by Kit Alloway
Breaking up with me was the best thing he ever did for himself, Josh thought.
That was her real fear—that his equilibrium and contentment weren’t an act, that he was legitimately fine without her. Was he hiding his pain, or did he just not feel any?
Feodor made a little ahem sound, which was his way of laughing at her. “The corpse?” he said.
“I’m thinking,” Josh told him.
“Perhaps you would like to think of something more relevant,” he suggested.
After giving him her best glare, Josh returned to examining the body, and only moments later, she found something that drove all thoughts of Will from her head.
“Feodor,” she said tightly. “Look.”
At the base of the man’s throat, near where the skin began to split, were numerous small cuts. They didn’t appear to be part of the fatal wound—they were straight and clean. Several cuts intersected to form a triangle at the end of a long, straight line.
Feodor cursed softly in Polish.
“Is it…?” Josh asked, even though she knew it was.
He sighed heavily. “Yes. Someone carved the symbol we used on Peregrine into this man’s chest.”
Two months earlier, Josh had been faced with the choice of either killing her grandfather or risking letting him live. She’d compromised and carved an ancient symbol into his chest, one that would prevent him from entering the Dream universe. The only people who currently had access to the symbol were Mirren Rousellario and Peregrine himself.
“But I thought the symbol would stop the wearer from entering the Dream,” Josh said.
Feodor gestured to the dead man’s ravaged torso. “Obviously, it did.”
* * *
Josh sent Feodor upstairs to hide in the library—only a dozen people knew he was back from the dead—and then rolled the dead man up in a sheet. It was a good sheet, too, and she’d probably catch hell for using it, but she thought he deserved something nice. It seemed like the least she could do, after dragging him out of the Dream and landing him like a trout on the archroom floor.
A gendarme named Burnette arrived at the house to collect the body. The Gendarmerie were the approximate equivalent of dream-walker police, but they only dealt with issues that couldn’t be taken to the real police. Josh was pretty sure pulling a corpse out of an alternate universe counted.
“You don’t look surprised,” she noted when she’d finished explaining how she’d found the dead man.
Burnette sighed. “Look, I wouldn’t tell this to anyone else, and I’m trusting you to keep it to yourself.”
Josh nodded.
“This is the fifth corpse we’ve pulled out of the Dream in the last six weeks.”
“The fifth?” Josh asked, aghast.
Burnette nodded, blond curls falling into her eyes. “Looks like we have a serial killer. We still can’t figure out how they’re being killed. Our best guess is one of those shark knives that blows things apart with a burst of air.”
Josh said nothing. She’d always wanted to use one of those knives—but not on a person.
“We’ve only managed to identify one of the bodies. Homeless guy.”
Josh wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that this man was also homeless, and suddenly the entire scheme clarified itself in her mind.
Peregrine is going to homeless men, offering them a meal or a place to stay, and then using them as guinea pigs to try to find a way around the symbol.
A sickening rush of guilt hit her so hard she reached out for the wall.
“You okay?” Burnette asked. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Peregrine had done some despicable things in his life, but this ranked near the top.
How is it so easy for Peregrine to kill people and still so hard for anyone to kill Peregrine?
Josh’s grandfather had been missing for six weeks. After staying in the hospital for two weeks, having the stump where his hand should have been treated and the cuts in his chest stitched, he’d snuck out and disappeared. No one had heard from him since. He’d been supposed to take the reins of the new dream-walker democracy, but since he hadn’t showed up, the junta was still in charge while they tried to figure out what to do.
Josh didn’t know where Peregrine could have gone. She’d hoped that his disappearance meant he’d died, but she’d never kidded herself. Now she had proof that not only was he alive, he was actively trying to reenter the Dream.
“Do you have any leads on my grandfather?”
Burnette’s pen paused in its travels across her notepad. “Do you think he’s connected to this?”
There was no way Josh could explain what she knew without admitting to the fact that she’d mutilated her grandfather, or without exposing her friend Mirren.
“I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
After helping Burnette carry the dead man to her vehicle, Josh went to find Feodor in the library, where he was browsing the family diaries. She told him what Burnette had said, and her own conclusions about Peregrine’s activities.
“One cannot fault the man’s tenacity,” Feodor said when Josh was finished.
“Let’s try to avoid complimenting him,” Josh said.
Feodor shrugged. He had the most graceful, elegant shrug Josh had ever seen, a little ballet-movement of a shrug.
“He has overcomplicated the testing process,” Feodor replied. “I would have experimented on animals in his position.” He considered, tapping his lip with one finger. “Cats would have been of sufficient size.”
Trying to ignore that thought, Josh said, “Glad to hear it.”
“However, we may be able to use his thoughtlessness to our advantage. If we map out where each body was found, we might be able to pinpoint the archway from which he’s operating.”
Clever, Josh admitted to herself. “I’ll ask Burnette if she’ll send me the case file.”
“Do you think she will?” Feodor asked skeptically.
“Sometimes people give me special access because I’m Peregrine’s granddaughter.”
That was only part of the truth. Josh had a reputation among dream walkers as a prodigy, and they were usually more than happy to bend over backward for her.
“Ironic,” Feodor said, but he smiled at her in a way that made her feel like he saw right through her. “Unfortunately, triangulating the bodies will give us, at best, a rough idea of where Peregrine might be.”
Not to discount the lives of the five men Peregrine had killed, but Josh had a larger concern. If he found a way back into the Dream, he was likely to hurt a lot more people. “What are the chances he’ll figure out how to deactivate the symbol?”
Feodor considered. “I could do it. But then, Peregrine is not me.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Josh said.
“However … the power of obsession to propel a man to acts of which he might not otherwise be capable should not be underestimated. I believe Peregrine will continue until he finds a way.”
That was not reassuring.
Two
“I really think I’m over it,” Will Kansas told his counselor.
Malina wasn’t technically a therapist, but as a pastor, she’d been trained in counseling, and because she was a dream walker, Will could tell her the truth about what had happened to him. They were sitting in her office, which smelled pleasantly of herbal tea and was cluttered with little statues of angels.
Malina lifted her eyebrows at his words. “That’s pretty quick,” she said. “How long has it been? Six weeks?”
“Eight,” Will corrected. Eight weeks since they’d gone into the Hidden Kingdom. Eight weeks since Will had killed Bayla. Eight weeks since he’d failed to kill Peregrine.
Eight weeks since he and Josh had broken up.
“How do you know you’re over it?” Malina asked.
“I’ve stopped having flashbacks and nightmares. I’ve stopped thinking about it all the time. I feel—mostly—at peace with what I had to do to save everyo
ne. I took down my stalker wall.”
“Okay,” Malina said, but the way she broke the syllable told Will she wasn’t crazy about his answer. “That’s all good evidence that your post-traumatic stress is under control, but I’m not sure how that indicates you’re moving on.”
Isn’t holding it together enough? Will wondered. It felt like it should count for something.
“Did you try out for track like we talked about?”
“No.”
“Did you join the Amnesty International Club?”
“No.” Before she could ask what other activities he had avoided, Will said, “I just keep thinking that Peregrine’s still out there. What’s the point of starting something new when I know he’s going to come back and screw it all up?”
“You’re certain he’ll come back.”
“As long as Josh has power he doesn’t have, he’ll be back to try to take it. I doubt he’s done with Mirren, either.”
“How’s Josh doing?”
In the two months since they’d broken up, Josh had tested out of her senior year and graduated early. She spent ten hours a day in the Dream, most of them with Feodor. She’d stopping eating meals with her family, and Will was pretty sure she was living on protein bars and candy. She’d also quit brushing her hair and was getting dressed in the dark, apparently, but her bizarre appearance was only part of the wiry, disheveled look she’d developed. Every time Will saw her, she seemed distracted, hassled, confused by the presence of other people, and more than once he’d caught her muttering to herself in Polish. Whatever was going on with her had ruined her already tenuous grip on the margins of normal behavior.
“Same as usual, I guess,” Will said.
Malina didn’t let him get away with the deflection. “Do you miss her?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I … still miss her. I wish things had gone differently.”
“What do you wish had gone differently?”
Everything, he thought.
“I wish we hadn’t lied to each other. I wish I’d asked for support when I needed it. I wish she had confided in me. But mostly I wish Feodor and Peregrine were gone. I think we could have worked things out if not for them.”
“Have you talked to Josh about what happened?”
“No.”
That was an understatement. Josh barely spoke two words to him. Then again, he barely saw her. She spent all her time with Feodor.
At least, Will thought she was spending all of her time with Feodor. Except for when she was dream walking, she wasn’t at home very much.
“Do you want to talk to her about it?” Malina asked.
“I don’t know. Sometimes. Sometimes I want to explain why I had to break up with her.”
“What would you say?”
“That I did it to protect myself emotionally. That it had less to do with her than it had to do with Feodor and Peregrine and all that chaos. I want to tell her … that it wasn’t because I didn’t care about her.”
“Do you think she knows that?”
Josh, with her monstrous capacity for guilt and self-blame?
“Nope.”
“Would you feel better if you told her?”
“Nope,” he said again, because he’d told Josh more than once. Even before they’d broken up, he’d warned her about the path she was leading them down. She couldn’t hear it, or she couldn’t hear it from him. He knew that if he told her again, she’d just add it to the list of things she blamed herself for.
“I don’t know what the point of talking to her would be. Nothing has changed. Peregrine is still out there. Besides, if I try to talk to her, I’ll just get sucked back into that codependent cycle where she does something reckless and I help her so she won’t get hurt.”
“Yeah, let’s talk about that for a minute,” Malina said, shifting in her chair. “You know that we all create narratives in our minds about things that have happened to us. We create a story around the events so they make sense to us.”
Will nodded.
“The narrative you’ve created is that as long as you’re around Josh, you’ll be in heightened danger and at risk for getting hurt—not just emotionally, but physically as well.”
“Right.”
That was what he thought.
“Let’s try challenging that narrative for a minute. We don’t have to decide that your narrative is wrong, let’s just play with it for a while. When Feodor was torturing Josh in his memory chamber, who came up with the idea to kill Feodor’s body?”
“I did.”
“And when the three of you were dying, who convinced Josh that she had the ability to save you?”
“I did,” Will said uneasily.
“When you were trapped in the Hidden Kingdom and Josh was, again, near death, who pressed the activator to disable Bayla and Peregrine?”
Will pursed his lips and then said, “I see what you’re getting at. But it isn’t that simple. We never would have been there if not for Josh.”
“You never would have been there if not for Peregrine, either. Or Feodor. Or Whim, for that matter. What if the story isn’t Josh getting into trouble and you enabling her, but you and Josh saving everyone?”
Will could feel himself getting defensive—an antsy, itchy, argumentative feeling.
“But why is that narrative more true than the one I’ve been telling myself?” he asked.
“It isn’t. One isn’t truer than the other. You get to pick which one to keep telling yourself, and I’m suggesting that the one you’ve been telling yourself isn’t making you happy.”
“But I just told you how well things are going.”
“No, you said that if you weren’t so afraid of Peregrine and Feodor, you’d be joining school activities and getting back together with your girlfriend.”
Will ground his teeth. He needed a narrative that would protect him. He needed to feel safe. And if he had to sacrifice his relationship with Josh to feel safe …
The scary truth was, he didn’t know if giving her up had been worth it.
“You’re assuming Peregrine will go after Josh again. That may or may not be true, but either way, you have no control over it. Why not look back on what happened before as evidence that if Peregrine comes back, you’ll be able to handle whatever he throws at you?”
“But I couldn’t handle anything last time,” Will protested. “I completely freaked out when Josh brought Feodor back.”
Malina shrugged. “And then you and Feodor helped save everyone. I’d call that a win. Look, one of the things post-traumatic stress disorder does is perpetuate a sense of impending danger. It makes you believe that whatever trauma you’ve experienced is likely to occur again. I think you would be happier if you pushed back against that feeling.”
Will wasn’t sure he liked the idea of letting his guard down—but then, that’s exactly what Malina was saying was the problem. PTSD made it hard to relax. “What if I start telling myself not to worry about Peregrine, and then he shows up again and everything goes to hell?”
“Then you’ll deal with it, just like you have before. But spending the time between now and then worrying about him and withdrawing from life won’t make you better prepared to meet him. It will just make you anxious.”
Will remembered how his anxiety had made him insist that Josh and Feodor not build stronger devices with which to face Peregrine two months before. He’d demanded that they come up with a different plan, and that plan had backfired, exactly as Feodor had predicted it would. Malina was right that his anxiety hadn’t helped him before and probably wouldn’t help him again.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Malina smiled. “That’s all I ask.”
* * *
Afterward, Will’s adoptive mother let him drive home, partly because he was practicing for his license, and partly because Kerstel was so pregnant that she could barely reach the steering wheel.
“Do you worry about Peregrine?” he asked her.
&nb
sp; “Of course. Some mornings I still wake up thinking he’s a god. I worry about that.”
Kerstel—and nearly every other dream walker Will knew—had been brainwashed by Peregrine to believe that he was humanity’s savior and that his political rival, Will’s friend Mirren, was evil. It had taken weeks of deprogramming to get Kerstel to see that she had been influenced through her dreams.
“But I also worry about climate change, Putin, and how to raise my son to treat women as equals. I have a limited amount of energy I’m willing to give to worrying.” Kerstel shifted beneath her seat belt. “Why? Are you still worrying a lot?”
“I guess. Malina seems to think so. I just wish I felt more prepared to deal with Peregrine, because I know he’s going to come back.”
“Maybe,” Kerstel agreed. “You know, if you and Josh weren’t refusing to speak to each other—”
“I speak to her all the time.”
“—she would be the perfect person to help with that.”
Josh had prepared him for a lot of things: knife fights, bear attacks, quicksand. But if she didn’t know how to defeat Peregrine, how could she teach Will?
After helping Kerstel inside, Will found his friends in the living room. Deloise was sitting forward on the couch, her back straight and her hands clenching her skirt, but Whim was standing, as if he’d been so arrested by the television that he forgot to sit down. A few feet away, Whim’s sister Winsor sat slumped in her wheelchair. They were all staring at the television with stiff, white faces, except for Winsor, who just looked confused.
“What’s wrong?” Will asked, sitting down on the couch beside Deloise.
“Snitch escaped,” she said hollowly.
Will’s stomach dropped. Geoff Simbar had been a family friend, ages ago. Then he’d gotten caught in Feodor’s private Dream universe and had his soul sucked out. Feodor had sent him back to the World as a zombie.
Snitch—which was the name Will had given Geoff before they found out who he was—and his partner had attacked the family, killing Josh’s grandmother and nearly killing Winsor, Kerstel, and the baby.
