Dreamfever (38 page)

Peregrine smiled, and Bayla began to giggle.

“Thought you were going to screw me out of my fun, didn't you?” Peregrine asked.

“I would rather see her dead than tortured,” Mirren told him.

“We'd just start again with your aunt,” he replied.

Then he shot Katia in the leg.

Katia screamed, not just out of pain, but from surprise, Mirren could tell.

“Missed the bone,” Peregrine complained. “I'll get it with the next one. There's nothing quite like bone pain.”

He glanced at Feodor as he spoke, and Feodor glanced back and shrugged coyly. Mirren didn't know what that meant, but she went to her knees beside Katia, who was trying to put pressure on her shin. The bullet had torn through her calf muscles, and she was bleeding from both entrance and exit wounds.

Mirren pulled her shirt over her head. With the long sleeves, she tied a tourniquet below Katia's knee and then used the rest of the material to put pressure on the wounds. “I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I'm so sorry.”

“Let me bleed out,” Katia was whispering back, trying to remove the knot from the sleeves. “It'll be faster.”

Peregrine laughed again, and Mirren didn't realize she was moving until her bloody fist connected with his face. She hit him hard enough that he fell backward onto his ass, and then Bayla tackled her, and they fell to the floor in a painful pile of elbows and knees.

Everything Mirren knew about fighting, she'd learned from Josh in a two-week period, and the knowledge wasn't enough to help her much. Bayla fought like a wild animal, with her nails and her teeth, growling and slobbering. Within no more than a minute, Mirren was bleeding from multiple bite wounds and her own patch of torn scalp, and one of her bra straps had been snapped.

“Stop it!” Peregrine shouted. “Stop it!”

He kicked Bayla, who reluctantly rolled off Mirren. Peregrine's eye was already beginning to swell, but he had no trouble aiming the gun at Mirren's face.

He trembled with rage. “I'll kill you!”

Mirren smiled a weak, bitter smile.

“Go ahead and shoot,” she said. “I'm not afraid. I've got someone waiting for me on the other side.”

“You think I won't do it?” Peregrine screamed, pointing the gun at her again.

“I think you will,” Mirren said. “I think you're depraved enough to kill me. But I've known that from the start, and I swore to myself when I began this that I would do what my parents would want. You took their lives, and you might take mine and my family's, but that's all you're going to get from us.”

The gun shook. “You stupid bitch,” Peregrine swore.

Mirren's smile sweetened. “The file cabinets are reinforced tungsten steel, by the way. It'll take you years to cut them open.”

Peregrine's whole body quivered. “You,” he said, his voice trembling violently. “You … you…”

“Me, me, me,” Mirren agreed.

Silence filled the room.

A martyr's death to seal her ruse,
Mirren recalled, thinking of her scroll. From the way Peregrine held the gun, she could see straight into the barrel, and the dark void reminded her not of Death, but of deep space, and of gravity.
What's the ruse?
she wondered.
That I'm a martyr? That I'm a princess?

Or is Death itself the ruse?

Katia grabbed Mirren's hand, and they waited.

“I believe the devices are ready,” Feodor said calmly.

Peregrine's hand shook, and Mirren watched his finger tighten on the trigger.

“Of course,” Feodor continued in the same casual tone, “you can shoot the girl before you test the devices. But I thought you might wish to use them to force her to unlock the cabinets. Or you might tear her body to pieces, rather than just shooting her.”

The idea made Peregrine crack a smile. He was panting.

Slowly, he lowered the gun. Mirren released a breath she hadn't known she was holding.

“Fine,” Peregrine said. “Give them to me.”

When he looked away from Mirren, she felt as though she'd stepped out of a very hot spotlight.

I guess gravity isn't ready for me yet,
she thought, and almost laughed. Instead, she hugged Katia. “Tighten the tourniquet,” she whispered, and her cousin nodded.

Feodor carried the devices over to Peregrine, and as Mirren turned to watch him, she caught sight of a tiny movement in the file room doorway.

“Have you worn them before?” Feodor asked Peregrine.

“No.”

Who is that?
Mirren wondered. All she could see was a slice of blue fabric floating at the edge of the doorframe, perhaps a shirt.…

“Roll up your sleeve, please.” Feodor turned Peregrine's arm in order to locate his veins.

Will ducked his head into the room for the briefest of instants.

He's alive!
Mirren's heart jumped. She honestly hadn't been sure whether or not Peregrine and Bash had killed Will earlier—or Josh, for that matter—but when they'd left, he'd been lying motionless on the living room floor.

“Ow!”

Feodor had just clamped the vambrace shut around Peregrine's arm. “Apologies, apologies.”

“Is it supposed to hurt like that?”

“I'm afraid so. The current requires access to the central nervous system in order to transmit electrical signals.”

But something sour had entered Peregrine's expression, and he stopped Feodor from putting the circlet on his head.

Will peeked into the room again. He had something in his hand—the activator?

“Wait,” Peregrine said. “Try them on her first.”

He nodded toward Bayla.

“Yes, yes!” Bayla cried, rushing forward. “It's my turn!”

Feodor looked between them, and something in his face made Mirren think that this was not a good idea. “The devices have already damaged her system greatly. It will be impossible to prove that their new configuration won't hurt the wearer if we demonstrate it on someone already so injured.”

He's up to something,
Mirren realized as Will snuck another look at the room.
And Will—are they working together?

Of everything that had happened to her in the last month, Will and Feodor working together seemed the most improbable.

“I want to wear them!” Bayla cried, and Feodor had to lift his arm to keep the circlet out of her hands.

“Then you test them,” Peregrine told him.

This time when Will ducked around the door, he saw Mirren watching for him. He gave her the fleetest of smiles, and she felt a surge of hope.

But Feodor and Peregrine were staring at each other with such fire in their eyes that she was surprised the space between them didn't burst into flame.

“Do you think I'm stupid?” Peregrine hissed. With his unencumbered arm, he pushed the barrel of the gun into Feodor's gut. “Do you think I forgot what you did to me,
old friend
?”

“I think you've forgotten what I did
for
you,” Feodor replied. He smiled, but his jaw tensed.

“I loved her—”

“Do not speak to me of love,” Feodor snapped, and all the civil tidiness Mirren had admired before was gone from his expression. Now she saw the Feodor that Will was so afraid of, the man with the crazed rage in his eyes and the snarl that destroyed the crisp line of his lips.

Feodor lowered the arm with which he held the circlet, as if he had forgotten it. Bayla, who had been standing beside him, jumping up and down to reach it, grabbed the device out of the air.

“It's mine!” she cried, and jammed it onto her own head.

Feodor shouted, “Now, Will!”

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then Peregrine's arm exploded.

Bayla's head blew apart like a dropped watermelon.

Peregrine, his face emptied by shock, stared at Feodor and then shot him in the gut before fainting.

The room shook, and Feodor fell to the floor beside Peregrine.

“Will!” Mirren screamed, throwing herself over her cousin.

Upstairs, something heavy crashed. Glass shattered, and the walls creaked. Plaster floated down like snow.

Mirren tried to put pressure on Katia's wound again, but Katia said, “I'm okay—help that guy!”

She meant Feodor.
She doesn't know who he is,
Mirren thought, and she didn't know if she should help him or not. If he died, would they still get Haley back? No one had told them.

Mirren didn't know what to do for Feodor except to put pressure on his wound, so she clapped her hands over the hole in his abdomen. Blood poured between her fingers, slick and hot.

Feodor groaned, his eyelids fluttering.

“What's happening?” Will shouted at him.

Mirren took off one of her shoes and used it to beat at the flames coming from Peregrine's arm. The vambrace had been blown to bits, and she couldn't bring herself to look at what was left of his arm for more than a second; the skin had blistered and burst like a microwaved hot dog, and his hand was gone entirely.

“We may have…” Feodor said, and his eyes fluttered again. “Activating the transmitters … destabilized this universe.”

The floor began to vibrate, and the sound of crashing upstairs morphed into a crush of white noise.

“You must leave,” Feodor told them. “Go.”

“We can carry you,” Mirren said.

“No! Save yourself, Your Majesty.” His face had gone as white as the moon, his lips nearly colorless, but he smiled faintly.

Will grabbed one of Katia's arms and Mirren grabbed the other, but as they rose Mirren saw a crack in the ceiling running from both ends. It widened like a great maw diving down to devour them, and only when the ceiling collapsed did Mirren remember how much she had wanted to live.

 

Thirty

Josh was dying.

She could feel it in every bit of her body, a sense of shutting down, of one cell after another being turned off, of tiny fires burning out. The weakness that had suffused her limbs was fading to numbness, then to nothingness. Over the dragging of her own breath, she heard Deloise crying and begging her to wake up; she didn't even have the energy to squeeze her sister's hand.

But as the sensation of closure slowly shut her out of her body, she became aware of another place, somewhere deep inside her, that she could go, a place she remembered.

Death,
she thought, and suddenly she wanted to go there, to escape the pressure of being forced from her own skin and instead run free on the golden shores of the river.

Something stopped her.

I'm not done,
she thought.

I can't leave yet.

There's still so much I have to do.

She didn't think of her life or how she wanted to spend it. She didn't even think of the people she loved.

She thought of the Dream.

I was supposed to balance the universes.

She had failed. Why? Hadn't she had the power? She could feel it closer than ever before, but the tighter she held it, the farther away it moved.

You can't force it,
Josh realized.

Somewhere, Deloise screamed. Furniture crashed, and a sound like a dozen trains approaching filled the air.

You can't force it,
Josh thought again, remembering how hard she had tried to open an archway and save Will.

You have to follow it instead.

What did that mean? Now Whim was screaming, too, and other voices she didn't recognize.

You have to follow it—

Suddenly, she was surrounded by silence. She opened her eyes and found herself standing on a shapeless gray plain. Three strong lights shone away from her, illuminating three different paths.

On the left, she saw the gods of Death, radiating golden light, their arms outstretched for her.

In the center, she saw the Dream, the ocean of colored lights that were the souls of the dreamers.

On the right, she saw the World, all blue and green and bursting with energy.

But she didn't walk toward them.

You have to follow it,
she thought, and she turned around to see where the lights originated.

Behind her, the gray brightened to white—white stone floor, white walls, an indistinct ceiling of white light. A few feet away, a rough-cut black pillar rose to waist height, water pouring down from it. Sitting atop the pillar was a pale stone shaped like an egg, small enough to fit in her hand, but just barely. The water burbled out from beneath the egg, and the reflection of the light on the moving water made the egg sparkle.

Follow it,
she thought, and she put her hand on the egg. The shell was not completely smooth, but bumpy and a little rough, and it was warm, even though the water pouring down around it was chilly. Josh picked it up, liking the warmth in her hand.

And then she understood that some things were meant to be.

The knowledge hit her in a flash, a bright light turned on right before her eyes.
There is a plan for each of us,
she thought, and she saw the three universes as three stages where different parts of a single great play were being performed. They moved together like cogs in a clock, souls spilling from one to the next in a choreographed dance too complex for Josh to follow.

And her own part? She tried to focus on herself, on the line of light representing her path, but it was short and too bright. Her soul hadn't emerged from the Dream, as all the others had. Instead, hers simply appeared the moment she was born, an unexpected entrance in the play.

Because I'm the True Dream Walker?
she wondered.
Is that why?

She didn't even know if she was the True Dream Walker, but she followed the idea as it led her into memory. She remembered being in the Dream, watching Ian's body bleed out while she lay, helpless, on the floor. She remembered Will whispering to her, telling her that she had to admit she was the True Dream Walker and save them. She remembered giving her life up to whatever was meant to be, and how in that moment she had merged with the Dream so completely as to almost lose herself.