Dreamfire (20 page)

“S'okay,” Haley told her. His voice trembled. “I was just sitting here. S'okay.”

Once again, Will wondered exactly what was wrong with Haley. Why was he sitting on the floor—with a chair no more than two feet away—staring into an empty archway? Why was he holding a pen and paper as if he expected to take dictation from the Dream? Why did he write notes in the first place? He seemed like a nice enough guy, but when he wasn't imitating his dead twin, he was barely functional.

“We were only going to use the looking stone,” Josh said.

Haley picked his pen up. “I'll go.”

“No,” Josh said quickly, “wait a sec. If we're not bothering you, it's no problem.”

Haley's face was unreadable as he slid across the floor to lean against the wall.

They spent the next hour refining Will's searching skills. The exercise was physically easy but emotionally exhausting. After a long session, Will needed a while to remember who and where he was, as though he had touched so many minds that he had lost his own.

They moved quickly from one nightmare to the next, and Josh always asked three questions:
Who is the dreamer? What is the danger? Do we go in?

Will answered as quickly as he could while Josh stood behind him, looking into the Veil. With his hand on the looking stone, he had some connection to the dreamer's fear, but that didn't mean he could always accurately sense what was happening in a nightmare. The number of times Josh corrected him, just by watching over his shoulder, amazed him.

“Who's the dreamer?” Josh asked again, a half hour or so into their session.

“A man, late middle age. He's dreaming he's in … China, I think. He's carrying something and running. He has to get it somewhere.”

“No, try again.”

Will closed his eyes, but all he could see was the man straining to run faster.

“He's not trying to get somewhere,” Josh said. “He's being chased. Where's the danger?”

Will tried to aim his perception, and instead of focusing on the dreamer, he looked at what was behind him. “Oh no.”

Josh's hand clamped around his shoulder. “What's wrong?”

“It's him. The man in the trench coat.”

*   *   *

Through the archway, Josh watched a man in a green-black coat lumber down a narrow alley with painted walls on either side.
It
is
him,
she thought, taking in the heavy boots, the black-banded hat, the large, hunched shoulders.
He's right there.

She wasn't aware that she was digging her fingernails into Will's shoulder until he shrugged to loosen her grip. “Sorry,” she said. “Hold on to this dream, okay?”

“I've got it.”

The man moved quickly toward the mouth of the alley, away from them. Josh had been forbidden to enter the Dream, but here was her chance to confront the man in the trench coat, to determine whether he was a figment of someone's imagination or a real person walking around in there, a person who recognized her. She didn't know when she'd get another chance like this.

I don't know what to do,
she thought, and she felt a sick paralysis. The feeling was familiar, although it hadn't struck her in years. When she was younger—much younger—she used to feel like this—helpless and uncertain, like a rabbit darting back and forth between lines of traffic in the middle of a highway, every direction leading to danger, every choice the wrong one.

Unconsciously, Josh let her weight shift onto her injured leg. Pain shot out from her knee into her thigh and shin, and she shifted back with a cry. In the next instant, Haley was standing beside her, just the way Ian always had, and he looped Josh's arm around his neck to support her weight. His slouch was gone, his eyes wide open and focused. A hard line marked his jaw.

Ian,
Josh thought, and felt a different sort of pain.

Because she wanted Ian in moments like this, needed Ian to tell her what to do when she turned into that rabbit on the highway, when she couldn't decide what was most important, when she couldn't live up to everyone's expectations. Will was waiting for her instructions, and she had no idea what to say.

She tightened her arm around Haley's neck. “What should I…”

Will turned toward them, his hand still on the looking stone. He frowned at the sight of them standing so close to the archway, and perhaps at the sight of Josh clinging to Haley—Josh didn't know which. She didn't have time to think about that.

Haley said, “J.D., look at me.”

She did, and he looked back at her with perfect steadiness. In a voice as strong and clear as bulletproof glass, he said, “You're wasting time. You know what to do, so get on with it already.”

Will said, “Josh, you can't go in there,” but Josh barely heard him. All she heard was Ian's voice—confident, certain—cutting through her fears. He was short with her; even that was reassuring, because he wouldn't have dismissed her so quickly if he hadn't believed that she was overreacting.

“Josh,” Will said urgently, but she and Haley were already moving.

“Whatever happens, stay here,” Josh said to Will, as she and Haley stepped through the Veil, causing it to shiver.

Her ears filled with clanging bells and shouting in Chinese. The hot, spicy scents of seasoned meat wafted in the air, and grimy water ran down the center of the alley into a rusted grate. Ahead of her, the man in the trench coat had reached the street and was looking back and forth, searching for the dreamer.

Josh didn't hesitate before breaking Stellanor's First Rule of dream walking this time. In her mind, she yanked the cork from the stone wall of her mental defenses and let the dreamer's fear rush through, just long enough to get a sense of the situation.

A man, with a precious microchip in his pocket. Running, running. Already a block away.

Strangely, she felt the scorching anxiety of dreamfire. Predicting what fears would reach deep enough into a dreamer's subconscious to summon dreamfire was more or less impossible, but Josh wouldn't have expected that level of terror in a nightmare about a microchip. Yet she'd encountered dreamfire in each of the three nightmares where she'd seen the man in the trench coat.

She had no time then to ponder the connection. As she severed her link with the dreamer's fear, she saw the man in the trench coat turn left at the mouth of the alley.

“Hey!” she shouted.

The man turned, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his fedora, his face hidden behind the glossy gas mask. With slow, even steps, he began walking toward Josh and Haley. His heavy-soled boots sank into the water running down the alley.

Good,
she thought, even as her gut began to scream,
Danger! Danger!

Watching him come closer, Josh wondered if she had made a mistake. The man approached her without any indication that he feared the situation, and Josh supposed that a teenage girl being half held up by a teenage boy didn't look so imposing, but still … the man had recognized her before. Since he'd identified her as Jona's daughter, he had to know that she was a dream walker and that—whether he was a real person or a figment of someone's subconscious—she was going to want answers from him.

Haley held her tighter. Distantly, she smelled Ian's warm, rich amber cologne on his neck, and the scent reassured her.

“Who are you?” Josh demanded.

The man said nothing, but he began running toward them. Water splashed from his boots.

“Dammit,” muttered Haley, who never cursed.

“Stop!” Josh shouted, but the man's speed increased. He was ten feet from them, seven feet, five …

“Clothesline!” Haley hissed, and shoved Josh away even as he found her hands.

Clothesline.
A stupid old trick Josh and Ian had pulled together a hundred times, more because it amused them than anything else. They grabbed each other's hands, their arms forming a long line, and the man in the trench coat ran right into it. His boots slid on the wet cobblestones and he crashed onto his back, his gas tank clanging like a bell against the ground. Before the man had time to recover, Josh threw herself onto his chest and Haley clobbered his legs.

Then the man's hat fell back, and Josh found herself staring into those terribly empty black eyes.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

No reaction. She hadn't realized before how pale his skin was.

Finally, he said, “You're Jona's daughter.”

Josh swallowed. He spoke from behind his gas mask, but this close, his words were clear. Josh knew she had heard him correctly.

“Did you know my mother?” she asked.

“Yes, before…”

His black eyes moved. Their coloration made them difficult to follow, but Josh thought they flicked from side to side, as if checking to make sure he was not overheard.

“Before Feodor…” the man whispered.

“Feodor? Who's—”

From behind her, Josh heard a shout. “Josh! Watch out!”

When she turned to look in the direction from which the shout had come, she saw Will standing at the far end of the alley, and the panic she'd felt before entering the Dream came back to her, worse, at the sight of him. He couldn't be here—not where even she wasn't supposed to be. She had to get him out immediately.

She was so caught up in her panic that she didn't see what Will had been warning her about. Something crashed into her from behind.

Another man, another trench coat. This man was thinner, wiry, but no less strong, and he knocked her onto her side. She fell, cracking her head against an aluminum garbage can that rang like a gong in her ears.

The man who had attacked her put one hand on her face and held her head to the ground—he wore black leather gloves, she noticed, unlike his partner—and with the other hand he dug into her hip. She thought at first that he was going for the fly of her jeans, and she reached up to poke his eyes out with her thumbs, but his arms were longer than hers, and besides, he wasn't unzipping her pants, just digging into her pocket.

Josh was fuzzy enough from the knock on the head that this seemed like a relief to her for a moment. In the precious second it took her to realize what he was actually doing, the man with the gloves jerked both her lighter and her compact out of her pocket.

Without her keys, she could be stranded in the Dream forever. She always carried them, even if she wasn't planning to enter the Dream, and she hoped to God that either Will or Haley was doing the same. Otherwise, they would become intimately familiar with Aivasian's Apothegm:
To be lost in the Dream is to be outlived by bubbles.

I have to get out of here somehow,
Josh thought, and that's when her mind cleared. Gloves sat back on his heels, and she rose up and punched him hard in the forehead above his gas mask. A clumsy blow—her fist form was so bad that her knuckles popped—but it was enough to knock him backward and onto her legs.

Josh scrambled out from beneath him, the pain in her knee continuous now, and when she tried to stand, her leg wouldn't hold her. She crawled forward on her hands and her good knee and hit Gloves in the face again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the larger man—the one she had clotheslined earlier—bring the garbage can down on Haley's head. Haley fell to the cobblestones, and Will rushed forward.

“No!” Josh shouted, but the aluminum can was already coming up again. It caught Will square in the chest and knocked him back against the wall.

Then Josh had to forget about Will and Haley, because she was blocking punches from Gloves, grabbing at his hands as they passed because he had her compact in one and her lighter in the other. She managed to catch the hand with the lighter and slam it against the ground. With the hard tip of her thumb, she dug into the pressure point on his outer wrist to make his fingers uncurl, and while she tried to pull the lighter from his grasp, he smashed her in the cheek with the compact so hard the plastic casing shattered and cut her skin.

Josh shouted wordlessly and hit Gloves in the face again, this time bringing the heel of her palm up into his mask, but he let his head roll back so that her blow rolled off.

He's had martial-arts training,
Josh half thought, her other hand scrambling to find the compact on the ground beside her.

Then she stopped worrying about the lighter or the compact, because she realized that the man who had first attacked them had withdrawn a mask and rubber hose from the contraption on his back and was attempting to force the mask onto Haley's face, while Haley, half-conscious, feebly tried to fend him off. Will walked toward them with a section of broken two-by-four board.

“Will!” Josh screamed. “Open an exit! Do it now!”

Josh ducked a punch so powerful it crushed the concrete wall behind her.

She was fighting on her knees, and the already injured one landed on her compact as she moved. Shards of glass and plastic sliced through her jeans and into her skin, and a whole new kind of pain tore through the joint.

“But Haley—” Will said.

Josh bent over, trying to get off her knee, which now seemed more important than not getting hit. “Abort!” she shouted at Will, and then Gloves hit her in the back—a kidney shot, which was low of him, made worse by his phenomenal strength—and she doubled up from the nausea.

GET UP GET UP GET UP!
her mind screamed.

She got up. Never mind her knee or her bleeding cheek, never mind the rising bile in her gullet, never mind the big man in the trench coat who was tightening the gas-mask straps over Haley's head. Josh straightened up with her weight on her good knee and, by moving slowly, deliberately gave Gloves an opening to swing at her again.

She was too small and he was too strong. She couldn't outmuscle him. Fine—that's why she'd been studying with Sensei Daiki since she was six years old.