Dreamfire (2 page)

But while Josh stared at him with a tilted head, the man in the trench coat reached for a second gas mask dangling from his canister, and she remembered what the soccer mom had said.

They put a mask on Paul and he turned all blue.

That was when Josh remembered to kick him, leaning back on the hand that wasn't holding her lighter and using the leverage to get her right cross-trainer in under his chin.

His head snapped back. The felt hat flipped off his skull, revealing strands of gray-black hair twisted around a palm-sized bald spot.

Josh lashed out again. This time her heel caught him square in the breastbone and sent him flying into the side of the tunnel. His canister clanged against the wall.

She didn't waste any time. Before he could so much as finish sliding into the water, she was on her feet and running full-out through the tunnel. The water felt thick; it clung to her jeans as if trying to hold her back.

Move, move, move,
she told herself.

The dreamer appeared around a bend in the tunnel, and Josh stumbled to a stop beside her. “I can't get this door open!” the woman screamed, knocking her fashion-ring-laden hand against a steel access door in the wall.

Finally,
Josh thought at the sight of the door.

She listened for a moment, but between her own breath and soccer mom's gasps and sobs, she couldn't hear anything. Either the man in the trench coat wasn't following, or else he could move silently. She thought she could guess which.

Cold air gusted from the direction she had run.

“Don't panic,” she told the woman, and braced her shoulder against the door. In the real world, she could never have knocked down a steel door, but this was the woman's dream, and it would respond to the woman's perceptions. If she thought Josh capable, the Dream would conform.

Josh launched herself at the door. Pain shot through her shoulder, but the hinges creaked.

“Harder,” the woman urged.

Josh managed not to glare at her. She threw herself against the door again, so hard her arm moved in her shoulder socket. This time the door fell outward.

And kept falling. On the other side of the doorway stretched black emptiness. Josh grabbed the tunnel wall with her free hand to keep from tumbling into the void.

“I'm gonna die,” the dreamer whispered.

If she hadn't felt sorry for the woman, Josh would have been annoyed. Why were people always so quick to assume that they were going to die? Josh had been in much worse situations than this one and made it out unharmed.

She relit her lighter with one hand while she pulled a makeup compact from her back pocket with the other. All of the facial powder had long ago fallen out of the hunter-green case. When she revved up the Zippo and reflected the light off the mirror and into the doorway, a shimmering surface appeared where the empty doorway had been a moment before. This filmy glaze, which dream walkers called the Veil, stretched across the doorframe like a huge soap bubble sparkling in the firelight.

“Through,” Josh said.

“I'm gonna die.”

The air that rushed over Josh's hair lifted it off her ears and slid icy fingers across her scalp. She turned without thinking.

The man in the green-black trench coat stood an arm's length away.

Josh raised her right foot, set it against the dreamer's waist, and kicked her through the doorway. Then she jumped after her.

 

Two

Josh stumbled on
her way out of the Dream and ended up on her knees on the archroom's tile floor. At the same time, somewhere else in the world, the dreamer was probably bolting upright in bed.

Josh's younger sister, Deloise, rose from a chair that sat near the stone archway through which Josh had fallen. But instead of helping her up, Deloise put her manicured hands on her hips and said, “I've been looking everywhere for you! Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Um…” Josh shook her head, trying to reorient herself. “Around six thirty?”

“Try eight twenty. You're going to be late to—oh, drat, Josh, you're wet. And you smell like you've been swimming in a septic tank.”

Despite her attempt to appear disapproving, Deloise was smiling. She usually was. When Josh held out her hands, Deloise took them and tugged her sister up.

Deloise was—to her infinite pleasure—a full four inches taller than Josh, and at least four times as pretty. When people said her blond hair had good body, they were talking about the Venus de Milo's body, and when they said her brown eyes resembled a doe's, they were talking about Bambi's mom. And people were always talking, because not only was Deloise beautiful, she was wonderful. She preferred young children's nightmares, where she could soothe, reassure, and comfort, and she was well suited to the task. In the World, kids were unnaturally drawn to her, as if they knew subconsciously that she fought for them. And she was social, and funny, and enthusiastic, and sensitive, and … a hundred other things Josh was not.

Josh groaned as she got to her feet. A puddle was forming on the clean, white tile and her hand was red from where she had let the Zippo burn too long. Her entire body shimmered with the aftermath of passing through the Veil, scientifically called Veil dust but more commonly known as fairy dust.

Josh wiped her face of fairy dust with a white hand towel. “How late am I going to be, you think?” she asked. Her seventeenth birthday party was set to start at nine.

“You'll make it if you hurry. I ironed your outfit.”

Deloise was already dressed in a dark blue dress with palm-sized white flowers printed on it. A white shrug covered her bare shoulders—Laurentius Weavaros did not approve of his daughters showing skin—and her left wrist was adorned with a pearl bracelet that matched the accents on her ballet flats. Like most dream walkers, Lauren believed that young women should dress modestly, and he wouldn't have been the only one frowning if Deloise had showed up in heels.

Deloise shut off the archroom lights while, ahead, Josh scrambled up the spiral stairs in her squishing shoes. “I only saw a minute of that nightmare, but the dreamer looked like she was caught up in some serious dreamfire,” Deloise said, following.

“Yeah. The guy in the trench coat was gassing people to death. Although he was also
wearing
a gas mask.… And he said the strangest thing—”

Josh pushed open the door at the top of the steps and let herself into the kitchen pantry. Spice racks and soda caddies cleverly disguised the door to the basement. After Deloise closed it behind herself, only Josh's gritty gray footprints on the floor suggested the room held anything more than nonperishable foodstuffs.

In the kitchen, Josh and Deloise's stepmother, Kerstel, was preparing a tray of bruschetta and goat cheese. The girls' mother had died five years before while trying to open a new archway between the World and the Dream, and three years later, their father had married Kerstel. She was twenty years too young for him and better educated than he was, but she was smart and funny and a good cook, and she thought Josh was a responsible young person, so Josh didn't mind having her around. Deloise positively adored her.

Saidy Avish was assisting Kerstel with the finger foods. Saidy and her husband, Alex, lived on the house's second floor with their daughter, Winsor, who was—or had once been—Josh's best friend.

Saidy looked disparagingly at the mess Josh tracked on the floor and ordered her to remove her shoes. Kerstel said, “Josh, I
just
washed the floor,” but she was laughing.

Barefoot, Josh followed Deloise down the hall and into the stairwell. Deloise floated up the steps, her ballet flats hardly indenting the carpet. “What were you saying?”

“Yeah, the guy in the trench coat. He said…” Josh hesitated, half wondering if she hadn't misheard the words through his mask. “He said I was Jona's daughter.”

“What?” Deloise looked sharply at Josh over her shoulder, lost her balance, and had to grab the banister to keep from falling down the stairs. Josh put a hand on her sister's back until Deloise was moving forward again.

“That's impossible,” Deloise said. “I mean, how could he know who you are?”

“He couldn't.” Now that she had a moment to think, Josh found the man's recognition even more disturbing. He had been a figment of the nightmare, not a conscious being with a mind or a past. He had never met Josh's mother.

“I must have misheard him.”

“Well, you should talk to Dad about it,” Deloise advised. “Or Grandma. They'll know. You didn't break Stellanor's First Rule, did you?” She turned sharply again, her voice rising with alarm. “He might have been able to read your mind if you let the dreamer's fear take you over.”

“I didn't break Stellanor,” Josh said, although that's exactly what she had done. Yes, letting the dreamer's fear touch her was dangerous—especially when dreamfire was present—but sometimes it was the only way to get vital information. And she was careful. “I'll ask Grandma later,” she said, and let the subject drop.

They reached the third floor. The house, originally a Greek-revival mansion, had been renovated and expanded several times, and now contained two three-bedroom apartments on the second floor and a four-bedroom apartment on the third. Because the Dream required monitoring, continuously but especially at night, and because the archway in the basement was the only one for miles around, it made sense for a number of dream walkers to share the house.

The Weavaroses lived on the third floor. The living room, once nothing more than four white walls and a couch, had flourished like a garden under Kerstel's care. Now the windows were dressed with brown velvet curtains and the taupe walls bore earth-toned textile art created by a local craftswoman. Alpaca throw blankets were piled in a wicker basket at the end of the couch, and the air smelled of Kerstel's favorite toasted-almond-scented candles.

Josh and Deloise's bedrooms were connected by a bathroom and sat between the master bedroom and an extra room used for storage and the collection of junk. Two weeks earlier, Kerstel had decided to clean out the junk room, but she had lacked answers when Josh asked about the unexpected change. “Just seemed like a good idea,” she'd said finally.

Deloise said this meant Kerstel was pregnant, but Josh thought she probably just wanted the extra closet space.

Josh's own room was a wreck of textbooks and martial-arts books and clothing she couldn't be bothered to put away. Half a dozen blankets, none of which matched one another or the sheets on the bed, were heaped on the mattress and the window seat and the overstuffed recliner in the corner. Most of her possessions looked like they had been won in a street fight; even her hairbrush had a corner chipped off.

Winsor was sitting on the corner of the bed, leafing through a knife catalog. Her dark, layered hair shone in the ruddy light of the bedside table, and she smiled knowingly—and just a bit scornfully—as she looked up at Josh, blue eyes cutting through her overlong bangs.

Though not shy, Winsor's combination of intensity, obvious intelligence, and reserve often created a barrier between her and other people. She could appear cold without meaning to—at least, Josh thought she didn't mean to. If her family hadn't lived on the second floor, Josh considered it unlikely that they would ever have become friends. After a “wardrobe malfunction” at a middle school pool party, Winsor had developed great sympathy for dreamers trapped in shame and embarrassment nightmares. Josh couldn't count the number of times she'd had to pass up a perfectly terrifying monster chase because Winsor wanted to help some kid dreaming he was naked in his school cafeteria.

“I told Del you would be down there.” Winsor shook her head. “Workaholic.”

“I'm not a workaholic,” Josh told her, although winter break had just ended, and she had worked like a sled dog the entire time. She fought the urge to flop down on the bed—she didn't want to contaminate her blankets with sewer sludge.

“You're a workaholic in dire need of a shower,” Winsor replied. Although her voice was light and she continued to smile, Josh detected a fine edge to her tone, like a very long, thin blade hidden beneath her words.

Nothing had been right between them since the summer before, and Josh was beginning to think that the damage to their friendship was irreparable.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Josh said. “I'm moving.”

As Josh closed the door to the bathroom that connected her room to Deloise's, she heard her sister say, “Look at this place!” Winsor chuckled.

Josh leaned against the door and sighed. She was exhausted. No, she had been exhausted for weeks. She was beyond exhausted and into bone-tired. And now she had her birthday party to deal with.

Her image in the mirror was a mess. Smelly, grayish water dripped out of her short brown hair. Her mouth hung slack with fatigue, and her green eyes, too pale to begin with, were now the color of cheap pottery glaze.

She peeled off her thin black shirt, shivering, and tossed it into the hamper with the rest of her clothes. Her right shoulder was swollen and already turning purple. Only a dreamer's soul—or spirit or consciousness or whatever one wanted to call it—was present in the Dream, so a dreamer couldn't be killed or injured no matter what happened to them. But a dream walker entered the Dream body, mind, and spirit, and whatever injuries they sustained in the Dream remained real when they returned to the World.

Josh pulled the compact out of her pocket and tossed it onto the wicker dish on the counter, along with her Zippo. Engraved in the lighter's rose-gold plating, among the myriad scratches and dents, she could still make out the inscription:
To J.D. Love Always, Ian
.

Ian had been the only one who ever called her J.D.

For a moment Josh stared at the words, realizing it had been exactly one year since Ian had given her the lighter. Such an odd gift coming from him, so thoughtful. And it was all the more precious because it was one of the only things she had left of Ian.