Dreamfever (28 page)

“So it's a lot easier for him to stage nightmares now,” Deloise said.

“And the nightmares can be much more elaborate,” Mirren added.

“No, no!” Will said. “That's just the beginning! Now he has the Karawar, too!”

Josh wasn't certain how the Karawar would help her grandfather, but Mirren caught on immediately.

“He can use the Karawar to call the souls of dream walkers to the part of the Dream he controls,” she said, “and then stage dreams specifically for them.”

“It's not just that!” Will continued. “Feodor tried to tell me last night.
Who's got your blood?
he kept saying. It's Peregrine! He has all our blood, because we all gave blood samples to the junta's DNA database!”

Oh, my God,
Josh thought.
He's right.
And at the same time, she couldn't help wondering,
Will saw Feodor when he was high?

“That means Peregrine has tiny pieces of our souls!” Will ranted. “Evidence of the subtle body is present even in the tiniest fragment of DNA! He's going to use the blood samples and the Karawar together somehow, and then he'll be able to stage nightmares for specific people!”

No,
Josh thought.
No, that can't be right. That can't be possible.

She looked at Mirren, even though Feodor's memories were stirring, each realization flicking on like a ceiling light, and the more memories illuminated her mind, the clearer the picture became.

Yes,
Feodor's voice whispered to her.

“I … I think it could work,” Mirren said, and she touched her fingertips to her forehead, as if she too, couldn't believe her own thoughts.

“Wait,” Deloise said. “Are you saying that he could go get the sample of my blood from the junta's database, and use the Karawar to call my soul into the part of the Dream he controls, and then stage terrible nightmares for me?”

“Yes,” Will said. “Yes.”

“And he's doing all this just to rig the election?” Deloise asked.

“Forget the election!” Will cried. “With this, he can rig anything he wants! He can make you
kill
Mirren!”

“Oh, my God,” Josh said again. “What if he's already been staging dreams telling people to kill Mirren? What if that's why everyone's turning on her?”

“But I thought Peregrine needed the Karawar to stage nightmares for dream walkers,” Deloise said.

“Yeah, if he wants to target
specific
dream walkers,” Josh explained. “But he could have been staging dreams the old-fashioned way, by using the looking stone to find dream walkers' nightmares and then jumping into them.”

“Who's got your blood?” Will whispered again.

Josh recalled the day she had taken him to the Dashiel Winters Building to officially become a dream walker. He'd been uncertain about giving a DNA sample, and she'd urged him to do so.

Better safe than sorry, right?
she'd said.

Oh, how wrong she had been, just like she'd been wrong about building the devices, and hiding her nightmares from Will, and trusting Bash.

I have to fix this,
she thought.
Will's still my responsibility.

“All right,” she said. “What are we going to do?”

 

Twenty−two

They more or
less panicked.

Josh began listing all the awful things Peregrine could induce them to do to one another. Deloise alternated between shushing her and repeating that somehow Whim had to be at fault for all of this. Will just sat on the couch with his bloodless face hidden between his knees.

Mirren didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She had just discovered that she might very well live through this—and that they might very well all die. The only thing she knew for certain was that if she had a chance of surviving, she wanted to fight for it.

She called Davita and impressed upon her the importance of locating and detaining Peregrine immediately.

“Do whatever it takes, even if you have to…” She tugged her earlobe. “I don't know—even if you have to personally assault him. Bind him to a heavy chair and then call me. Oh, and do the same thing with Bayla Sakrov and Bash Mirrettsio.”

“You want me to assault your main competition in the election?” Davita repeated. “Mirren, do you have any idea what this will do to your reputation? This is career suicide.”

“I have bigger concerns than my reputation right now, Davita.”

Haley, who had resorted to scribbling notes on a nearby notepad, thrust one into her hand.

protect the cradle he wants our belly button

“Haley, I don't know what this means,” Mirren told him. “This doesn't make any sense.” To Davita, who was still barking in her ear about explaining herself, she said, “I have to go.”

Haley crumpled up the next note and tossed it into a growing pile on the floor, but the note after that he gave to Mirren.

“‘Open the Royal Trimidion'?” she read. “They tore down the Royal Trimidion during the overthrow.”

After briefly choking on the words, he croaked, “Build another.”

“I don't know what to do,” Josh said to no one in particular. “Maybe we should break into the Dashiel Winters Building and try to destroy the DNA database.”

Mirren had spent enough time at the junta's headquarters to know that the chances they would be able to break in were zero.

“Josh,” Will said desperately, lifting his head, “we aren't marines.”

“Maybe if we cut the power to the building for long enough, the blood samples will rot. They're probably refrigerated, right?” Josh suggested.

“I'm sure they have a backup generator,” Will said, his voice rising with what Mirren suspected was hysteria. “They have a bomb shelter—they must have a generator!”

Although Mirren appreciated that Josh had moved so quickly to problem solving, so far her anxiety seemed to be short-circuiting her brain.

Josh ran her hand through her hair like she meant to rip each strand from her scalp. “We could go to the Gendarmerie and just report the devices stolen. Then we'd have a whole bunch of people looking for them.”

The Gendarmerie were the rough equivalent of dream-walker police.

“Now that makes sense,” Deloise said. “They can put out an APB for Bash and Bayla, or whatever the Gendarmerie equivalent is.”

“Yes,” Will said. “Adults. Let adults deal with it.”

“What if the gendarmes catch Bash with the devices?” Mirren asked. “Won't they just turn the devices over to the junta? And no one will believe us if we say Peregrine's involved. We have no proof except Will's hallucinations.”

“You're probably right,” Josh muttered. She sighed with frustration. “At least I can go into the Dream and pull down the towers Bash and I put up.”

“How will that help?” Mirren asked.

“If Bash has more of them, he could be putting them in the Dream right now, and making the area he controls bigger and bigger. At least I can dismantle this section.”

“But couldn't Peregrine or Bash be in the Dream, using the devices to control that section of the Dream, while you try to take it apart?” Mirren asked. “They'd be able to control you then, too, right?”

“Maybe,” Josh admitted, and from her expression, it was clear the possibility hadn't occurred to her previously.

On the couch, Will was so pale and sweaty that Mirren thought he was likely to pass out, which worried her for multiple reasons. Aside from her concern for Will, she knew Josh wouldn't be focused on the issue at hand if she was trying to take care of him.

To Mirren's relief, Deloise was the one who wrapped Will in a blanket and hugged him to her side.

“We'll figure this out,” she told him. “It'll be okay.”

Will just kept watching Josh pace.

Mirren put her hand over Haley's to make him stop scribbling. “Just let me think for a moment,” she said, and he exhaled as if relieved and then capped his pen.

Mirren blocked out the room as much as she could and tried to concentrate on what she knew:

Josh believed she was the True Dream Walker but was unable to access her power for some reason.

Josh had Feodor's memories—if not all, then many of them.

Josh was desperate enough to wield the True Dream Walker's power that she had made a serious lapse in judgment and created dangerously powerful devices, which Bash—and likely Peregrine—now controlled.

Now that Peregrine had the Karawar, he could stage dreams to influence everyone whose DNA was stored in the junta's database. This included everyone Mirren knew in the World, with the exception of herself.

Interestingly, even though Peregrine was now much more powerful, Mirren believed her chances of surviving had increased. The passage torn from her scroll came back to her:

If a queen she would become,

one of two things have begun:

a martyr's death to seal her ruse,

or lead to Death Dream Walker True.

She'd already chosen to try to become queen, which meant she was on her way either to being murdered as a martyr or to killing Josh.

There was one other possibility.

“May I speak to you alone?” she whispered to Haley.

A minute later, they were alone in his bedroom. Mirren went to the drawer Haley had emptied for her and from beneath the linen drawer liner withdrew the sheet of paper she had brought back with her from the Hidden Kingdom. After reading through the secret ritual it described one last time, she held it out to Haley, who took the brittle page from her with light fingers. As he read the handwritten words, he sank onto his bed.

Without looking at Mirren, he gave the page back to her.

“Do you understand what it says?” she asked.

He removed his steno pad from the pocket of his gray cardigan and rubbed his thumb over the glossy cover like it was a talisman. “I can't help you with that,” he said.

Mirren glanced at the page, half expecting its contents to have changed since she had last read it. “I don't understand.”

“I can't … I can't tell you if you should use that.”

She had experienced Haley when he was anxious and when he was shy, but she didn't know how to read him now. Gently, she lifted his chin with the edge of her finger.

“Haley?”

His hazel eyes were pained. “I know too much,” he whispered. “I see too far. I can't … influence what you do.”

“Oh.” Mirren turned to drop the paper back into her drawer.
The disadvantages of loving a psychic,
she thought, and wondered if she did, in fact, love him.

She had always assumed that love grew from knowing another person deeply, from learning to see all the wonderful things in him or her. She'd expected to have to study her lovers the way she had studied books and physics and languages, to tease out every nuance of personality.

But as she slipped onto the bed beside Haley, she wondered if love couldn't grow from seeing a single profound beauty in someone. If it could, she knew that seeing Haley try so hard to grow was enough for her.

“Don't tell me,” she whispered, hugging him. “You don't have to tell me.”

“I want to tell you everything,” he admitted. He rested his chin on top of her head. “I feel like you're the first person I've met who wouldn't run screaming.”

“I wouldn't run,” she told him. “Not from you.”

He pulled back to look into her eyes, as if he needed to witness the truth in them, and whatever he found there made him smile. Mirren tilted her head and ever so slowly kissed him, not on the mouth, but on the hinge of his jaw. Her own boldness astonished her, and the heady taste of his skin made her open her mouth.

“Mirren,” he whispered, but the end of her name turned to a groan that told her he would not always be so quiet or so gentle.

He slid his hand into her hair, and she knew he was going to turn her head and kiss her full on the mouth, and she was going to let him, and at that exact moment Josh opened the bedroom door and said, “All right, the plan goes like this: First, I go into the Dream. If I stand outside the basketball court, I can reach into it and pull out the towers, and that way I won't risk my whole body. Then I start building another vambrace and circlet, although it might take me a few days to build a whole new set since I'm out of beryllium copper.”

Only then did she appear to realize what she had interrupted.

“Oh,” she said. “Uh, sorry.”

She ducked back into the living room, but the reminder of the danger they faced had ruined the moment. “I suppose I should call Davita again,” Mirren said, rising reluctantly from the bed.

“I suppose,” Haley echoed, smiling.

Mirren caught his hand. “You owe me a kiss,” she said.

He stood and placed a soft kiss on the top of her head.

“Now you owe me two,” she told him.

*   *   *

Haley and Will accompanied Josh down to the archroom, while Mirren called Davita again. Davita had said that no one could find Peregrine, which was unusual for a Tuesday. He was known for being obsessively punctual and scheduling down to five-minute intervals.

“Where are you?” Davita asked.

“Where am I?” Mirren repeated, surprised by the question.

“Yes. Where are you?”

Something in Davita's voice unsettled Mirren.

“What do you mean—where am I?” she asked, knowing full well that her aunt would have called Mirren rude.

“Are you at Josh and Deloise's house?”

Again, something … was Davita's tone too intense? Mirren couldn't shake the feeling that something was off.

“No,” she lied. “We're on our way to brunch someplace downtown. Fat Mac's, I think Josh said? And then Deloise is going to take me makeup shopping.”