by Kit Alloway
This close, he could see that the auras of the people clustered around the bonfire were expanded. Their colors were rich and bright, and noticeably missing the streakiness of anxiety or muted shades of depression he was used to seeing in the auras of the living.
Something was flowing out of the dead and into the bonfire. He thought at first that it was their auras, but it was something else, some other form of energy he had never seen before. Or had never been able to see before. He watched as a tendril moved away from a woman standing nearby, and it was gauzy, vague, and oddly thick. Curious, Haley brushed his fingers through it.
Instantly, he felt a rush of pain and fear. He held his hand up before him, blinded by white light, and he heard the sound of flesh smacking flesh and then the wail of a baby. Flailing in the freezing air, he was thrust upon warm skin and felt huge arms wrap around him. He smelled something, someone, and when he breathed deep, he recognized the scent. This was his mother. This was home. He was safe.
Haley jerked his hand back and sucked in a great breath. When he opened his eyes, he saw the last of the woman’s birth memory float into the intense blue flame. When he looked back at the woman, her aura was an even cleaner, sweeter shade of yellow.
They’re releasing their lives, he realized. Their memories, their personalities … they’re releasing them. That’s what this place is for.
He understood then what Death was. When people died, they came here to make peace with the lives they had just lived. They were releasing their memories, not their true selves. The true self was indestructible—Haley had always known that. Beneath his thoughts, his personality, his character, was a higher self, a soul that had never been born and could never die. Each time the dead gave up the people they had been, they released the pain, the fear, the confusion of life. With each offering, their auras grew more exquisite and luminous, and when they walked away from the bonfire, they were far more peaceful than when they had arrived.
“Haley!” Ian called.
Haley turned to see him standing just as he had been, arms crossed, glaring. His aura was still laden with every memory, every injury, every pain he had carried when he died, and worse, a wealth of fear at the idea of losing himself. Ian had believed in what Haley saw, but he had never trusted in the existence of a soul.
“I should have known you’d be into that hippie-dippie crap,” he said when Haley reached him. “You’re going to leave me—just like Dustine did.”
Haley started. “Dustine?”
Dustine is here, he thought. If I could find her—I could ask her about Josh’s abilities—maybe there’s a reason I ended up here.
Ian’s eyes were brooding. “Crapped out all her memories and then took off through the gates.”
“What gates?”
Ian pointed. A quarter mile or so along the path they were walking stood an enormous set of golden gates, spread open like wings.
“Where do they lead?” Haley asked.
“How should I know?”
“You’ve never been past them?”
He knew the question was a mistake the instant he asked it.
“Why should I?” Ian demanded.
“You shouldn’t,” Haley assured him. “You don’t have to. I’m sorry. I just meant—maybe we could go together and find Dustine.”
“No,” Ian said flatly. He yanked a pear off a nearby tree and began walking again. “By the time you find her, she won’t even remember you.”
Haley recalled watching the woman release her memory of birth and wondered if Ian was right. Maybe finding Dustine was pointless.
They’d both grown up with Dustine; she was their grandmother in every way except biologically. And although she’d been a tough lady who wasn’t always quick to show affection, Haley had felt safe with her. She’d never hesitated to call Ian out when he was being a jerk, and Haley craved that protection now. Besides, Haley was beginning to fear that if Haley didn’t find a way to force Ian, he would remain in Death forever, refusing to let go of the person he had been and so never moving on. Haley couldn’t bear the thought of his brother stuck in limbo forever.
There was one other reason to find her: “I need to talk to her about Josh.”
“Why?”
“She’s in trouble.”
That got Ian’s attention. “What’s wrong with Josh?” he asked.
Haley swallowed. “I can’t tell you while we’re here.”
Ian tossed the pear onto the ground and strode toward Haley so forcefully that Haley took a step back. “Cut the crap. What’s wrong with Josh?”
The answer was on the tip of Haley’s tongue, but he didn’t let himself say it. He just shook his head.
Ian grabbed his shoulder. “Haley. Now.”
With a trembling hand, Haley pointed to the golden gates. “I’ll tell you once we’re on the other side of those.”
Ian’s eyes—more gold than hazel—pounded at Haley’s. In a low, dangerous voice, he said, “I should kick your ass.”
Be brave, Haley told himself. You have to be brave.
He knew he wasn’t brave. But all his life, he’d been doing something in place of bravery: he’d run.
Haley sprinted like a rabbit.
“Jerk!” Ian shouted after him. “You’re going to leave your own brother here? Who does that?”
Since school had let out, Haley had been running in the mornings with Josh and Will. Josh pushed a brutal pace; sometimes she even made them run down the center of a nearby creek, a practice her mother had invented. Haley had been doing that Romanian circuit training video, too. He was in the best shape of his life, and he knew when he heard Ian’s breathing recede that he had a significant lead.
He blew past the dead and through the golden gates. If something happened when he passed beneath their arches, he didn’t feel it.
Twenty feet farther down the path, he stopped running and turned around. Ian was walking toward the gates, his arms crossed and his jaw clamped shut. Haley walked back toward him until they stood ten feet apart, the gates between them.
Haley panted as his heartbeat slowed down. He knew the look on Ian’s face—he was both angry and hurt, and he wanted Haley to know it. His aura had darkened, and a grayish-green mist hovered around his gut.
Beyond Ian, Haley could see the rolling hills where his brother had spent the last five months. Such a pleasant, easy place, with the beauty of the temple rising up at the far side. Such a safe place. Haley understood why Ian had stayed there; for much of his life, Haley had longed for such a sanctuary of his own.
But souls, Haley knew, weren’t meant to be static. They could slow down, rest, even hibernate for a time, but—like the fruit trees that dotted the landscape—they would always start growing again.
“What the hell are you doing?” Ian asked, and his tone was so mirthless and dangerous that it nearly pulled Haley right back through the gates. “Do you think this is funny?”
He gave Haley what Haley had long thought of as “the look.” It was something he did with his eyes and his forehead and the set of his jaw that brokered no argument, allowed no dissent, and contained a warning that if Haley didn’t do exactly what Ian wanted, there was going to be trouble.
“Do you think it’s funny?” Ian repeated. “Answer me.”
“No,” Haley whispered.
“How long have you been here?”
Haley shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Less than two hours. How long have I been here?”
When he waited for an answer, Haley whispered, “Five months.”
“Five months,” Ian repeated. “Which one of us do you think knows more about this place?”
I’m not ten years old anymore, Haley told himself. I don’t have to let him talk to me like this.
The problem was, he didn’t know any other way to answer.
“You do.”
“And if I tell you that going past the gates is dangerous, what does that mean?”
“Going past the gat
es is dangerous.”
The dead passing by were watching them; some of them had even stopped to watch. Haley blushed, remembering all the times Ian had berated him in front of their friends. Josh had been the only one who ever stepped in and told Ian to stop.
Ian was still standing there, giving him the look, and when Haley glanced up, Ian widened his eyes, as if to say, What are you still doing standing over there?
Haley only knew one way to placate Ian.
“Please,” Haley said. “I don’t want to go alone.”
Ian gave a disapproving frown, but some of the anger left his face. He walked through the gates, casting a glance upward as he did so. Haley hugged him tightly.
“The things I do for you,” Ian muttered.
Four
Josh’s father woke her up by flipping on the light in her room, thrusting a cordless phone into her face, and saying, “Please, for the love of God, get a cell phone like every other teenage girl in the country.”
The clock read 2:18 a.m.
“Sorry,” Josh said with a wince as she took the phone. “I’ll tell her not to call this late.”
Laurentius wandered, bleary-eyed, out of Josh’s room.
“Zorie?” Josh said. There was only one person who called her at two in the morning.
“Hey. We’ve got a tear on a farm in Selmy.”
Josh scribbled down the directions Zorie gave her, then pulled on a pair of running pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a soft shell jacket, and snuck downstairs on her tiptoes. No sense in waking anyone else up.
This wasn’t the first time her father had demanded she get a phone, Josh reflected as she pulled out of her driveway. It had become a minor household war, and one Josh knew she would eventually lose. But right now, it afforded her a freedom that she valued. If people were used to being unable to reach her, they were less likely to question where she was all the time.
As she got onto the deserted highway, she thought back to the corpse she’d found a few days before and the case file she’d received from Gendarme Burnette. All of the corpses had had damage to their lung tissue suggestive of chloroform inhalation, which Josh saw as more evidence that Peregrine was responsible for their deaths; with his left hand missing, he wouldn’t be able to overpower anyone without the help of an easily obtainable drug, and chloroform could be cooked up at home.
Josh had known, even before she helped carve the symbol into Peregrine’s chest, that his inability to enter the Dream wouldn’t stop his quest for power. But she’d never expected him to disappear—he had always loved being the center of attention—and now she had no idea where he was or what he was plotting. Because of that, she and Feodor had been forced to take a defensive position and wait for him to appear. They were working on various projects that might help them protect the Dream—one of which Josh was going to try out that night—but they had agreed that the single best way to prepare to face Peregrine was to help Josh access her abilities as the True Dream Walker.
And so far, they hadn’t made much progress on that.
Nearly two hours later, Josh parked her car on the side of the road next to a field. Nothing was growing there yet, but the earth had been recently tilled. The edge of the road was crammed with cars and pickups, and a tanker truck had been driven right through the fence and across the dirt rows.
“Damn,” Josh muttered as she climbed out of her car and got her first good look at the Veil tear. She estimated it was near sixty feet long, and it hung in the air a good twenty feet off the ground. The tear itself was a jagged line traced across the sky. It looked like a giant hose being shaken in midair, spewing a waterfall of white sparkles and light not just from its ends but all along its length. The tear was still thin, but it would widen—like an opening mouth—if given the chance.
Anyone driving down the road is going to see that, Josh thought. Luckily they were outside a small town.
The Veil separated the Dream from the World and from Death. Josh had been taught that it surrounded each universe like a bubble, but now that she had Feodor’s memories to draw from, she understood that it was more like an energy vibration that separated one reality from the next. The best way to avoid tears was to keep the emotional turmoil level in the Dream as low as possible, but inevitably, a tear would still occur once in a while.
Normally, nightmares couldn’t leave the Dream universe. They became insubstantial and dissolved, like a drop of food coloring in a bucket of water. However, if they interacted with enough Veil dust while exiting the Dream, they could remain intact for minutes, hours, even days. All archway edges were sealed in order to prevent Veil dust from leaking out of the place where the Veil had been cut, but of course no seal was perfect. All archways leaked a little, and Veil dust tended to cling to living things, which was why dream walkers emerged from the Dream covered in a faint shimmer. It was why, if Josh got wet in the Dream, her clothes were still wet when she entered the World. But the archway seals were tight enough to prevent anything large from coming through.
The problem with a Veil tear was that it wasn’t sealed at all. Veil dust was pouring out of this one, and Zorie’s people were preparing to spray additional, ionized Veil dust on it.
“Is it the aurora borealis?” a man standing nearby asked. He was wearing pants, an undershirt, and suspenders, and he was staring at the tear in a way that made Josh certain he wasn’t a dream walker.
“It’s actually gas,” Josh told him, which was the usual party line.
“I just finished planting three days ago,” the man said.
“Sorry,” was all Josh could think to say. They were pretty much going to wreck his field.
She walked up to a small woman with a sharp face and short black hair, both of which were hidden behind a gas mask.
“Hey, Zorie.”
Zorie’s voice was muffled by the mask. “Hi, Josh—Sal, don’t drag the generator!” She yanked her mask off to shout again. “Sal, get it off the ground!” She wiped the sweat from her face. “I’m going to kill him if he gets dirt in that thing.”
“You’re using the light spray method? Why not try to suture the tear?”
“We already did. Every stitch we made tore right out.”
Teams like Zorie’s used various methods for closing Veil tears, depending on the size and location of each tear. None of them worked every time. The method Zorie’s team was about to attempt involved spraying the tear with Veil dust and then flashing lights of various colors over the dust—essentially the reverse process of opening an archway.
“You want us to wait until you’ve done your thing to start?” Zorie asked Josh.
“No, no. Don’t wait on me. If I succeed, you’ll know.”
Josh went back to her car and sat on the trunk. One of the projects she and Feodor had been working on was a new method of Veil repair. It required only one piece of equipment: a bundle of wires connected to a control box the size of a pack of mints. At the end of each wire was a node that Josh attached to her scalp or chest with a drop of medical goop. The nodes vibrated in a certain sequence, the speed and strength of which Josh could change via the control box.
The idea was that the repetition of the vibration sequence would coax her own body’s vibrations to match it, and that vibration would signal the soul that it was time to enter the Dream. Josh would remain conscious within the Dream, but since she’d also be a dreamer, she’d be able to change the Dream with her thoughts, and she could simply instruct the Dream to close the tear.
Feodor called it the Vibrational Harmonic Acclimation Guide—or VHAG. This would be the first time Josh tried it since they reprogrammed the pattern.
Once Josh got all the nodes attached, she turned on the VHAG and closed her eyes. The vibration of the nodes wasn’t unpleasant, but the strange pattern they created—like twinkling Christmas lights all over her head and chest—disoriented her. That was their purpose, of course. The longer she wore the VHAG, increasing the speed and intensity of the vibrations every few
minutes, the dizzier and woozier she felt. Her body slumped backward onto the rear window of her car, and she began to lose feeling entirely. All she could sense was her mind, and it was struggling to break free, trying to shrug off her mortal form, but something was holding her back.
This was as close as Josh had ever gotten to merging with the Dream, and it wasn’t much closer than she’d been able to get two months ago—or six months before that. She’d hoped the new vibration sequence would give her the last push she needed to escape her body, but so far, it didn’t seem to be—
“SHEEP!” someone screamed, and Josh opened her eyes.
The scene before her was brilliant. Men and women in gas masks were spraying iridescent rainbows of Veil dust from fire hoses. The fine mist of delicate colors burst into the air and over the tear like a magical healing shower. Behind them, a half-dozen industrial lights fit with colored filters were flashing one after another, running from one end of the color spectrum to the other and back.
Sheep began to leap out of the tear.
“Uh-oh,” Josh said. She shut down the VHAG, climbed off the trunk so she could open it, and pulled out her gas mask. Sheep were pouring out of the tear, bounding over its lower edges as if they were leaping fences. Some crashed to the tilled earth and couldn’t get up, their legs broken, creating a pile of agony on which other sheep landed.
And the nightmares came marching out, two by two, Josh remembered her grandmother saying once, months and months ago.
As she buckled on her gas mask, Josh’s eyes strayed from the mound of scrambling sheep to the tear itself, and she saw what was coming next.
She ran toward Zorie, vaulting the fence as she went. “Wolf!” she shouted, but her voice was muffled behind the mask, and she couldn’t take it off because she was running through a literal rain of Veil dust, which, if inhaled, could cause permanent insanity.
“Wolf!” Josh yelled, but no one was looking at her, they were all transfixed by the mangled, bleating sheep. The injured animals had formed a high enough pile that the sheep coming out of the tear were landing on them without injury, rolling down the pile, and then running scattershot across the field.