Dreamfire (14 page)

Will never would have anticipated how much the gift meant to him. Everything thus far had felt very official, like registering for school, but here was this little welcome gift being given to him by someone who, unlike Josh, was so excited that he was part of their world now.

“Thank you,” he said. The trimidion was light in his hands.

“That's it.” The woman stood up to shake their hands. “Please just let me say again how delighted I am to have gotten to meet you both.”

Afterward, riding upstairs, Will caught Josh's eye in one of the elevator's mirrored walls and said, “So, here's a weird question: Are you famous?”

“What?” she said. “No.” But she tried to sink under her shoulders again.

“Is it because your grandfather's on the junta?”

“No! Bleh. I only see him when I have to. I don't even tell people I'm related to him.” She cringed as she continued, lowering her voice as if afraid their reflected images might hear her. “I'm not famous, exactly. Just … a few people know who I am from this study.”

“What kind of study?”

“Some dream theorists were studying whether or not variables like age, race, gender, and all that had any influence on a dream walker's resolution rate. Peregrine heard about it and volunteered me, and … I sort of messed up their data.”

“How?” Will asked when Josh trailed off.

Reluctantly, Josh admitted, “Everybody else was able to resolve a nightmare an average of sixty-four percent of the time. My resolution rate was eighty-eight percent.”

A
24 percent
difference? Either the scientists who had conducted this study were incompetent, or else Josh was an outright prodigy.

But when Will thought back on their trips to the Dream together, he realized that 88 percent sounded right to him. Some afternoons they walked four or five nightmares and resolved every single one.

“This totally explains why I've been getting congratulation cards from people I don't know,” he said as the elevator doors opened.

“You have?” Josh cringed. “How many?”

“Like, nearly a dozen. One lady sent a poem.”

They stepped out onto the top floor, where Josh's equilibrium was restored by the news that her grandfather was at a press conference and would have to leave immediately afterward to catch a flight, negating the possibility of their visiting with him today.

“Please make sure to tell him we stopped by,” Josh said firmly.

She was positively giddy on the ride back downstairs.
She really hates this guy,
Will thought.

“Let's stop in the press room and wave,” she said. “He won't be able to do anything.”

Will had never been to a press conference, or a press room, and was surprised by the large, voluptuous room filled with velvet curtains and upholstered chairs. At the front of the room, behind a podium on a stage, stood a man with a large bald head. His face was too big for his skull, with thick, wet lips that could have touched his chin and eyes that might have slid right down his cheeks for their weight. Small and very thin, he was not at all frail but overly animated, crossing and uncrossing his arms, putting his hands on his hips, tapping one foot, shifting his weight, pulling out a pocket watch on a chain to check the time, even as he answered questions from the dozen or so journalists gathered before him.

Josh slipped inside the doors and leaned against the back wall. Will followed.

“Mr. Hyde,” Peregrine was saying, “Dracula, Hannibal Lecter—” Peregrine stumbled over his words as he caught sight of Josh's wave. He gave her a little nod before continuing. “Plus Darth Vader, terminators, the guy from
Harry Potter
who didn't have a nose, the
Jaws
shark—a few years ago I ran into Grendel's mother, for God's sake! And those are just the famous ones. Remember '97, when it took almost six months to figure out that a single copy of some Portuguese horror story had made its way into a middle school library in Savannah? Every kid in the seventh grade had read that book, they were passing it around like the flu, and everybody freaked out just like now with these trench-coat people. We
will
identify them, but it's going to take time, people.”

He paused to take a question Will couldn't hear.

“That's a ludicrous suggestion,” Peregrine replied. His voice dripped condescension. “This isn't a matter for the Gendarmerie, it's a matter for the Department of Media and Cultural Influences, and I assure you that every member of that department is working his ass off as we speak. People who are demanding an investigation are just pathetic conspiracy-mongers who are looking for a way to discredit me because they're afraid that one day, I might ask them to give back to a government that has done nothing but give to them. So they sit with their laptops and their fancy cappuccinos and they bitch and whine all over the Internet, and now you're at an official press conference asking if a rumor about a rumor on a blog is real. You're wasting time, people—”

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—”