Dreamfire (17 page)

Without even thinking, Josh broke Stellanor's First Rule. She might have ignored this extraordinary coincidence, made excuses, come up with some rationale—if the dreamer's terror hadn't set off all the alarm bells inside her at once. Her instinct didn't just speak up; it exploded like a land mine.

Run, run, run!

He will
kill
you.

The dreamer had already swum to the diving board, sobbing but apparently unable to control her own motions. The man pulled her out of the water by her hair, causing her to scream, and then he dropped her on the end of the diving board, which bounced beneath her weight. With quick, coordinated gestures, he unhooked a second mask from the tank and jammed it against the dreamer's face. He twisted a knob on the mask and the girl began to twitch.

Josh suddenly recalled what the woman in the sewer dream had said:
They put a mask on Paul and he turned all blue.

She could feel that the man was going to do something awful to the girl, something that had nothing to do with gas. Fear doused her as if from a flamethrower, but as a scream rose in her throat, she realized she had nearly lost herself in the dreamer's fear and pulled back.

This nightmare is full of dreamfire,
she thought, and even after she had imagined jamming the cork back into her safety walls, pounding it into place with a mallet, frissons of anxiety ran up her spine like sparks on a wire. Her skin felt strangely warm.

No, wait, her skin wasn't warming, the pool water was hardening around her. For a moment it flashed opaque, and she felt concrete surrounding her legs. Then it slipped into water again, but around her matter itself began to flicker and melt.

This dream was coming undone.

Run, run, run!
Josh's instinct wailed.

Josh's Rule:
Trust your gut.

“Abort!” she shouted.

“Wait—what?” Will asked. Unlike Josh, he had never run into the man in the trench coat before. “What about the dreamer?”

“Forget her!”

Winsor and Deloise swam toward the pool's edge. They might not have followed Josh's reasoning, but they knew her well enough not to question when she called time.

Will questioned. “Why?”

Above them, the Ferris wheel came to a creaky halt. Its yellow lights flickered.

“I said abort!” Josh shouted, but Will continued to argue.

“He doesn't even have a weapon.”

Winsor climbed out of the pool and ran toward the fun house nearby.

“I can save her!” Will said, and he swam away from Josh, closer to the diving board, where the dreamer continued to twitch, her skin white. The man in the trench coat crushed the gas mask to her face.

The spokes of the Ferris wheel began to wilt until the whole structure listed to one side. Beside it, the slide tower swayed. The wailing siren in Josh's head grew louder.

This was no time for Will to be a hero.

“Will!” Josh yelled. “Stop! Right now!
Stop!
”

She wanted to threaten him, to say she'd ground him or slap him or kick him out of her house. She was desperate enough that all those things sounded reasonable.

He must have heard the panic in her voice, because he stopped swimming and turned around. Before he could speak, Josh pointed to the fun house and shouted as if she were making an imperial decree: “
GO!
”

Looking like a whipped puppy, he went. Josh followed.

For a moment, she thought they would be okay. She and Will were swimming away from the man in the trench coat. Deloise was climbing out of the pool. At the fun house, Winsor had her lighter out and was readying her compact to open a porthole back to the World.

Then a second trench-coated figure stormed through the fun house door and knocked Winsor to the ground.

“Winsor!” Josh shouted. Deloise ran toward the fun house.

Will cursed and stopped swimming long enough for Josh to catch up with him. She shoved him hard between the shoulder blades and they took off together.

Run,
Josh's gut said.
You don't know what you're fighting.

The trench-coated figure wrestling with Winsor saw Deloise coming and turned his head sharply in her direction. A cotton candy machine exploded as Deloise passed it, and she hit the ground.

Did he just control the Dream?

Josh scrambled out of the pool, barely able to believe what she'd seen.

Winsor took advantage of the distraction to kick her assailant's legs out from under him. Lighter tucked in her fist, she punched him in the gut.

Deloise was already back on her feet. “Open the archway!” she called to Josh. “I'll help Winsor.”

Josh nodded, although she didn't see a doorway besides the one Winsor and the man were wrestling in. As she turned her head to look around, she caught sight of Will.

He had retrieved the mallet from the strong-man booth. Holding it over his shoulder, he inched his way down the diving board behind the man in the trench coat. Josh wanted to shout at him again, but she was afraid of ruining his surprise. The dreamer, who had turned as gray as cigarette smoke, lay faceup on the edge of the diving board. Josh ran toward them even though she knew she would be too late to do anything.

“Look at the tower!” Deloise screamed.

The slide tower was bending at the waist and then straightening, bending then straightening. Never mind that no wooden structure should be so flexible—the whole thing was about to topple.

Will brought down the hammer. The wooden end, edges flared from so many poundings, caught the man's green felt hat at an angle and flung his head to his shoulder. He crashed into the water. The dreamer, still tethered to him by her gas mask, followed.

Something crashed. People screamed, and a static crackle filled the air. The dreamer surfaced without her mask, eyes wide open, mouth full of water. The creaking of the waterslide structure became a terrible groan. Josh didn't have time to look up, but she knew what was happening—the tower was finally giving way.

And then … something fell on her. Sound crashed around her, so much sound that it lost all distinction and became only a deafening rush. Something else landed on her, something heavier, and behind her eyelids she saw a flash of red.

Then there was quiet, and with the quiet came the pain. She didn't try to move, not even when she felt her left leg twisted back under her hip and the agony it sent through her knee. Cold water soaked her clothes, and her neck was wrenched to one side.

She thought time had passed, but she wasn't sure how much. At some point she must have passed out. She opened and closed one hand. All her fingers worked. She tried to call for help and choked.

People screamed and more water splashed against her legs.
Didn't anyone manage to wake that dreamer up?
Josh wondered. She could still smell the cotton candy and roasted peanuts.

“Josh, don't move!” someone called. She knew his voice, but she couldn't place it. Why couldn't she remember who he was? “We're going to get you out of there.”

Suddenly something heavy was lifted off her head. “Don't move her,” another voice ordered, and this one she at least recognized. “Wait until we have the back board.”

“Del?” Josh asked, her voice hardly more than a croak.

“I see her,” said the guy she couldn't place. His boot flew past her face, knocking away planks and sheets of curved plastic. When there was space, he crouched down in front of her. She finally saw his face, his pretty green-hazel eyes and curly black hair. “I've got you.”

Her heartbeat fluttered in her ears.

“Ian?” she whispered.

 

Thirteen

Josh stared at
the stain on the hospital room ceiling through the mess of wires, slings, and metal bars holding up her leg. The pillows under her head were flat and made her neck cramp. She was surprised she could still feel pain of any sort, what with all the drugs the doctor had pumped into her. She could feel her heart, too, the beats slowed to the pace of a funeral dirge from the meds as she lay in bed and rubbed her thumb over her plumeria pendant.

Deloise, Lauren, and Kerstel had finally gone home. Josh didn't know what time it was, but she felt certain that the witching hour had come and gone. Whim Avish—who had apparently arrived home just as the amusement-park nightmare was heating up—was going to stay the night at the hospital and make sure that Will, who had a concussion, didn't lapse into a coma before sunrise. Winsor had endured having her broken wrist set before leaving with her mother.

Josh didn't know where Haley McKarr had landed in all of the chaos.

How could I have thought he was Ian?

It had been easy, really. Ian and Haley were—no,
had been
—identical twins, and she hadn't seen either one of them for seven months. She hadn't expected Haley—or Whim, for that matter—to show up in a nightmare gone horribly wrong. And she hadn't expected Haley to have his hair cut like Ian's, or to be wearing one of Ian's shirts.

During the confusion of her rescue, Josh managed to call Haley “Ian” four more times.

In the ER, the cover story was that Josh had been standing next to an aboveground pool when a second-story deck collapsed on it. Will had been standing on the pool's ladder and hit his head when the structure fell apart. Winsor had broken her wrist trying to dig them out. Since they were all soaked in chlorine water, the story went over well.

Josh winced when she heard the hospital room door open. If that nurse was back to check her vitals again …

But it wasn't the nurse. Will stood in the doorway, his billowing hospital gown a black silhouette against the hall lights.

“Will?” she asked.

He didn't move. Josh couldn't see his face, but the way he stood reminded her of numerous dreamers: panicked, frozen. He looked like she had felt for the last six hours.

“Are you all right?” she asked finally.

“I'm sorry,” he all but whispered.

“Come in.”

He hesitated before stepping inside, closing the door, and walking to the bed. One hand trailed the wall to balance his wobbly steps. He half fell into the chair beside the bed.

“Do I look that bad?” Josh asked.

“What?”

In the light from the window's view of Tanith, she saw his face in hues of silver and gray, like she imagined aliens would look. Only without the overgrown auburn hair and the white bandage around his head.

“You nearly went running when you saw me,” she told him.

“Oh, I'm sorry.” He smiled with a wince and shook his head, which caused him to wince again. “It wasn't you. Just … for a second, you looked like my mother.”

He and Josh had never talked about his parents, or why he had been a ward of the state. She hadn't wanted to pry, and she hadn't wanted to risk a session of quid pro quo, but tonight she asked anyway. Maybe the meds were messing with her judgment.

“Did your mother die in a hospital?”

He managed to catch himself before shaking his head again. “She didn't die. But she was in hospitals or rehab centers a lot, because of her drinking. One night she got confused about which bottle the rum was in and accidentally swallowed some cleaning fluid. Her kidneys were really messed up after that.”

His hands shook while he poured a glass of water from the plastic pitcher on the tray table.

“Where is she now?”

“I don't know. Five years ago she left me with the state and took off. West, she said. Maybe California, although I sincerely doubt it.”

He said the last with venom. Then his expression weakened, and he looked down.

“That's not fair,” he said. “I shouldn't say it like that. I told her to leave me. I was the one who called the police.”

Oh god,
Josh thought. Part of her was screaming,
Don't ask, you don't want to know!
and the rest was snared by the raw pain in Will's voice.

“Did your father go with her?”

“Dad left when I was six. He lives in New York, with two more ex-wives and like a dozen kids.”

Couldn't you have gone to him?
She didn't let the words pass her lips; she didn't want to know this; she didn't want to hurt for him.

Will finished drinking the water and poured a second glass, then glanced at it and set it down. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I know you don't want to hear that kind of shit.”

Josh felt as if he'd slapped her. Was that the message her silence had given him, that his past was just a load of shit not worth her time?

“I'm sorry,” he said again, before she could figure out a response. “I have a concussion—I'm not thinking straight.”

Neither am I.
Between her own exhaustion and the cool IV drugs slipping through her system, her heart felt too close to the surface tonight, her emotions too near. She was afraid that if she spoke, she wouldn't be able to control what she said and apologies and reassurances and secrets would pour from her mouth.

Maybe she wanted all that.

“How's your leg?” Will asked.

“Badly bruised cartilage and pulled muscles,” she said, nearly whispering. The words felt useless, phony. She tried again. “Sorry about your mom. And your dad.”

He looked away from his glass of water and back at her. “Thank you.”

His eyes in the dim room were piercing, bright as if with fever. She knew that his reserve at that moment was as fragile as her own. What could she say that was comforting? The words never came to her, and she wondered if it would be easier to convey what she meant by touching him, if a hug would say what she couldn't. But she remembered earlier that day, when he had almost kissed her, and she feared going too far again.

“I'm sorry I didn't listen to you,” Will said, oblivious to her thoughts, “when you told us to bail. I'm sorry I ignored you. Or, I guess it was actually more like I mutinied. I just … I had this bad feeling, this terrible feeling about that guy in the trench coat. It didn't even feel like dreamfire, more like … dread.”