Dreamfire (21 page)

Gloves jabbed. Josh ducked then swung, but without much force and without extending herself enough to give him any access to her body. As expected, he took her weak shot as a sign that he was gaining and threw a roundhouse. Josh ducked it and used the opportunity to roll him over her hip and slam him to the ground.

One of his legs landed bent, his foot close to his other knee. The position was ideal for a favorite jiujitsu move of Josh's—the Indian Death Lock. She grabbed both his ankles and arranged them as if he were sitting cross-legged. By hanging on to one of his legs, she immobilized both of them. Then she extended her own left leg until she could plant her foot under his chin and press down on his throat.

He scratched at her ankle, but his gloves saved her skin from gouging. Josh pushed down harder on his throat, and the fall must have knocked the wind out of him, because he passed out in less than thirty seconds. She remained in position at least that long again—even though her knee was screaming at her—just to make sure he was out, then stood up, breathing hard. She hadn't actually thrown someone twice her size in a while.

Turning, she saw Will holding an exit open in a doorway that led to the building next door.
Finally,
she thought.

The man pressing the mask to Haley's face saw what Will was doing at the same time as Josh did. He looked at the door and narrowed his fathomless eyes.

And the entire door vanished.

Just—gone. No doorway, no door, no doorknob. The red wall now extended, unblemished, deep into the alley.

Will's eyes locked with Josh's, and she knew they were thinking the same thing:
That's not possible.

It wasn't possible for a figment of nightmare to alter the Dream.

Josh's mind was so completely unable to process the idea that it quit thinking entirely. Years of training took over, and she went into survival mode.

She looked at the trash around them and found a small microwave with a blackened interior. It smelled of melted plastic, and it weighed more than she expected as she lifted it and hopped over on one leg to the man in the trench coat. He had turned from the vanished doorway and was kneeling over Haley, who had revived enough to claw at the rubber mask on his face. When Haley saw Josh approaching, he intensified his struggle, and the man in the trench coat was entirely preoccupied when Josh dropped the microwave on him.

She tried to drop it on his head, but it was heavy and she was too tired to lift it that high. So she settled for dropping it on his stooped back, which sent him sprawling but failed to rupture the canister as she had hoped it would.

Josh might have held him down and gotten more information out of him, but Gloves was stirring, and she was afraid she and Haley wouldn't survive another encounter. So she just held her hand out to Haley.

Will had already run farther down the alley and opened a new exit. Josh hadn't had to tell him to do so; he'd just done it. Gratefully, she and Haley stumbled and limped through the exit Will held open.

When they were all standing in the archroom, dripping water onto the tile floor, she turned back and caught a glimpse of Gloves reaching for something small and golden on the ground.

My lighter,
Josh thought. And then the archway closed.

 

Seventeen

They looked like
they had been in a car accident.
No,
Will thought,
worse than a car accident.
A train derailment. A plane crash. A subway collapse. Not just an accident but some terrible shock.

Of the three of them, Will had come out the least injured. Josh's jeans were ripped over her knee, which dripped blood and glittered with reflective shards of mirror. Whatever that flower on her pendant was, it looked like a crimson rose now. Her cheek, already turning purple, had been scratched as if by an angry bear. She stood half bent over, one hand pressed to her back where she'd taken the kidney shot, and when she looked at Will, her eyes didn't quite focus.

Haley looked worse. For a moment before he and Josh had jumped into the Dream, Haley's face had been flushed with health, but now the circles and the paper-white cheeks had returned. Blood matted the black curls on his head and ran in thick streams down his temples. He had a pink outline around his nose and mouth—like a little kid who'd been drinking red juice—where the gas mask had been, and the mask must have been tight as hell, because the straps had left pink lines across his cheeks. Will didn't know what was in the canister, but Haley's breathing made a raspy, crackling sound as he sank to the floor and swallowed convulsively.

Josh looked at Will from beneath her lowered brows. “I told you to stay here.”

Will just stared at her.

“I told you not to follow,” she said through gritted teeth. “
Whatever happens
—those were my exact words. Why didn't you listen to me?”

Will couldn't believe she was actually going to chew him out. She had needed his help. Without it, she would never have been able to open an exit while fending off both men.

“If you hadn't gone in,” she continued, “if I hadn't been looking at
you,
thinking about
you,
worrying about
you
—”

“You would have gotten clobbered,” Will said, finally finding his voice. “You didn't even realize there was a second guy in there.”

“I can handle getting hit!” she shouted. He'd never heard her raise her voice in anger before. “What I can't handle is trying to protect myself
and you
when you're somewhere you shouldn't be!”

Something about the way she kept spitting the word “you” made him feel like she hated him.

“How many times do we have to go over this? When I tell you to do something, do it! When I tell you not to do something, don't do it!” Now her voice was cracking, breaking down, and she was falling back against the wall, then wincing and trying to push herself away from it. “Do you hear me? Do you get it? This is the lesson, Will:
Don't ever disobey me!
Because if you do and you get killed, I'll—”

But she just shook her head, tears she wasn't conscious of dripping from her cheeks, and Will realized she wasn't angry at him. She was terrified.

He didn't know why she was so scared. He sensed that it had less to do with him—despite her constant use of the word “you”—than it did with the situation. Something in the Dream had triggered a memory or a deep-seated fear, Josh's own dreamfire, and she didn't know what to do with the fear besides shout at him.

The realization made it easier for him not to shout back.
I will not get into a screaming match with her,
Will told himself.
I will not turn into my father.

“You're right,” he said. “I'm sorry. I need to start doing what you tell me to do.”

She didn't seem to know what to do with that, either. She looked at him strangely, wet her lips, and turned to Haley. “Are you all right?”

Haley didn't answer, though his breathing had begun to return to normal. He stretched out one arm to reach for his pad and pen where he'd left them on the floor, but when he'd collected them he didn't write anything, just held them to his chest like a teddy bear.

Will shut his eyes.
This is so screwed up.

He wanted to comfort Josh. He wanted her to tell him whatever it was that had frightened her like this, if only so he could avoid triggering it again. Then he wanted to get a warm, wet washcloth and gently wash the blood off her face. He wanted to tell her how scared for her he had been.

But he knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't let him do any of that. They stood there in silence until she finally said, “Dad will freak if he finds out I went into the Dream, so here's what we're going to do. Will, wipe up the floor. Haley and I are going to go break the mirror in that big ugly armoire, and then we're going to tell everyone that we were showing you how to disarm somebody and we crashed into it. That's our story.”

They were going to lie. Great. Will was going to lie to the nice people who were adopting him because Josh had a complex and had gone into the Dream when she shouldn't have. Wonderful.

He must have been giving her a look, because she barked, “
What? Go!
”

And Will, who had just promised to obey her, got up and went.

*   *   *

After cleaning the floor and helping to break the armoire—which turned out to be no easy task—and lying to Kerstel and watching Deloise pick the glass from Josh's knee, Will sat in the library alone. He didn't know what else to do with himself, so he just sat there drumming his fingers on the tabletop and replaying his last conversation with Josh in his head.

She had gone beyond not wanting him to get involved in her problems. Now she didn't even want him to care.

How he was supposed to not care, he didn't know.

“Will?”

He started, but it was only Dustine standing in the doorway. Her wooden walker shone in the library's yellow lights.

“Hi,” he said.

Dustine smiled unexpectedly, as if she knew everything that had just happened to him and saw the folly of youth in it.

“Bumps in the road?” she asked. She maneuvered her walker between the table and the walls of books and took a seat across from him.

“Nope,” he lied. Dustine hadn't been terribly warm to him during the last month—not the way Kerstel and Deloise had—but she hadn't been cold, either. He knew she had been watching him. “You heard about the armoire?”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Could have heard that thing fall two miles down the road. Heard a lot of shouting, too.”

Shouting
before
the armoire fell, she meant. Will decided his best bet was just to say nothing, so that's what he did.

“You know,” Dustine said, settling into the chair, “I wasn't born a dream walker.”

“I think you mentioned it.”

She nodded ruefully. “I was fifteen when I became an apprentice to Lasia Borgenicht, Josh and Deloise's great-aunt. Honestly, for a long time I thought I had entered my own personal nightmare and never woken up.”

Leaning her elbows on the table, she looked at him squarely. “I'm not going to tell you my life story, Will. If you want to know it you can read my diaries when I'm dead, or you can call up Peregrine and hear his side of the story. What I want to tell you now is this: You will
always
be an outsider.”

Will didn't know if the house around them was truly as still as it seemed then, or if he was simply unable to focus on anything but the old woman's face. Her eyes were a beautiful green—resembling Josh's but darker, as if the color had faded through the generations—and she didn't dodge his gaze the way Josh would have.

He wanted to say, “How did you know that?” He wanted to cry.

“It doesn't matter what you do, what you give them, or how hard you work. There will always be family stories you don't know and no one will ever trust your instincts and they will still leave you out of important conversations. They don't mean to do it; it's just automatic. Deloise won't be as thoughtless, because she's more sensitive than the others, and Kerstel comes from Savannah and knows a bit about what it's like to be an outsider, but Josh was born a dream walker through and through. All her loyalties are intact. You're going to be the new kid until the day you die.”

Will turned his face away, breathing quickly through his mouth, hoping she wouldn't see the tears in his eyes.

“Josh doesn't know what she has in you,” Dustine said, more softly than before. “And trust doesn't come easy to her to begin with. I don't want you to think that you'll never be happy here, because you will. But there will always be a line between you and them, and you're going to have to walk it.”

Will didn't move. When he failed to reply, Dustine reached out and ran the back of her cool, waxy fingers over his cheek. Then she stood up and took a few pained steps deeper into the library.

He wiped his eyes while she still had her back to him. Was his desperation to fit in so obvious that even Dustine had noticed?

She slid a book across the table to him, and Will looked up, startled. Dustine smiled more impishly, showing a little of the young woman she once had been. “I think you've been looking for this,” she told him.

The edition was bound in gray cloth and had been labeled along the spine with a black Sharpie. He had no idea what it was, and he didn't know what to say. “Ah, thank you,” he muttered.

Dustine only smiled again, as if his confusion were just one more step in the complicated joke she was playing. He waited until she had left the library before he picked up the book.

Most of the pages lay flush together; only the first few were rumpled. He tilted the spine to the light and made out the block letters:

HIANSELIAN AMBROSE DONOVAN MICHARAINOSA

Will tried to reform the name into something he might have heard in casual conversation.
What do you call a kid named Hianselian?

Hianselian. Hansel. Hans. Hian.

Ian?

Will put the book down. He couldn't quite bear to touch it now, knowing who had written it.

He should have thought of it before—all the family diaries were here in the library. Some were so ancient they had to be kept in amber plastic bags and carried stickers reading
DO NOT HANDLE WITHOUT GLOVES
. The books and pages were as varied as their authors: ink in every color, lines forming Roman and Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, and brushstrokes arranged into beautiful, wispy characters. Sometimes a long life was chronicled in the pages of a slim pamphlet, or a few years written in such detail that they produced a dozen or more volumes.