by Kit Alloway
The doors closed behind Josh and Will as they left the press room.
“So,” Will said, “good news: I absolutely loathe your grandfather.”
Josh held her hand up for a high five.
* * *
The only real light in the coffee shop came from a single spotlight aimed at the low stage. Beyond it, the tips of cigarettes burned red like the eyes of nocturnal animals. Just enough illumination passed beyond the stage to highlight the rims of whiskey glasses and reveal that many in the audience were smoking hookahs.
The woman in the spotlight was African American, fortyish, her hair in perfect curls, wearing black-rimmed cat-eye glasses, jeans, and a shimmery red top that seemed to have been woven around her body. Her guitar was stained auburn and had a pattern of sunbeams emanating from the sound hole.
Josh headed toward the smoky, dim seating area, and Will cautiously mounted the two steps to the stage. She’d agreed to let him handle this one alone—a simple stage-fright dream—and only get involved if needed.
As Will approached the woman on the stage, moving very slowly, she noticed him. Her fingers fumbled on the guitar’s fretboard, and the chord she meant to play emerged warped and cringing. She gave a tiny shake of her head. No. No.
“I’m here to help,” Will said, but he didn’t think she could hear him above her own music.
He went to stand beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. He didn’t know what her song was about exactly—despite the clarity of her singing, he couldn’t make sense of the lyrics—but it sounded beautiful to him. With his free hand, he patted a rhythm out on his thigh. He’d always thought he would make a good drummer, and he thought the beat he was putting to this song was really bringing the music up a notch.
Then he stopped looking at the woman to glance out at the audience, and he felt frightened. The smoke from the hookahs seemed to make a solid golden wall in the circle of light cast around him, and beyond it glowed the crimson eyes of the animals watching him. He could hear an awful dragging sound accompanied by footsteps—step, step, drag. Step, step, drag.
Something terrible was happening. The woman didn’t have stage fright; why had he made that assumption when he was using the looking stone? Why couldn’t he stop tapping on his leg now that he’d started? Each touch reverberated through his entire body, weakening him. The wall of stage light could not protect him from the feral animals on the other side.
He looked down and saw that the woman had become ever so slightly transparent. When she sang, a swath of burgundy marked with stars flowed out of her mouth and was sucked into the darkness beyond the spotlight.
Frantically, Will looked down at his own hand, still tapping, tapping away, and yes, it was happening to him, too, a brushstroke of midnight blue shot through with green that stretched longer and longer as he lost more of himself to the creatures.
This was why the woman had been terrified. Because when she played a concert for people, she gave them a part of her soul.
But when she played for the devil, she had to give him all of it.
The smoke in the room began to clear, and there he was in the audience, Satan himself. Will had forgotten that Lucifer had been an angel once, but he saw now the decrepit remains of what once must have been beauty: two skeletal wings, their feathers mostly gone, one badly bent; refined features half eaten away by worms; long fingers reduced to claws with swollen knuckles. He bared his teeth—whittled down to pencil points—at Will and hissed, and blood sprayed the table before him. Then he opened his mouth and used his foot-long serpent’s tongue to clasp the souls in the air and draw them into his mouth.
Will had never felt such intense fear. It raced along his nerves like flames tracing a line of gasoline, and when the lines met at the center of his chest, an explosion of terror filled him. He began to shriek, to scream utterly without reserve, every breath more fuel to the fire that rose out of his chest and ruined the air.
Suddenly Josh was standing in front of him, and though it took him an instant to recognize her, he felt a glimmer of hope. His soul changed its path to flow past her.
“Will,” she said. “Stop screaming.”
He hadn’t realized he was still screaming. Stopping required too great an effort, though, so it wasn’t until Josh pushed his jaw shut and sealed her palm over his mouth that the cycle of shrieking burned itself out.
“Good,” Josh said, cautiously removing her hands. “Now, listen to me: You have gotten sucked into the dreamer’s fear. None of this is real. You need to imagine your protective egg.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. Luckily, Josh seemed to sense that, and after thinking hard for several seconds, she changed tactics.
“You remember that the Dream exists, right?”
“Yes,” he whispered on his stripped-dry throat. “It must. There’s a looking stone.”
“Good! Yeah, there’s a looking stone. And anything can happen in the Dream, right?”
He nodded.
“Do you remember earlier today, when we decided to go into a nightmare together? You used the looking stone. Which nightmare did you pick?”
He thought back, letting the memories present themselves to him like a movie, one frame at a time. “I picked one with a woman singing in a coffee sh—”
Josh waited.
“Oh,” Will said. He glanced around, somehow impressed by how realistic everything appeared, and then looked back at Josh. “None of this is real.”
His hand quit tapping. He looked down and saw that his flesh had become opaque again.
The woman next to him vanished completely. Her guitar fell to the stage.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Josh said.
* * *
Will expected her to be angry at him, but she just looked freaked out. Without saying anything, she took him upstairs to her apartment and made them both hot chocolate in a microwave. For a while, they just sat together on the couch, mugs in hand.
“Ah, I’m sorry,” Will said finally.
“It’s all right,” Josh said tightly.
“I know I screwed up back there. I broke Stellanor, I let the dreamer’s fear get to me.”
“It’s all right, I mean it.” She ran a hand through her hair. He wondered if this was the end of his apprenticeship. “There was an unusual kind of fear in that nightmare, something called dreamfire. I should have realized it was there sooner and gotten you out right away.”
“Dreamfire?”
“When a nightmare triggers one of a dreamer’s deepest fears, we call the fear dreamfire. It has a different feel to it, and if someone gets caught in it, they almost never manage to pull themselves out again.” Josh poked at the mini marshmallows in her hot chocolate, submerging each in turn. “I don’t know what the dreamer was so afraid of tonight, though.”
Will remembered the sensation of loss he’d felt as the blue light slipped out of his body, and the fear that had burst into hysteria. “She was afraid of losing her sense of self,” he said.
“Maybe so. Look, every dream walker makes the mistake of getting caught up in the dreamer’s fear. Every single one. It was bad luck that you got caught up in dreamfire on top of the usual fear. I’m just glad you survived it.”
“Me too.” Will thought a moment and then realized that her last comment might not have been hypothetical. “Wait, are you saying that you think that if you’d ended the nightmare, I would have died?”
Josh nodded her head grimly. “You were half-transparent by the time I got to you. I think that you were so in tune with the dreamer that whatever was happening to her began happening to you. If I’d ended the nightmare, I doubt you would have made it.”
The magnitude of the danger he had faced hit him full-force then, and he had to push the hot chocolate away because he was overcome by nausea. “Take it easy,” Josh said, and she dragged a small wicker trash can up next to the couch. “Everybody’s all right.”
“Yeah,” Will said, mostly to
remind himself. He swallowed against the lump in his throat. “You did a pretty amazing job of talking me down.”
She waved the compliment away. “There was no psychological insight, I just used reasoning.”
“Whatever it was, it saved my life, so give yourself a little credit.”
She softened. “All right.” Then she reached out, awkwardly, and put her arm around him. “You want to knock off for the rest of the day? Watch TV and eat cheese puffs or something?”
She’d never offered to let him skip training before. He nodded yes, but he didn’t feel any better, and he said, “Josh, I don’t know if I can go back in there.”
This time, the anger he’d expected her to display never came at all. She just smiled, squeezed his shoulder, and said, “You’ll be able to.”
“I don’t know—”
“I do. You care about people too much not to go back in.”
Mystified, Will said, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to with why we walk nightmares in the first place. You’ll see another kid getting attacked by another Meepa, and you’ll think about how scared he is, and you won’t be able to stop yourself from running in to help, just like the first time.”
Will stared at her, hardly able to believe what she’d said. Despite all the times it had seemed like she was barely aware of his presence, she had known something about him that he hadn’t known about himself. Something good, even.
A little thrill ran through him at the knowledge that she thought about him.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said.
Eleven
Dear Diary (I’m trying to give that opening another try),
I keep thinking of how scared I was when Will was fading away. My voice was shaking so bad I’m surprised he could hear what I was saying. Then afterward, I could barely keep it together. I just wanted to hug him and tell him how glad I was that he’d made it out.
This is exactly what I was afraid would happen—I’d start caring about him and thinking of him as a friend, and then I’d get him killed. Why didn’t I think to warn him about dreamfire? Would that even have helped? Once someone gets caught in it, they don’t usually get out.
And he trusts me! He proved it today. That can only put him in worse danger. If he trusts me and I care about him enough that I can’t think straight when he’s in trouble, it’s just a matter of time until something terrible happens.
Maybe I could explain all of this to him somehow. Maybe he’d understand that knowing he’s my responsibility freaks me out so much that I can’t keep him safe. He gets the psychological stuff so much better than I do. He’s read all these books, and he throws around terms like “passive-aggressive” and “defense mechanism” like everyone knows them. But I’d have to tell him about Ian then, and I just can’t do that. It’s stupid. I know he shouldn’t trust me, that I should warn him away from putting his faith in me.
But some part of me really likes that he does.
* * *
“Relax your shoulder,” Josh said.
Will lowered his gun and used one hand to lift a pair of protective earmuffs from his ear. “What?” he asked.
“I said to relax your shoulder. Think of the gun as an extension of your arm, not as a deadly weapon you use to kill people.”
“That’s a big help.”
Josh shrugged and leaned against the wall of their stall in the shooting range. She smiled to see him struggling with the handgun. He was in good shape—he could run forever—but he got nervous around guns.
He fired three rounds and then stopped to examine the paper figure in the distance. “That third shot grazed the left arm,” Josh told him.
“Yeah, I’m sure a flesh wound will stop the Creature from the Black Lagoon from tearing me to pieces.”
“If he’s a lefty, it might.”
Will smiled, but Josh could see him getting frustrated. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find Deloise and call it a day.”
Three stalls over, Deloise had just blown the letter D into the cardboard target’s chest.
“Hey,” she said, gathering up her shells. “Am I good, or am I good?”
Will gazed wistfully at her mangled target. “We’re lucky you aren’t an assassin.”
Deloise winked. “No one suspects us blondes.”
Will was still living in the county home and would have to stay there until Lauren and Kerstel were approved as temporary guardians. That was supposed to happen very soon, but Josh was still reluctant to drop Will off at the county home. Over the last few weeks, making conversation with him had gotten easier every day: less tense, less terse, more familiar. Josh had been surprised to realize that she actually liked Will, and often after training she found herself thinking, We didn’t get any time to just hang out.
Well, she was meant to be his teacher, not his friend. And it was just as well that they didn’t become too close.…
“Don’t worry about the shooting,” she told Will as she put the car in park just outside the county home’s front doors. “It’s not an essential skill.”
He shrugged. He was a guy; he didn’t like thinking he was a naturally lousy shot. “Maybe I can learn how to throw a tomahawk instead,” he suggested as he opened the door.
Josh watched him walk into the hospital-like building as Deloise climbed from the backseat to the front. “You think he’s all right in there?” Josh asked. “I don’t even know what happened to his parents, why he’s living there.”
“You could ask him,” Deloise suggested practically.
“If I ask him questions, then he gets to ask me questions.”
“You still haven’t told him about Ian?” Deloise asked with a sigh.
“I don’t know what to tell him. What would I say? That the house fire was my fault? That someone is dead because of me?”
By the time she stopped speaking, Josh’s chest hurt. Ian’s memory muscle seized up.
“You did what you could for Ian,” Deloise told her.
“And it wasn’t good enough. What does that say about the girl teaching Will?”
“Nobody blames you for what happened.”
Josh didn’t argue, just rubbed the cramp in her chest with one hand; but inside she thought, Pretending doesn’t change the past.
“Winsor blames me.”
“Winsor’s dealing in her own way. Plus, these postcards from Whim are driving her nuts. He’s always saying he’s coming home and then not showing, and she was so close to him.…”
Josh turned onto the highway and said thoughtfully, “Closer to him than you are?”
“Of course. They’re siblings. Whim and I are just friends.”
And Josh could have said something about that, but she didn’t.
They arrived home to the usual predinner bustle. Kerstel called Josh over to the stove, where a wok full of peppers sizzled. “How’s my soon-to-be son? I missed seeing him today. Oh, and there’s mail for you.”
“He’s fine. Can’t shoot the broad side of a barn, but otherwise fine.”
“The lawyer called,” Kerstel said. “Unofficial word is that Lauren and I are approved. We’ll probably hear for sure tomorrow, which means we can move Will in on Saturday.”
“Oh,” Josh said, startled. “That happened fast.”
“Your grandfather pulled some strings.”
“In the real government? I thought he could only pull strings in the dream-walker government.”
“Apparently he knows someone in Family Services.”
Does he have his finger in every pie in town? Josh wondered as she retrieved her card from the mail basket on the counter. Frowning, she ripped open the envelope and pulled the card free. The front cover showed a baby chicken saying, “I know I missed your birthday, but I made you a cake anyway.…” Inside, it read, “One for each day late,” and showed the chick lying on its back, surrounded by dozens of half-eaten cakes.
“Who’s it from?” Kerstel asked.
Josh choked on the next word and fell silent.
Haley and I are heading back in your direction. I know I’ve written to Winsor a couple different times that I’m on my way home, but this time I mean it. Not sure about the date, so expect us any time. Happy birthday!
Love and peanut brittle,
Whim
“That sounds like Whim,” Kerstel agreed, unaware that she hadn’t heard the entire message.
“Yeah.” What is he doing with Haley? “He just wrote to say happy birthday.”
Josh looked again at the exploding chick and felt a strange kinship. The discomfort she had lived with ever since Will came into her life closely resembled having eaten too much cake. She closed the card and put it back in the envelope, and moments later, she was in the Avishes’ apartment, knocking on Winsor’s bedroom door.
“Come in!” Winsor called.
Josh entered and found Winsor in her connected bathroom, removing a squishy pair of shoes. “Kiddie-pool nightmare,” she explained.
“You have carrot shavings in your hair,” Josh pointed out as she shut the bedroom door.
“Oh.” Winsor peered at herself in the mirror. “There was also a Dumpster involved.”
Josh sat down on the padded bench at the foot of the bed. The room was crowded with a bedroom set from the early 1900s, complete with a four-poster bed, a rolltop desk, and a wardrobe large enough to fit two grown men inside. Heavy red drapes had been pulled back around the bed and window.
“I got a card from Whim today.”
Winsor glanced at the floor near Josh’s feet, momentarily caught off guard. “Really,” she said, and turned back to the wardrobe.