Dreamfever (40 page)

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.

Besides, Josh was Feodor's in a way she had never been Will's, maybe not even in a romantic sense, but in some deeper, more thorough way. Feodor and his memories had changed who she was, and Will didn't know her anymore. He didn't trust her.

Will had overheard them talking in the office earlier. They'd been speaking Polish, and very quickly, as if they had so much to say to each other.

Will didn't have anything left to say to Josh. He didn't even know what he was doing in this house anymore, except that Whim and Deloise and his adopted parents had all insisted he stay, and since he wasn't eighteen yet, he didn't really have a choice.

Now, as Josh fumbled with her sheets of copper in the doorway, Will just stared at her and said nothing. He pinched his lips shut against the desire to say,
I'm sorry. I take it all back.

“Sorry,” she babbled. “I was just going to— I can come back later.”

“It's fine,” Will told her, his voice cracking. “Do what you need to do.”

She set the sheets of copper against the wall and closed the apartment door behind her. Still not looking at him, she said, “About … I was … hoping, I guess…”

So we're back to this,
Will thought, remembering how difficult she had found it to talk to him when they first met.

“I didn't mean to…”

Back then, he would have helped her, coaxed her into finding the words she needed, reassured her that whatever she felt was okay. The urge to do so was still strong in him, as was the desire to hold her close and reassure her without words.

He didn't have the strength to do either.

Finally, Josh just muttered, “Sorry,” again, and fled to Whim's room with her copper.

As soon as she disappeared, another round of guilt hit him. He knew what it must have taken for her to even try to start a conversation about the way things had ended.

I should have helped her. She was trying so hard.

But he was afraid that one forgiveness would lead to another, and by tomorrow he'd be neck-deep in nightmares and danger and science he didn't understand. Being alone was so much easier and less frightening. He turned up the volume on the television.

“And it's official!” Myssa declared. “Peregrine Borgenicht and his Lodestone Party have been voted in as the permanent form of government for the dream walkers of North America!”

Lime-green confetti rained down on the stage, and the station cut to a shot of dream walkers celebrating at the Dashiel Winters Building in Braxton.

Will leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes, and the cheers filled his ears.

“Long live Peregrine Borgenicht!”

 

Thirty−two

Josh, Whim, and
Feodor broke into the nursing home at two in the morning, crawling through a window in the accounting office and taking the equipment elevator up to the third floor, which was useful because they had a lot of equipment. Besides the copper cage, Feodor required various osmium plates, a wealth of crystals and magnets, a massive negative ion generator, a water pump with ten yards of tubing, and five gallons of seawater. Not to mention the canister containing Winsor's soul.