by Kit Alloway
Josh ignored them all and sat down on the floor next to her unconscious grandfather. She had hoped that being near him would help her decide what to do, but if anything, it made the sense of peace she had brought back with her fade faster. Instead of seeing the path he was meant to take, all she could feel was her own fear that he would come after her again.
Will stood on Peregrine’s other side. He used the toe of his shoe to nudge the gun across the floor and toward Josh. “Shoot him.”
Deloise gasped.
Killing Peregrine was an option, Josh knew. Maybe the best option.
“He’s insane,” Will said. “If we don’t kill him, he’ll keep coming after us.”
“I’m siding with this guy,” Katia said. Will glanced at her and then did a double take, as if he hadn’t realized she was in the room.
“You can’t kill him!” Deloise cried.
Recalling the thicket that was Peregrine’s mind, Josh said, “He’s going to keep staging nightmares. We don’t even know what World we’re going back to, what he might have done to it. He could have turned Dad and Kerstel against us or convinced them to kill each other or to burn the house down.”
Safety, that was all Josh had ever wanted. Safety for the dreamers, safety for her family. Safety for herself.
The same uncertainty that had snapped her out of her vision filled her now, and she wished she had been able to control her anger and fear long enough to see the path intended for Peregrine.
“So we’ll put him in jail,” Deloise said. “There are dream-walker jails!”
“Yeah, minimum security jails,” Whim said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’ll break out the first day.”
“Will is right,” Feodor added. “This incident will only strengthen his ambitions.”
“I agree,” Mirren said, but then her eyes widened, and she grabbed the giant key ring off its hook and dashed into the maze of file cabinets. “Wait—maybe—”
“You can’t kill him!” Deloise repeated, shouting it this time.
Josh tightened her hand around the gun, but she couldn’t bring herself to point it at Peregrine. “He was going to kill us all, or turn us into slaves like Bash and Bayla.”
“Josh, he’s our grandfather,” Deloise said, her eyes full of tears.
“I know,” Josh said. She glanced at Mirren’s aunt and uncle, who were standing near the doorway holding their daughter. “He hurt you, too. What do you think we should do?”
“Kill him,” Katia said.
Fel and Collena exchanged a long look. Finally, Collena said, “The monarchy has never practiced capital punishment. Neither do we.”
“Not even for him,” Fel added, although the look on his face suggested he thought that maybe it was time to break with tradition.
They all want him dead, Josh thought. Carefully, she opened Peregrine’s mouth and stuck the barrel of the gun between his teeth. The surest way to kill him was to shoot into the base of his brain. He was deep in shock, sweaty and pale. He’d never know what had happened; he’d never even wake up.
But the egg’s wisdom tugged at her. Not yet, she kept thinking. Not yet.
“Josh!” Deloise shouted.
Will said, “Whim, take her upstairs so we can do this.”
When Whim tried to grab Deloise, she hit him with a left punch so fast and sure that it would have made Muhammad Ali proud. Whim stumbled backward and careened into a row of file cabinets.
“Touch me again!” Deloise dared him. “Josh, don’t do this!”
“I don’t know what else to do,” Josh told her sister. “How are we going to defend ourselves from him?”
She didn’t know what else to do, but she didn’t know if she could do it, either. Why couldn’t she have seen his path? The weight of the gun was making her hand tremble, and she was afraid she’d shoot by accident.
“Josh, you have to stop him while you have the chance,” Will said, a frantic note entering his voice.
“Wait,” Mirren said. She emerged from the stacks holding up a photocopy of a clay tablet with what appeared to be orderly chicken scratches on it. “We can banish him from the Dream forever.”
“What?” Josh asked.
“How?” Deloise asked.
“This symbol. If you carve it into a person’s skin, their soul can’t enter the Dream.”
Feodor took the photocopy and studied it.
“He won’t be able to go into the Dream at all?” Josh asked. “Not even when he sleeps?”
“Neither body nor soul,” Mirren said. “You understand … it’s a forbidden act. To stop someone from entering the Dream … it’s sacrilege.”
“How will keeping him out of the Dream help?” Will demanded. “He’ll just kill us when we’re awake!”
“It’ll keep him from staging,” Deloise told Will. “Maybe if he can’t enter the Dream, he’ll lose interest in controlling Josh.”
“Or maybe he’ll sneak into the house and murder us while we sleep!”
Josh wondered if Will was right. Peregrine’s interest had always been in determining the extent of Josh’s powers as the True Dream Walker. He’d never borne her a particular enmity—although that would probably change after they turned his chest into scratch art.
“This appears to be from the Muzat School,” Feodor said. “Impressive.”
He held the page out to Josh, and she stared at the scratches. “We’d have to carve this into his skin? With a knife?”
“Josh!” Will protested in a near shout. His lips were pale with anger.
“Yes,” Mirren said. “But … we wouldn’t have to kill him.”
Josh shook her head. “After what he did to us, I always thought it would be easy to kill him. But maybe it just isn’t easy to kill someone.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be,” Deloise said.
“He’s a murderer and a psychopath,” Will said desperately.
Josh ran a hand through her hair. “I know,” she assured Will. “I know exactly what he is.”
Not yet, her mind said. Not yet.
She looked at her sister. “Can you live with using this symbol on him?”
“Being unable to dream could drive him mad,” Mirren warned.
Deloise sighed. “He’s already mad. At least this way he gets to live.”
“Will,” Josh said. “Can you live with it?”
She was almost afraid to ask, knowing how angry he was at her.
“I think we should shoot him in the head,” Will said. “He deserves to die! How do you even know this symbol thing will work?”
“The Muzat School created a number of such symbols,” Feodor told him. “The others have proven effective.”
This information only enraged Will further. “I don’t care!” he shouted. “He’s criminally insane! Why can’t we just kill him?”
“Because we aren’t killers,” Josh said.
Will gave her a look then that scared her. He wasn’t the Will she knew, the one who had thought things through so carefully, who had been able to examine his own desires and emotions with such a rational eye.
“Josh, if you don’t do this…”
He trailed off, and Josh didn’t know if he couldn’t think of a threat bad enough or just couldn’t speak.
He’s going to break up with me, she thought, if I don’t kill my grandfather.
But she couldn’t do it. Not even for Will. She had killed one person that night; she wasn’t going to kill another.
She stood up and held the gun out to Will. “I can’t kill him. If you can, that’s your choice.”
“Josh,” Deloise said with alarm.
“Uh, is this a good idea?” Whim asked.
“It’s a great idea,” Will said, taking the gun from Josh. “I’ll do it myself.”
“Josh,” Deloise said again. “Stop him!”
Josh shook her head. “It’s Will’s call.”
Mirren put some distance between herself and Peregrine’s body, and she drew
Deloise away. When Whim started to step toward Will, Josh held out her hand to wave him off.
“What are you doing?” Whim asked.
Josh just held out her hand.
Will knelt at the top of Peregrine’s head. He pressed the barrel of the gun to Peregrine’s forehead, then changed his mind and put the gun in the old man’s mouth.
Josh waited. Deloise watched through her fingers, and Whim jumped every time Will made any motion at all.
“Okay,” Will muttered to himself. “Let’s do this.”
But he didn’t do anything. Josh watched the gun tremble in his hand, the metal barrel clacking against Peregrine’s teeth. From where she stood, Josh could see the lump beneath the back of Will’s T-shirt—the scar from the skin graft he’d needed after their last encounter with Feodor. As much as Will blamed Feodor for his suffering, he and Josh both knew that Peregrine was equally to blame. He was the one who had manipulated them into entering Feodor’s universe, knowing what they would face.
Still, the sight of the scar didn’t make Josh willing to kill her grandfather. It just made her want to put her arms around Will and guide him away. It made her want to balance the universes once and for all.
Will repositioned himself, checking to make certain the barrel was pointed at the back of Peregrine’s skull. He squared his shoulders and got a good grip on the handle. He took a deep breath.
He still didn’t fire.
Josh had known he wouldn’t. Well, almost known. She had been pretty sure. He’d shot at Feodor, but Feodor was already dead. For all Will had been traumatized, he was still a moral person underneath, and he couldn’t shoot a living man in cold blood any more than Josh could. She felt an unexpected pride that he couldn’t pull the trigger, not even against a man who had hurt him terribly.
“Oh, my God,” Whim burst out. “Just shoot him already! The suspense is killing me!”
Will’s head snapped up, and his face was filled with rage and, beneath that, humiliation. “Can you shut up for one minute, Whim?”
“It’s been like ten minutes!” Whim protested.
Will sprang to his feet, yanking the gun from Peregrine’s mouth. “You know what? This isn’t my problem.” He shoved the gun into Josh’s arms, and for an instant she fumbled it dangerously. “All of this is your fault,” Will told her. “So you take care of it. I’m done cleaning up your messes.”
His words filled Josh with a familiar rush of guilt and shame. He was right that the situation they were in was her fault—not completely her fault, but enough.
He stormed out of the file room, and Josh ran after him, handing the gun to her sister as she passed. She heard a metallic sliding as Deloise removed the magazine.
“Will, wait!” she called, and she caught him on a landing between staircases. “Please, wait.”
He had tears in his eyes. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said, all his anger burned away. “Josh, I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“I know, I know. You don’t have to do anything else.” She tried to take his hand, but he was moving too quickly. “We’ll go home and you can rest.”
“No, I don’t want to go home! I don’t want any of it!”
He means being a dream walker, Josh realized.
“I almost shot a man!” he wailed. “I can’t—I can’t be part of this! It’s changing me. It’s … destroying me.”
“Will,” Josh said, “this is the end of all the craziness. I promise. We’ll go get Haley back and then it will all be over.”
“Over? Are you kidding? You just assured that it isn’t over by letting Peregrine live! And I can’t—” He pushed the hair out of his eyes, taking dizzy, pacing steps on the landing. Josh tried to hug him and he pushed her away. “No! Don’t touch me! I don’t want any of it! I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t be with you. I can’t be part of any of it.”
Josh didn’t know what to do, and her own panic was making her hands tremble. He doesn’t mean it, she told herself. He’ll calm down and see reason.
“Ask me for something,” she begged. “Anything. I’ll do whatever you want—go to therapy, or quit dream walking for a while, or go on vacation.”
He shook his head, and the way he looked at Josh without seeing her, as if she no longer existed to him, made her realize that she had already lost him.
“I just want my mom,” he said hollowly, and he wandered up the next flight of stairs, away from her and alone.
* * *
Later, after they’d found an emergency kit with a syringe of morphine to keep Peregrine sedated, and after Feodor had volunteered to do the cutting, and after Josh, Whim, and Mirren had spent an hour holding the old man down and putting pressure on his new wounds, her friends tried to convince Josh that Will would come around.
“He’s all hyped up on adrenaline,” Whim said. “He just needs a day or two to chill out.”
“Once he gets some perspective, he’ll be glad he didn’t kill Peregrine,” Mirren insisted.
They meant well, Josh knew. But they were wrong. Will wouldn’t calm down and he wouldn’t forgive her, because in the end, she had been the one who hurt him the worst.
Only Feodor failed to try to convince her that everything would be fine.
Feodor knew better.
Thirty−one
Two days later, Will sat alone on the couch in the guys’ apartment and watched the Accordance Conclave coverage.
“Joining us now,” said the reporter on the television screen, “is noted political analyst Jobe Calmikterie. Jobe, is there any doubt about the outcome here?”
“None,” replied a middle-aged man in an ugly suit. “Now that Mirren Rousellario has been exposed as a traitor, the only votes she’s going to get will come from fringe lunatics and hard-core anarchists.”
“Like mother, like daughter, eh?”
“That’s right, Myssa. I doubt we’ll even see a statement from her regarding the Accordance Conclave. If she has any sense at all, she’s left the country.”
“I’d shoot her if I saw her,” Myssa agreed.
Her words added another boulder to the mountain of despair Will already sagged beneath. He and the others had returned from the Hidden Kingdom to find that every dream walker they knew believed Mirren was evil—even Davita, who proudly announced that she had been the one to show Peregrine how to access the Hidden Kingdom.
Josh explained to them that they had been victims of staging, and even though they all believed her, they seemed unable to connect the staging with their certainty about Mirren. Right now, the adults of the household were in the living room, watching the election results and cheering for Peregrine. Kerstel was wearing a homemade T-shirt that read, “Babies for Borgenicht!”
Mirren herself was safely tucked away in the Hidden Kingdom (the entrance to which had been moved), but she had sworn to return to the World once everyone stopped wanting her dead. Will didn’t know how long that might take, given how high anti-Mirren sentiment was running.
Myssa the reporter was standing in front of a projected map of North America, talking about which districts had turned in results already. The districts in which Peregrine had won were colored lime green, centered on Braxton. The districts in which Mirren had won were meant to be colored orange, but so far none were, not even far away where Peregrine hadn’t been able to stage dreams.
“As goes Rome, so goes the empire,” Feodor had said when he’d predicted this outcome the day before.
Feodor was in Whim’s bedroom with Whim and Deloise, building some sort of cage that he said would help them restore Winsor’s soul. “Assuming her brain isn’t mush,” he’d added when he finished explaining that he thought reunification would be possible. Will expected it was all just another trick, but he’d given up trying to warn anyone.
“Even with twelve more districts left to report in, this election has obviously been a landslide for Peregrine Borgenicht and the Lodestone Party,” Jobe said. “It’s a shame that he isn’t
well enough to publicly claim victory and truly enjoy this moment.”
“Obviously we’re all sending well wishes and congratulations to the hospital.”
After Feodor had carved Peregrine like a roast, Deloise, Josh, and Whim had carried him out of the Hidden Kingdom and done a dump-and-run outside a Braxton ER. The Lodestone Party was saying he had pneumonia, but according to Whim’s underground sources, he was really in a psych ward, babbling incoherently and missing a hand.
“Five more districts have just reported,” Myssa said, and another burst of lime green appeared on the map. “Oh—and here’s a surprise! Greenland has gone orange!”
Jobe laughed. “Do they not have Internet up there? How far behind on the news are they?”
“Of the fewer than five hundred dream walkers in Greenland, slightly over one hundred voted for Mirren Rousellario and eighty-nine for Peregrine Borgenicht.” Sarcastically, she added, “Now we’ve got a real race on our hands.”
Will groaned. Bad enough that Mirren was losing; did the reporters have to enjoy it so much?
The apartment door opened, and Josh appeared, carrying several poster-sized sheets of what appeared to be copper. She stopped short when she saw Will.
Deloise had told him that Josh had killed Bash to save him and nearly killed herself in the process. In fact, Del insisted that Josh had died for at least a minute. She had been performing mouth-to-mouth while Whim did CPR when Will hit the activator and nearly destroyed the Hidden Kingdom.
Will felt nothing but guilt about any of it. Josh had killed Bash, and Will had killed Bayla, and neither of them had been able to kill the only person who needed killing.
The sight of Josh standing in the doorway sent a throb of pain through his heart, both because the wound of losing her was so fresh and because he still loved her so damn much. He knew that demanding she kill her grandfather had been irrational, yet he still felt angry that she hadn’t done it, which was supremely hypocritical since he hadn’t been able to do it either. And he hated her for having shown him that.
The truth was, whether or not they’d killed Peregrine had been immaterial to the state of their relationship. Will would have broken up with her either way, he saw that now. Distancing himself from her and the constant danger she inspired was the only chance he had to regain some of his sanity. He needed space, and quiet, and peace. He needed to feel safe in the World again.