by Kit Alloway
By the third night, Will had grown attuned to the desperate whimpers that preceded Josh’s full-blown panic. Deloise must have as well, because Will heard her voice through the walls of the nylon tents as she shook her sister awake.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re awake now. It wasn’t real.”
Then he heard Josh crying, not just whimpering but full-on crying, and Deloise shushing her.
From the other side of the tent, Whim whispered, “Isn’t there something you can do for her, Haley? Different stones or more salt or a tinfoil hat?”
“It isn’t coming from outside her,” Haley whispered. “It’s in her mind. That’s Will’s arena, not mine.”
Will didn’t know if Haley meant Will should be the one to comfort Josh because he was her boyfriend or because he’d read a lot of self-help books.
Pick one, he told himself.
Josh was still crying. Will sat up, unzipped the tent door, and brushed the salt off the bottoms of his feet before stepping into his sandals.
“Knock knock,” he said outside the girls’ tent.
Josh unzipped the door and fell into his arms while trying to climb out. “Sorry,” she moaned. “I can stop. I’ll figure out how.”
The sight of moonlit tears on her face broke him. He’d only seen her cry, really cry with tears—what, twice? She hadn’t even cried when Gloves shattered her elbow.
I’m an idiot, he thought, and hugged her.
“Mirren was right—they’re nightmares,” he said. “They aren’t fantasies. I’m not mad at you.”
For some reason, that made her cry harder.
They sat down on the cooler together, far enough from the tents that they could whisper to each other in private. Will found such comfort in holding Josh that for a moment he couldn’t remember why he’d stopped.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the nightmares when they started?” he asked.
“I did,” she insisted. “Every time I slept in your room, I was telling you.”
She felt so small to him tonight. She always felt small—she was small—but usually Will could feel the strength coiled inside her, the power ready to explode the instant she called on it. Tonight she felt small and so fragile, like a hummingbird.
“But why didn’t you tell me about the devices and … the other stuff?”
“For the same reason you can’t say it! Because it’s twisted. And it’s almost, sort of like cheating on you.” She hid her face against his shoulder. “And, honestly, I think I didn’t tell you because I knew it was wrong to build the circlet and vambrace and I knew you’d call me out.”
“I would have!” he agreed. “I mean, damn, Josh, what were you thinking?” She shrank back, but he kept his grip around her tight. He had no intention of letting either of them pull away tonight. “People need other people, Josh. None of us is complete alone. And one reason you need other people is because sometimes your judgment isn’t that great.”
She laughed. “Yeah, that’s true. Every time I do something stupid and reckless, I do it in spite of somebody telling me not to.” He felt her relax against him again. “Do you need me?”
“Of course. I need you to get me out of my head, because when I spend too much time there, I go a little crazy. I’ll always need you.”
The night was warm, but Will felt her shiver.
“But—but—now you’re going to hate me forever.”
“What?” he asked. “Why would I hate you?”
But she must have passed him her shiver, because he felt it slide through him like the warning whisper of a ghost. Don’t tell me, he thought. Let’s just stay at this lake forever. We can be happy here. We can survive.
“Because,” she whispered, “I have to go find Feodor.”
“What does that mean? Like, in your dreams?”
“No.” Her voice caught in her throat. “I have to break into Death and find him. He’s the only one besides Bash who can figure out how to remove the towers.”
Will was confused; whatever he had feared or expected, this wasn’t it.
“But if you go into Death, you’ll die. Besides, even if you went to the afterlife or whatever and found Feodor’s … soul, and it told you how to remove the towers, you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone who was still alive.”
Josh gently detached herself from him and stood up so she could pace around the coals of the campfire. “That’s not quite how it works. I might be able to—” She turned and called toward the tents, “Mirren? You want to come out here?”
A flashlight came on in the girls’ tent, and Mirren emerged a few moments later, pulling a light sweater on over her pajamas.
“Tell him,” Josh said.
Mirren sat down in a chair and said, very quietly, “Will, I’m going to tell you something that I never thought I would tell anyone, let alone three people. It’s one of the secrets my family keeps, one of the things we know that are the most important to keep secret. You will understand why as soon as I tell you. I need your promise that you will never tell anyone, for any reason.”
Will hated every word. More secrets—hadn’t he and Josh been trying to get rid of their secrets? Nothing good had ever come of one, and here he was being asked to keep another.
“I’m done keeping secrets,” he said. “I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient.”
He rose from the cooler, but Josh grabbed his arm. “Mirren, tell him.”
“If he won’t—”
“He doesn’t have to promise,” Josh insisted. “Will would never tell people things that would hurt them. He’s a dream walker; he understands responsibility.”
Mirren gave Josh a long, level look and said, “It’s on you, then.”
“Fine.”
Will almost protested that he didn’t want to know, but Mirren was already speaking in a low, quick voice that carried only a few feet through the darkness. “My family knows a ritual to break into Death. That is the correct term—‘to break in.’ It would allow us to enter Death, hopefully to find Feodor and ask him how to remove the towers, and then return to the World, without us dying.”
Will waited to see how he would react, but the information was lost on him. What Mirren was suggesting was so unbelievable that he simply didn’t believe it.
“And you’ve done this ritual before?” he asked.
“No,” Mirren admitted.
“But you know someone who has.”
“No.”
“But you have some sort of evidence that this is actually possible.”
Mirren glanced at Josh. “The ritual hasn’t been performed—or, at least, recorded as performed—in recent memory. But I believe it will work.”
“Yeah. That’s about what I thought.”
Will started toward his tent.
“I don’t even know what I got out of bed for,” he muttered to himself.
The girls chased after him, but he blocked out their protests and arguments. The plan was crap. The plan wasn’t going to work. They were going to have to keep thinking while he went hiking and fishing and photographed ducks.
Finally, Josh jumped in front of him and cut off his path. “All right,” she said. “Maybe it won’t work. Probably it won’t work. But at this point we don’t have any other ideas, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least try it.”
Will felt boxed in—Josh in front of him, Mirren behind him—and trapped most of all by this terrible thing they were suggesting.
“You don’t see why we shouldn’t try it?” he repeated slowly. “You don’t see why going into the Death universe and calling out one of the craziest people there to ask his advice, which you would apparently then consider following, is a bad idea?”
“He’s dead,” Josh said. “He can’t hurt us anymore.”
“You don’t know that!” Will felt his pulse speed up. The easy dismissal was wearing off and the realization that Josh was actually talking about going to find Feodor was sinking in. “Do you think being dead made him less crazy? �
�Cause I think it probably just pissed him off, and in case you’ve forgotten, we’re the ones who killed him!”
“Mirren says he’s a shade, he won’t be able to hurt us.”
“Mirren doesn’t even know if her ritual has ever worked or if it will work for us. For all she knows, Feodor could take over your body as soon as you get there.”
“No, I know that can’t happen,” Mirren said.
Haley emerged from their tent, wrapped in his disgusting old robe. “Your girlfriend’s insane,” Will told him. “You need to— She’s trying to find him!”
“Please,” Josh pleaded, “listen to us. This is a long shot, but it might work.”
“I don’t want it to work!” he burst out. “Are you listening to yourself? You’re talking about going to find Feodor! The evil sociopath who nearly killed us!”
“We just need to ask him a few questions—”
“What makes you think he’d tell you anything? Why would he help you?”
“Mirren says Death changes people—”
Will began laughing. “Yeah, I’m sure it does.” He tilted his head back and the stars above—or Haley’s crystals—spun crazily.
He couldn’t see Josh clearly, but he heard how helpless she felt when she spoke. “Will … we just don’t know what else to do at this point.”
“Pretty much anything else would be okay with me.”
“Will,” Josh said, and he saw her turn her head to glance at Mirren before going on.
“Don’t look at Mirren!” Will barked, and his control snapped like the chicken bone he wore around his neck. “Mirren doesn’t know what happened last time! She didn’t see the look on your face when you realized Feodor had Ian, she wasn’t the one you called an outsider when she tried to make you think rationally, and she didn’t have to watch you vomiting and beating your head against the floor to try to escape Feodor’s memories! So don’t tell me that Mirren is any sort of authority on letting you risk your life!”
He was furious, but for some reason he was laughing, too, a creepy, high-pitched laugh, and he let Haley coax him to sit down at the picnic table.
This isn’t happening, he tried to tell Haley with his mind. This can’t happen.
Josh knelt in front of him and wrapped her small hands around his fists. “Relax,” she said. “Relax.”
Slowly, he was able to release his clenched fingers, and Josh slipped her hands into his.
“You were right,” she said in a soft voice, “about going after Ian. It was lunacy, and I shouldn’t have done it. It was exactly what you said—you told me I was being reckless and I didn’t listen. I know that every scar you and Haley have is because of me. I know that you’re shaking right now because you haven’t gotten over what happened in Warsaw, and I know that’s my fault, too, because I haven’t been here for you since we got back.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry, Will, that you’re hurting because of me. I’m so sorry.”
Will fought tears. He didn’t want to break down now, he wanted—he needed to stay angry. Seeing Josh wipe her own eyes didn’t help.
“I know I’ve screwed up again. Probably even worse this time than last. And I wish I could go tell my dad what I’ve done and trust that he and the Gendarmerie would sort it out, but by now Peregrine has probably gotten to all of them. I’m not trying to be a hero this time. But there’s no one besides the six of us we can be sure aren’t compromised. And there isn’t anyone else who can build another set of devices, if it comes to that.”
Will slid his hand up her wrist to gently touch the skin near one of the quarter-sized burns on her arm. “But look what they’re doing to you.”
“I know, I know,” she said, choking on tears. “But if you’re right about the power my grandfather has now, I don’t think these burns will be anything compared to what he’ll do to me.”
The thought was too much for Will. “Oh, God—” he said, his voice breaking. He leaned forward until his forehead pressed against hers, and he put his hand on the back of her neck, only to find more sores and burns there.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she said. “Please. I can’t go through with this knowing it will mean losing you. I need you now more than ever.”
“I can’t do this again, Josh. I can’t handle it.”
“Please, please. Just hang in there while we figure this out. We will, I swear, and then we’ll go away. Anywhere you want, for as long as you want. I don’t care if we miss senior year. We can go to Tahiti, or Ireland, or Greece.”
“Therapy,” he said, opening his eyes. “I want to go to therapy with you.”
“We can do that,” she promised. “We can go to therapy every day if you want.”
He was hanging all his hopes on the possibility that they would survive this, and that if they did, whatever new wounds they had acquired would be healable. And he knew those odds were slim, that he should get up and walk away with what he had left of his sanity, but her words kept echoing through his mind: I need you now more than ever.
“Okay,” he said.
Twenty−four
Gravity, Mirren thought. It’s pulling everything together.
What were the chances that she would read a piece of her scroll that spoke of leading the True Dream Walker into Death, then stumble upon the ritual to do so, and finally discover that she had been walking side by side with the True Dream Walker all along?
These things could not have happened by chance. In all of it, she saw the hand of gravity, drawing her and Peregrine toward their final confrontation, drawing her scroll toward fruition, even drawing Will toward his obsession. She felt herself being pulled along. But she reminded herself, as she followed a weary flashlight beam deep into Iph National Forest, that astronomical odds could only be made more remote by adding one more unlikely scenario to the equation: reason to use the ritual.
This has to be what we’re meant to do, Mirren assured herself again. For all of these circumstances to have come together … how could gravity not be leading us to this conclusion?
Josh had proposed alternatives. They could bomb the Dashiel Winters Building and hope the blast both killed Peregrine and destroyed the DNA database. Of course, they would kill scores of innocents in the process. They could change their names, dye their hair, and begin new lives somewhere else, but that saved only the six of them, leaving the rest of the World in Peregrine’s bloody hands. They could, theoretically, wait until Peregrine surfaced, then stalk and kill him. This was the only practical plan they had. But Peregrine might not surface for weeks or even months, during which time he would be free to stage nightmares for anyone he liked.
So they were going to break into Death, find Feodor, and pray that he could provide a solution. And was willing to tell them what it was.
“This is far enough,” Josh said, and the bobbing flashlights formed a rough circle as the six teenagers came together in a small clearing. “Will, you and Whim mark the doorway. Deloise, can you hold flashlights for them? Mirren and Haley, start setting up the singing bowls.”
From weighty duffel bags, Mirren and Haley unloaded eleven hand-hammered brass bowls. Each sang a different note when a wooden mallet was run around the lip of the bowls. The instructions for the ritual scientifically specified which notes the bowls should produce, and because a number of frequencies weren’t part of the Western world’s musical scale, Josh and Haley had meticulously hammered the bowls’ bellies until they produced the desired, off-key notes.
Will marked out a rough doorway on the ground in salt, and then he dug a firebreak around it with a trowel while Whim filled the doorway with an even layer of gunpowder. Deloise placed extinguishers on each side of the doorway.
She and Whim were staying behind. They had decided this during what should have been a brief, logic-based discussion of who was needed on the trip and had instead turned into an emotionally draining scene complete with tears and threats. Mirren and Josh were going without question. Josh wanted Will to come because she didn’t feel sh
e could trust her own judgment; Mirren didn’t know how much help Will would be when he couldn’t stop trembling. Deloise broke down at the thought of Josh going, claiming that Josh had sworn never to do anything dangerous again after her first encounter with Feodor, and Will backed her up. Mirren still didn’t trust Whim and didn’t want him to come along, to which Whim had taken offense. He’d finally relented but made the mistake of trying to comfort Deloise, who threw a cup of fruit punch in his face when he put his arm around her.
In the end, Josh, Will, and Haley had agreed to go with Mirren. Whim and Deloise were staying behind to make sure they didn’t burn down the forest.
“What time is it?” Josh asked, wiping her hands on her jeans.
“Seven to midnight,” Whim said.
Will pulled on a backpack he’d loaded with protein bars, water, and weapons. The ritual provided almost no information on what they’d encounter once they reached Death, only a few warnings.
“Remember,” Mirren said, “don’t eat or drink anything except what comes from Will’s pack. Don’t accept any gifts. Don’t take off your shoes. And don’t tell anyone your name.”
Haley nodded. Mirren wasn’t sure why he was putting on a violet-and-yellow cardigan, since the temperature hovered in the mid-eighties, but she still thought his sweaters were as much sources of comfort as of warmth.
“What do we do after you go?” Whim asked.
Josh glanced at Mirren, who shrugged. “Wait,” Josh said.
“What if you don’t come back?” Deloise asked, her voice still gritty from crying.
Josh bent over to check that her knife was secured in its shin strap, but Mirren thought she did it just to avoid meeting her little sister’s eyes. “Keep waiting,” Mirren told Deloise.
Mirren didn’t doubt that Josh understood the danger of what they were about to do. Mythology was full of stories about heroes who descended to the underworld and never resurfaced. Beware the tricks of the dead, read the last line of the ritual. Will understood—he couldn’t stop understanding long enough to pull himself together. And Haley was a born seer, who accepted the danger and the inevitability of these risks with his usual grace and gravitas.