by Kit Alloway
She was only half kidding.
“Oh, Josh,” Mirren said, and then she chuckled. “Do you have any idea whether or not you want Will back?”
Yes. Josh almost spoke the word before she had fully thought it, and then a rush of longing filled her like a full-body flush. She had been trying so hard not to think about him that she hadn’t realized how much she wanted him back.
“I wasn’t the one who wanted to call it quits,” she said. “That was all him. But it’s not like I’ve changed since we broke up, not in the ways he’d like me to.”
Mirren was shaking her head. “What?” Josh asked.
“May I give you a piece of advice?”
“Sure.”
“You have to stop letting Will’s opinion define your self-worth.”
Josh stared at her. “What?”
“You have to stop letting Will’s opinion define your self-worth. What does it matter if Will thinks you’re prettier than you are, or if he thinks you’re half Feodor? What does it matter if he smiles at you or not? You know who you are, and hopefully you know you’re a generous, loyal, incredible person.”
Josh brushed the compliments aside. “Yeah, but I built those devices—”
Mirren put her hand on Josh’s arm. “I would have done the same thing.”
Josh shook her head, afraid she had something in her ears. “You would have?”
Leaning toward her, Mirren said, “Of course. We would have had to be stupid to pass up that opportunity. The chance to bring balance to the three universes? It’s only what our people have been working to do since before recorded history. Yes, the situation turned out badly. That’s your grandfather’s fault, and Bash’s, and Bayla’s. Only a small part of it is yours.”
“But Will said—”
“Will may not be cut out for this work, Josh. I know that’s inconceivable to you, but it’s the truth. He’s going to be a great psychiatrist, sitting in his office and helping people sort through their feelings. He understands people, and he understands how they think. He’s good at what he does. But you and I, we’re good at what we do, and what we do is keep the balance.” Mirren frowned. “The biggest mistake I’ve made was letting him talk you out of building more powerful devices. I should have stopped him.”
“He was afraid I wouldn’t—”
“You already said it: He was afraid. He was acting out of fear. That’s what gets dream walkers killed. Will is a good person, and I hope he calms down and realizes how lucky he is to have you, but you don’t have to answer to him.”
I don’t? Josh thought.
The idea felt like a bucket of cold water tossed in her face. Shocking, and yet … somehow refreshing. Still, Josh was afraid to hope; the relief felt too good.
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ve made so many mistakes…”
“Oh, and you’re the first one? Should everyone who’s made a mistake avoid ever making another decision? No. You just try to make a better decision next time.”
That’s dedication, Josh thought. You try again. You jump back into the Dream.
“I’m sorry,” Mirren said. “I shouldn’t be telling you how to live your life any more than Will should. I just … You know, all anyone talks about today is Feodor the madman, but before Maplefax, people thought he was a genius. He was a visionary, and he did great things. He could have done more great things if he hadn’t let his emotions tear him up inside. I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you. Maybe it’s better to be without Will if it gives you a chance to learn to trust yourself. Del says you’ve only been single for a year out of your entire life, and that you believed everything Ian told you about yourself, too.”
“That’s true,” Josh admitted. She and Ian had been together before they were old enough to understand what being together meant, and he’d told her a lot of things about herself that, after he died, she realized weren’t true. “I still can’t quite believe Will broke up with me. I thought … that he understood dedication.”
“Well, maybe he needs some time away to find clarity, too.”
Josh remembered the nightmare, how he had said, I’m trying to learn to trust you again. Maybe he needed time away from her to do that.
Tired of thinking about him, she said, “Thanks, Mirren.”
“I would hug you if I weren’t all grouty.”
Josh hugged her anyway. She wanted to say something, felt afraid of offending Mirren, and then decided to risk it. “You know, I don’t make friends that easily. That first time we met with Davita in the kitchen, and you said Will and Haley and I were your friends, I was kind of shocked. We’d only known you a couple of days.”
“I remember,” Mirren said with a smile. “I felt rather bold saying it.”
“Well, I just want you to know that I’m really grateful you did.”
Mirren hugged her again. “Oh, Josh. I wish you could see how much you’ve changed.”
Changed? Josh wondered. Maybe …
“Your fashion sense notwithstanding,” Mirren added.
“I know, I need to buy new jeans. And new sneakers.”
“Your shirt is inside out. And you have something in your hair…” Mirren picked it out and pursed her lips. “It’s floss.”
Josh winced. “After we get Haley back, I’ll start dressing like a human being again. I promise.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
A phone rang. Mirren crawled on her knees to a toolbox nearby and dug a phone out. “Hello?… Oh?… Actually, Josh is here.” She held out the phone. “It’s Will.”
Josh took the phone reluctantly. “Hello?”
“Hey,” Will said. “I didn’t know you were at Mirren’s.”
Josh didn’t know what that meant. Was she supposed to tell him where she went? You don’t have to answer to him. “Well, I am. What’s up?”
“Del and I are at your grandfather’s. You need to come over here right away. Bring Mirren.”
Fifteen
“Are you crazy?!” Whim shouted at Mirren. “This is your moment! This is your chance! You have to stand up and take it! Call a press conference!”
Will watched Mirren sit down at the makeup table in Peregrine’s basement. He could still see her face in the lighted mirror over the table—they’d turned the power back on—but Mirren was carefully controlling her expression. Even in her muddy jeans and flannel shirt, she was a diplomat.
“For once,” Davita Bach said, “I agree with Whim.”
“Thank you,” Whim said.
Davita was a local representative of the junta—the government the dream walkers had just voted to abandon in favor of a democracy. Before the coup twenty years prior, she had been a staunch supporter of the monarchy, and her political career had been somewhat stunted by her continued loyalty. Will had never entirely trusted Davita, but he believed she wanted to see Mirren in power.
“People are already calling for a new election since Peregrine disappeared,” Whim said. “If we prove he rigged the last one, the junta will hold another election for sure.”
“And what will that accomplish?” Mirren asked. “Just because there’s a crown in his prop box doesn’t prove that the nightmares Peregrine staged are the reason everyone hates me—not to those same people. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the people who voted against me will suddenly change their minds.”
“We might be able to stall and put off the election for a few months,” Davita said. “The junta is considering a six-month extension of their leadership in order to sort out what to do with the Lodestone Party now that Peregrine’s missing. We could push to hold a new election close to the end of that term, to give you time to campaign.”
“So that Peregrine can stage more nightmares to turn people against me?” Mirren asked.
“He’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere,” Whim told her.
Mirren laughed grimly. “That’s wishful thinking if I ever heard any.”
“At least let me call the Gendarmerie and hav
e this place documented,” Davita said. “Let Whim put the photos on his blog. That way when you’re ready to run again, we’ll have proof of what Peregrine did.”
Mirren sighed and then nodded. “All right. But keep my name out of it.” She touched the top of the makeup table with her fingertips before letting her hand come to rest there. “Do you think I could have a few minutes alone down here?”
Josh, who had been leaning against the wall in silence during the entire conversation, pushed herself onto her feet. “Sure.”
She’d barely said a word since she arrived, and Will wanted to know what she made of this place—which Whim had already nicknamed Peregrine’s staging dungeon—but the tension from the nightmare still hung between them.
Instead of heading for the stairs, Josh went over to Mirren and hugged her. Mirren touched Josh’s arms around her chest, and she smiled when Josh whispered in her ear.
“Thank you,” Mirren said.
Startled, Will followed Josh up the stairs. He had never seen her reach out like that, not to someone outside her household family, and rarely with them. She hadn’t even looked uncomfortable.
When she paused to examine the teddy bear that had insulted Whim earlier, Will said, “That was nice of you.”
Her finger hovered over the button beneath the teddy bear, then abandoned it. “What was?”
“With Mirren, just now.”
She frowned as if confused. “All right. Thanks.”
As she started to walk away, Will blurted out, “I want to apologize for last night.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t sure you remembered it.”
“Thank you for waking me up. And … I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean to imply that you should kill Peregrine and Feodor.”
She considered him for a moment before asking, “What did you mean?”
“That it’s my anxiety about them I can’t handle, not you.”
“Huh,” was all she said.
Passing the teddy bear, she walked over to a display of postcards from Nazi concentration camps. Will wasn’t sure if they were meant to be sarcastic or ironic or just offensive, but each included a photograph of one of the camps with a slogan like CAMP DACHAU—WISH YOU WERE HERE!
“What do you see when you look at these?” Josh asked.
“The postcards? I don’t know. Bad taste?”
She nodded. “What I see is that this postcard is mislabeled.” With one fingertip, she tapped a black-and-white photo of a sign that read DUST SPREADS TYPHUS 5 MPH. “This was taken at Belsen, not Auschwitz.”
Will didn’t ask how she knew; he didn’t have to. Josh turned away from the display, as if she didn’t want to look at it any longer, and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed.
“You want Feodor and Peregrine out of your life so that you can feel safe. I get that. But that means you need to get as far away from me as possible, because I am Feodor. His memories are never going to go away. He told me he couldn’t remove them if I asked him to, and frankly, I’m not sure I would ask. You might not like me like this, but I do.” She glanced back at the postcards and shook her head. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is balance the three universes. Now I have the intelligence to actually do it. But to you, Feodor’s memories have corrupted me.”
Will wanted to argue with her, but he was afraid she was right. His nightmare had already proven as much.
“I made a mistake,” she said. “Granted, it was a big mistake, and you were right that I went a little power-crazy. But if you can’t trust that I learned my lesson, if you don’t believe that my intentions were always to help people, then it’s probably best we keep our distance.”
She didn’t sound angry, or even defensive. She didn’t sound like Feodor. She sounded like someone who knew she had no power over the situation, and was okay with that.
Will envied her that acceptance.
“I never doubted your intentions,” he told her. “Maybe your judgment, but … if I could—if I were able to trust you again…” He swallowed. He was so afraid to ask. “Would you want to—”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation, before he’d even finished asking. Then a smile broke through her seriousness, a sheepish half smile he remembered from all the times he had managed to coax her into vulnerability. She slipped her fingers through the belt loops in his jeans and tugged him close to her. He wasn’t expecting that, and he had to brace his arms against the wall on either side of her.
She whispered, her breath brushing his ear. “Hell yes.”
And before he could reply, she had ducked under his arm and was gone.
* * *
Davita called the captain of the Gendarmerie and convinced her that Will, Whim, Deloise, and Winsor shouldn’t get in trouble for breaking in, given the evidence they were about to hand over. Within the hour, gendarmes swarmed the house and taped off the basement, but not before Whim took about a hundred photos of the staging dungeon. Will didn’t let him take photos of Peregrine’s private bedroom. That felt like a secret none of them had the right to share.
By the time the Gendarmerie arrived, Winsor couldn’t even hold her head up, and her eyes kept closing and her jaw falling slack halfway through a sentence.
“I need to go home,” she said.
“We will, soon, I promise,” Whim assured her. “I just want to talk to whoever’s heading the hunt for Peregrine.”
“Please,” Winsor begged, tears in her eyes. “My head hurts.”
Whim blinked, and then shook himself. “I’m sorry,” he told his sister. “I’m being selfish. Of course we can go home.”
As soon as Deloise climbed into the backseat, Winsor lay down on her side to rest her head on Deloise’s leg. Deloise stroked her hair, but they’d already pushed Winsor too far, and she cried the whole way home. Whim had to carry her to bed.
“That was depressing,” he told Will afterward, while opening a can of tuna in the kitchen. “I knew we shouldn’t have let her come.”
“If she’d stayed here, she would have felt left out. We didn’t really have a good option.”
“I hate seeing her like this,” Whim admitted. “I keep trying to assure myself that she’s going to get better, but I’m starting to think this is as good as she’ll get.”
“It’s barely been three months. The brain heals slowly.”
“She just used to be so smart. Much smarter than me. Now she forgets words. Her head hurts all the time. She cries for no reason. This morning she yelled at me for moving her shoes out of the hallway.”
Will nodded. In one of Winsor’s worse moods, she’d accused Will of stealing her lip balm.
“I think she’ll improve,” Will told Whim. “She’s getting stronger physically, and she’ll probably feel better when she can do more for herself. But even if this is as good as it gets…” He thought of Haley’s awkwardness then, and Josh with her shirt inside out, and his own misfit past. “I have a feeling everybody will still love her.”
“Well, obviously.” Whim stared morosely into a bowl of tuna and mayo, then straightened up and said resolutely, “Okay. From now on, Project Support Winsor is priority number one. Project Get Deloise Back is officially being downgraded to priority number two.”
Will smiled at that. Whim obviously hadn’t realized that being kind to other people was the way to win Deloise back.
“So, do you feel less afraid of Peregrine, now that we’ve uncovered his dirty secret?” Whim asked.
“I don’t know. I pity him—that’s new.”
The doorbell rang. Will didn’t know who else was around, so he got up and went to the foyer.
A man was standing on the doorstep with a pet crate covered in airline stickers. “I have a delivery for Whim Avish,” he said. A cab sat parked behind him in the driveway.
“Whim!” Will shouted, peering into the crate. He had a bad feeling about this. “Did you order a live animal?”
Whim cursed cheerfully and came running to the door. “Yes, yes, yes!
Thank you so much!”
“Sign here,” the cab driver said.
Whim tipped him twenty dollars and carried the crate into the living room. He called Deloise on his phone and said only, “Darling, please come downstairs. I have a surprise for you.”
Will watched in horror as Whim opened the crate and removed a tiny, adorable bundle of white fur with two black eyes shining out of it. “You didn’t…”
Whim grinned. “I did. It took me three months, but I found one.”
Ever since Will had met her, Deloise had been talking about how, when she had her own apartment, she was going to get a Bolognese puppy. They were expensive, and hard to find, and made rather nice pets, but Will couldn’t believe Whim had been stupid enough to buy her one.
Whim had tossed a throw blanket over the crate and hidden the puppy behind his back by the time Deloise walked in. “Del,” he said, dropping to one knee, “I know I’ve hurt you and treated you disrespectfully, and I’m truly sorry. I love you, and I think you’re the sweetest, kindest, most beautiful girl in the three universes, and I hope you’ll accept this gift as a token of my regret for the way I’ve treated you.”
Will almost couldn’t watch as Whim held out the trembling puppy. Deloise screamed, clapping her hands over her mouth, and her knees dipped dangerously.
When she could speak again, she said, “If I weren’t a hard-core pacifist, I would slap you across the face right now.”
“Really?” Whim said, and his smile began to fade at the ends.
“What the bleep is the matter with you?” Deloise cried, unwilling to swear even in these circumstances. “You bought me a puppy without asking me? Without asking any of our parents?”
“You’ve always said you wanted a Bolognese puppy—”
“Yes, in the future, when I don’t live in a third-floor apartment! I’m going to have to run up and down the stairs twelve times a day taking it out!”
