of weight in the last four months, but her very skeleton seemed to have shrunk, giving her the appearance of a twelve-year-old. She lay on her left side, propped in place with foam bolsters, but her right arm hung awkwardly behind her, the fingers on her hand curled into a half fist. Her hair—cut short for ease of maintenance—was dull and lank, and her pale skin sagged. Although her eyes were open, they didn't register her guests, only gazed at the wall in front of her.

The sight of her made Josh sick. It made Will angry. But strangely, it brought out the best in Haley.

“Hi, Winsor,” he said, and he walked into her line of sight. Gently, he rearranged her arm and straightened the sleeve of her flannel pajama top. “I'm happy to see you.”

Winsor said nothing and gave no indication that she had heard Haley. Mirren glanced at Will and Josh, as if she expected them to follow Haley's lead, but Josh couldn't imagine talking to Winsor any more than she could imagine striking up a conversation with a department store mannequin. She went to sit in the rocking chair, as far from her friend as she could get. Will just stood at the foot of the bed, frowning.

“Josh and Will are here,” Haley said, “and we brought someone new. Her name is Mirren.”

“Hello,” Mirren said, only a little awkwardly. “It's a pleasure to meet you.”

Haley crouched down to look Winsor in the face. He knelt there for several seconds before rummaging around in the nightstand drawer and removing a tube of lip balm.

“Winsor is Whim's sister,” Will said. “She's in a stage three coma; she goes through cycles of waking and sleeping, but she's never fully conscious.”

“That's so sad,” Mirren said.

“Her brain can hear us, though,” Haley said as he carefully applied balm to Winsor's lips.

Will shrugged. “There's no proof of that, but if Haley says it, I believe it.”

All Josh could think was how Haley had said “her brain” instead of “she.” Because Winsor's soul didn't occupy her body;
that
was trapped in a canister at Willis-Audretch.

“She's been like this for four months?” Mirren asked. “I read about the attacks in the papers, but the reports were vague. They didn't say anything about what happened to the victims later on.”

“They're all like this, or worse,” Will said. “Except the three who died.”

“Four,” Josh muttered from her seat at the window.

“What?” Will asked.

“The little girl died last week,” she said, casting a guilty glance at Will.

Will ground his teeth.

“What is their diagnosis?” Mirren asked.

Still angry, Will said, “Persistent vegetative states due to frontal lobe damage. The CDC called it catatonic sinoatrial dysfunction, but they've stopped investigating since new cases stopped appearing. But most vegetative patients make sounds, some even scream or cry. Some of them will follow objects with their eyes. CSAD patients never do. They never move on their own, either, not even in response to pain.”

“Do we know why not?”

Will shrugged. “Ask Haley.”

Josh shut her eyes. She didn't know if she was upset because they were talking about Winsor like she was an interesting species of fish or because Josh didn't want to talk about her at all.

“She's not really here,” Haley explained. “Her soul is still in the canister. Without her soul, her body … it doesn't care.”

“We have the canister,” Will said. “It's at Willis-Audretch being studied, but they haven't raised any hope that they can free Winsor's soul from it.”