Dreamfire (33 page)

He turned back to the window. The woman on the other side wasn't his mother. It was Kerstel.

She opened the door and leaned wearily against the frame. Her bottom lip was split open in two places and had turned a plum color that lipstick could never match. “Hon, what's wrong?” she asked.

Will looked down and saw the blood pooling at her feet. “You're hurt.”

She nodded. “They came out of the Dream.”

“My mother…” He tried to fit the pieces together, to understand how Kerstel had taken his mother's place. “I think they might have my mother.”

Kerstel considered for a moment and then shook her head. “Your mother isn't here, Will. Not anywhere.”

“But if I find her…”

Kerstel took the bottle of vodka from him, her hands smearing blood across the glass. She showed him the label:
Pure Spring Water
.

“You'd give her this? It's just water, Will. She doesn't want water.”

“Do you need it?” Suddenly his mother was of no concern. That responsibility was no longer his. He took the bottle back, twisted off the cap, and held the bottle to Kerstel's lips. She didn't push his hand away until she had drunk half the water.

“Thank you,” she said. The color came back into her cheeks, but it made her look fevered instead of strong. “I wanted to be stable for you,” she said, her voice breaking. “I wanted you to feel safe in our house, I wanted…”

She cried weakly, leaning against the doorjamb for support. Will could barely handle seeing her so injured and fragile; seeing tears roll from her eyes—and for him, no less—brought him to the edge of panic. He reached through the doorway and wiped the blood from her cheek.

“You were,” he told her. “And I do.”

“Just remember that I tried,” she said. “And that we loved you—”

She cut her words off as she shut the door.

Will watched her through the window until she curled up on the bed again. She took the white teddy bear in her arms and held the bottle of spring water—now a baby bottle—to its lips. The teddy bear began to feed hungrily.

Someone should be there with them,
Will thought, but when he tried the door it was locked.

Reluctantly, he stepped away from Kerstel's room and checked the others. They were all empty except the last, where Ian, wearing a black suit, was using a Sharpie to write the same phrase across the wall, over and over.

I SAW A GATE BEYOND THE ARCH I SAW A GATE BEYOND THE ARCH I SAW A GATE BEYOND THE ARCH

He turned suddenly, his green-hazel eyes drilling into Will's.

Then he opened his mouth, and a horrible, reverberating eagle scream shattered the glass window in the door and filled the hallway.

“
TELL JOSH!
”

Will covered his ears with his hands but felt his palms sprayed with blood by his bursting eardrums. He fell to the floor as the scream continued, then—

He woke up on a hospital waiting-room couch.

*   *   *

Josh had given up trying to sleep. The waiting room was no place to rest, between the ringing phones and the television that never shut up. Whim couldn't stop moving; Deloise couldn't stop crying. The Avishes were in Winsor's hospital room, and Laurentius was pacing the hallway outside surgery. Only Will had fallen asleep, scrunched up on a waiting-room couch far too short for him, Whim's borrowed sports coat rolled up under his head.

Josh watched everyone with the detached feeling of sitting in the audience at a play. She had been to St. Dymphna's Hospital a dozen times, but tonight the whole building seemed like a movie set; everything looked just
too much
like a hospital. The furniture was all covered in pastel-colored polyester, and landscapes in the same color scheme hung on every wall. The nurses wore scrubs with cartoons or flowers or Valentine's Day hearts on them. The biohazards were all safely locked away in brightly marked containers.

Josh sat on a couch across from Will. Haley sat beside her; now fully himself again, he wrote one note after another on his stenographer's pad, and Josh knew he was upset because he wasn't writing on the lines. Whim went upstairs to be with his parents and Winsor, and Deloise wiped her eyes and blew her nose and headed for the bathrooms.

Josh understood now why Gloves had wanted her lighter. He had been looking for a way out of the Dream, and he must have gotten a hold of a mirror somewhere, because he'd succeeded in opening an exit. He and Snitch had burst in on Winsor in the archroom, then attacked Dustine on their way down the hall, and taken on Kerstel, Alex, and Lauren in the living room. Kerstel had already been in surgery when Josh arrived at the hospital, but Josh had briefly seen Winsor, who was catatonic. When EMS had arrived at the house, Winsor's heart hadn't been beating, and it had stopped twice more in the hours since. She'd suffered a brief seizure in the ambulance. The pink outline of a gas mask marked her face.

Josh had been too late to see her grandmother; Dustine had died in the hallway. In her mind, Josh pictured the quilt Dustine had given Will, the dark circle of Death with people walking into it—but not out. Never out.

The image destroyed what was left of Josh's numbness. The sudden, stunning realization that her grandmother was dead—really and truly inaccessible, lost to her—fell over her like a shadow from which she could never emerge. She had left the play, just as Winsor had accused Ian of doing, leaving the rest of them to carry on the show without her.

Grandma Dustine is dead because of me, because I was brash and went into the Dream when everyone, even Will, said not to. Kerstel and Winsor are in the hospital because of me. I might as well have hurt them with my own hands.

Josh wished then that she believed in something, in a trustworthy guiding source like God or a saint or divine intelligence. But dream walkers came in all faiths, and saying “God bless so-and-so” was about as much religion as Josh had ever had. She didn't even really believe in the True Dream Walker; at that moment, she was rubbing his plumeria pendant between her thumb and forefinger but finding no comfort in it.

She wanted Ian.

“Haley,” she said, her voice weakened to a whisper. Haley looked at her with wide eyes and damp lips. “I need you to help me,” she told him. Her own eyes felt hot and raw. “Can you help me? Like … like you did in the parking lot?”

He shuddered. “Oh god.” He knew what she meant.

“Please?” She felt like everything was sinking downward, toward the ground two stories below. “Please, Haley, just for a couple of minutes.”

She held her hand out, begging him. He ignored her offer and took her in his arms instead. When she began to cry, he held her head against his chest as if to keep her from falling to pieces.

“Stop crying,” he said, his voice strong. “Stop it, J.D. It won't help.”

He said exactly what she needed to hear, but she only felt worse.

“My grandmother…” She tried to justify her tears by telling him how desperately she hurt, but her emotions were too vast to partition into words. “Kerstel … my father can't lose Kerstel, it will wreck him.”

“She'll make it.”

“If I hadn't let Gloves get my lighter, he could never have come out of the Dream.”

“Stop blaming yourself for what they did.”

He was saying all the right things, and yet, there was something wrong with his tone. She got the impression, as she tried to find comfort in arms as warm and yielding as tree branches, that he was patiently waiting for her to finish needing him.

Josh pulled away. Haley's gauntness was vibrantly apparent to her—the pale color of his lips, his shaking hands. He wasn't Ian—she knew that. And they were both under so much stress that neither one of them could pretend he was, even though they both needed Ian at that moment.

“Josh,” Whim said from the waiting-room doorway. She didn't know how long he had been standing there, but she noticed at the same moment that Will was awake, sitting up on the couch across from her.

When she saw her own weakness through their eyes she realized how pathetic she was. Crimson with shame, she forced herself to completely release Haley. Without a word, he rose and left the room, ducking past Whim with hunched shoulders.

Whim sat down on the couch next to her. “Josh,” he said. “He's sick.”

She swallowed. “I know.”

“No, you don't. We went to New York and Boston, we went to Switzerland, we went to China. We have seen doctors on three continents, and no one seems to be able to help.”

Startled, she met his eyes. “What?”

“He's sick,” Whim repeated. “Even medication only helps a little.”

“Wait. You went away to…”

“I left home because Haley mailed me a note saying he thought he was losing his mind. Do you think I wanted to just walk away after Ian died? But when I got to Haley's house, and I saw him … I can't even explain. Sometimes he really does believe he's Ian for days at a time. Sometimes
I
almost believe he's Ian. He's confident and friendly and willing to take chances. While I tried to find better doctors, he partied in Europe. He went to dance clubs, Josh. He wasn't anything like Haley.”

Josh shook her head. “No,” she said, “he's just—it's a defense mechanism. Pretending he's Ian is just a defense mechanism for when he can't handle things.”

Whim nodded. “Precisely. He can't handle the fact that Ian died, so he pretends to
be
Ian. The problem is, he can't stop. And he's never going to stop if you keep encouraging him. As hard as this is—as much as you need Ian right now—Haley has to learn to face things if he's going to get better.”

Josh would have been angry at Whim for speaking to her like he would a child if she hadn't understood why it was so important for her to hear him clearly. Having Haley around, seeing him act like Ian, was a temptation she could barely resist. She had given in to it, but she wouldn't let that happen again. Haley had always been—albeit in his own strange way—her friend. She wasn't going to contribute to keeping him sick.

“I get it,” she told Whim. But the truth was that she felt like she'd lost her last comfort. “Thank you for taking care of him,” she added. And she meant it.

“Yeah, well … sometimes I wish I could have been home instead, taking care of you guys.” Whim put his hand over hers.

“We managed,” she said, but there must have been a bitter note in her voice, because Whim turned his face to the floor.

“I think you should go home,” he said. He glanced at Will, who had sat in silence during Whim and Josh's conversation. “All of you. Get some sleep, eat.”

“Is Winsor any better?” Josh asked.

“No. Worse. They're—” He grimaced. “They're talking about pacemakers and brain damage from oxygen deprivation. She still hasn't said a word.”

No, please, not Winsor, too.

“Josh,” Will said. “Go home.”

Josh hadn't looked him in the face since she turned away from him at the dance, but now their eyes met briefly. She didn't expect to see so much pain in his face. Discomfort—yes. Disgust for how she had used Haley—probably. But not the unmasked sorrow that greeted her now. Not the compassion or the longing. She remembered what he'd told her in the school lobby.

I see these things eating you up inside and I … I would do anything to help you, if you'd only tell me what to do.

She'd fought so hard for the distance between them—but he was here, now, in the hospital with her family, waiting to see if the woman who had just adopted him would die in surgery or not. He was right—he was in this just as deep as she was, and he probably needed a hug just as much as she did.

But after pushing him away for so long, she didn't know how to stop, so she just said, “Would you go get Haley and Del?”

And he just nodded and left the room.

 

Twenty-seven

Will didn't know
where Haley had gone. He tried the surgery waiting room first and then headed for Winsor's room.

The hospital was quiet so late at night. Many departments were closed, lights dimmed, and even the nurses spoke in whispers and moved softly in their sneakers. The serenity of it unnerved Will; people were, after all, still dying here.

He passed Winsor's parents asleep in another waiting room, Saidy's head resting on Alex's shoulder. Asleep, they hardly looked upset. They might have been here for their daughter's tonsillectomy, for all the fear on their faces, except that Alex had a blackening eye from his fight with the trench-coat men.

Will found Haley in Winsor's room. Winsor was awake, in a distant, trancelike sort of way. She wore a loose hospital gown that slid down to reveal one pale shoulder. The blankets drawn over her waist were smooth, as if she hadn't moved since the nurse had tucked her in. At least a dozen wires reached out from the neck of her gown, all attached to a silent computer screen in the wall above the bed. Not a foot from her pillows, a defibrillator waited in case her heart stopped again.

She blinked often, but her eyes never focused. She seemed to be looking at Haley's arm more than anything else. But the thing that upset Will the most was the pink outline of a gas mask around her mouth and nose.

Will stepped up to the side of the bed. “Hey, Winsor.”

Her gaze drifted toward him. It stopped before reaching his face.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

Winsor exhaled as if she had meant to speak and failed. Her eyes drifted.

Will pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat down. Haley sat across from him, his arms wrapped around his shins. Josh had asked Will to bring Haley back to the waiting room, but he decided she could wait a few minutes. He wasn't quite ready to deal with her glares and silent accusations yet.