by Kit Alloway
She had been going to say “intuition,” but the word in her mouth was “wisdom.”
You have to follow it.
In her mind, she saw the Omphalos, like a big white egg. It rested atop a black basalt pillar. Josh reached out for it, dipped her fingers in the cool water flowing out of the pillar, and—
“Josh?” Will asked.
Josh’s attention snapped back. She had been staring at the bed; she turned back to Will and Haley.
“So, what,” she said, “I’m supposed to merge the three universes so that they can form something new, some next incarnation for all of us? Am I the True Dream Walker or not?”
“Nothing’s written in stone,” Will said, but he glanced at Haley as he spoke.
“He’s right,” Haley said.
“Either I merge them or I don’t.”
“It’s not that simple. The future isn’t fixed.”
Josh wanted it to be simple. She liked monster nightmares, ninja nightmares, zombie nightmares. She liked knowing her enemies and knowing how to beat them.
Haley reached toward her, and his hand hovered in the air a moment before resting on her knee. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do,” he said.
That was not reassuring.
Twenty−seven
Haley was finally back in his apartment, his bedroom, his bed, and he couldn’t sleep.
After making it very clear to her family that they had no right to dictate where she spent her nights—she was nearly twenty, after all—Mirren had fallen asleep in Haley’s bed. Her sleeping aura was a pattern of scarlet red and deep orange, arranged in concentric circles, like ripples spreading out from her, spreading that peace, and Haley wished he could bring himself to lie down beside her and bask in her calm energy.
But he couldn’t sleep.
He’d borrowed Dustine’s letter. Josh hadn’t wanted to ever see it again; she’d been upset and confused enough that she went down to the basement to dream walk, and had turned Will down when he offered to go with her.
Haley hadn’t understood what the things he sensed about Josh had meant until he read Dustine’s letter. Now he wondered if he had jumped the gun when he told Josh she was the True Dream Walker eight months before. He’d said it because it was written in her scroll and because he had no other explanation for the silver singularity that was her energy field.
Maybe Young Ben had run into the same problem when writing her scroll. Maybe there was no name for what Josh was, and they’d all assumed her uniqueness was part of something they’d heard of.
Will had told Haley about the prophesies, the True and False Dream Walkers, and Feodor’s attempt to hide information from Josh. It had only confused Haley further. He knew what he saw when he looked at Josh, and what he felt when he touched her, and certain flashes of a possible future, but he didn’t know how any of it fit together.
That had always been his problem.
He sat against the wall beneath his window and closed his eyes. He had his steno pad open on his leg and a Sharpie in his hand.
Show me something, he begged. Let me help. Tell me what to do.
His pen remained motionless, poised over the page, and he was still waiting when Mirren stirred. A flash of yellow anxiety burst from her third chakra at finding him missing from bed, and then a cooling rush of green when she saw him under the window.
Without speaking, she got out of bed and sat down beside him, slipping in between his arm and side. Her touch was comforting, her peaceful, sleepy aura a warm, red cloud around them. Haley waved his hand through the air where her scarlet aura and his violet aura overlapped, and smiled as little energetic sparks flew, both energy fields quickening.
“Are you playing games I can see?” Mirren asked, her tone lighthearted.
“Maybe.”
“I almost think I can feel it. Like little waves.”
Haley felt a stir of excitement. He’d always wanted to do this with someone, and Mirren was the first person he trusted. “Close your eyes.”
Mirren closed her eyes and leaned against him, smiling faintly. “What are we doing?”
“Just tell me what you feel.”
Haley wiggled his fingers in the air close to her elbow and watched as their auras began to spin, like stirred water. “What is that?” Mirren asked, but she was smiling.
“What do you feel?”
“It’s like … you’re kissing my elbow.”
Haley swept his fingers up her arm, leaving a trail of twirling energy in his wake. Mirren inhaled sharply as the energy moved along her collarbone to the base of her throat, then up her neck and finally across her lips.
“Haley,” she whispered, and her gray eyes, when they opened, were dark.
The energy kept moving when he kissed her, and through his eyelids, Haley saw orange flares around them. He felt its heat almost as surely as he felt Mirren’s hands on his chest, and he—
Suddenly he was watching her face on a computer screen, and she was speaking in a slow, deliberate manner. Yellow energy filled her aura, and it was pure and bright around her like a solar flare.
Haley pulled away, and the image vanished. He didn’t know if he’d caught a peek at her thoughts or her future. If he warned her of what was to come, would she alter her actions? The dilemma was the same he’d been facing since he was a child, and whatever he had learned in Death or over the last three months meant nothing, because he still didn’t know how to resolve it.
“What’s wrong?” Mirren asked. Her parted lips were damp.
He didn’t want to look at her. He knew his eyes were faulty and weak—too easy to read, like the rest of his face.
“You saw something,” she said.
He nodded, picking up his Sharpie. He wanted to write Mirren a note, but what could he have safely said?
“I thought things would be different if I made it back,” he admitted, forcing the words out through his mouth instead of his marker. “I thought I’d be different.”
“You are different,” Mirren told him. She brushed his hair out of his eyes. “I can see it.”
You see it, Haley thought. I’m not sure I do.
“Do you want to know what I saw?” he asked.
Mirren’s eyes widened. “Are you allowed to tell me?”
“I don’t know. No one ever gave me any rules. Sometimes I told Ian things … but it always seemed to bring trouble.”
“Then don’t tell me.”
Haley rubbed the palm of his free hand against his jeans. It hurt a little, and he liked that.
“Maybe I want to tell you. Maybe I’m tired of … being helpless. Always knowing what could happen and not being able to do anything about it.”
“Why can’t you do anything about it?”
He looked at her in the odd shadow beneath the window, startled.
“You told me before you went away that you were tired of being afraid,” she said. “You said you regretted watching Ian fall apart and not trying to help him.”
Haley thought of what he’d just seen, of Mirren on a computer screen. “I can’t influence your decisions. I—I don’t know how, but I know that’s not what I’m supposed to do.”
She nodded, as if she accepted his determination, but after a moment she said, “What about using your second sight to see something useful? Would that be wrong?”
“I tried. This is all I came up with.”
He picked up the steno pad to show her the blank page, but the instant his fingers touched the paper, a memory woke in his mind. He was three years old, standing in the living room, and Josh was holding out a painted wooden nutcracker. It was her favorite toy, and she was going to let him play with it to be nice even though she didn’t really like anyone else touching it. Haley had only known her for a few weeks, and he was still scared of her, the way her aura blazed purple and silver and was full of stars, but his curiosity had slowly overtaken his fear.
When he accepted the nutcracker, he let his fingers touch her soft
, dirty hand, and for an instant, he was enveloped in that starry purple sky. He felt something his three-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend, but his heart had understood: this girl was part of his destiny.
When he’d opened his eyes, he had been holding the toy out in front of him, and Josh had been frowning, and she’d taken the nutcracker back. “You make it bite the bad guy,” she’d said, and demonstrated with a stuffed bear. “Chomp!”
“Is that a smile I see?” Mirren asked, and Haley was back in his room, sitting beside her, and yes, he was smiling.
“I think I can do it,” he said. “But I’ll need Josh’s help.”
* * *
Haley and Josh sat cross-legged on a training mat in the basement. He knew from the streakiness in her aura that she was feeling anxious, but she was trying really hard not to let it make her cranky. She looked different from the girl he had gone into Death with six days—no, three months before. She’d developed a dangerous, wiry look, one that suggested she could be trouble. And her eyes, those aventurine green eyes, had darkened. When Haley looked into her eyes, he saw Feodor’s reflection instead of his own.
“I … I’ve never tried this before,” he admitted.
Josh grinned. “Me neither. And what are we trying, exactly?”
It was easier to look at her with Mirren and Will standing out of eyeshot, easier to pretend they were alone while doing this oddly intimate ritual.
“We’re … trying to direct my visions.”
“All right. What am I supposed to do?”
“Hold my hands.” He arranged their hands so that the lefts were on top and the rights were on the bottom. That felt important, somehow. “Now close your eyes.”
Still trying to pretend they weren’t being watched, Haley shut his own eyes.
I don’t know what to do now, he thought. He’d never tried to use his abilities deliberately. Show me Peregrine, he thought. Show me Feodor.
Nothing happened.
He tried thinking of the future and waiting for an image to appear, but all he saw was how he must have looked to those watching.
Should I try calling on angels? he wondered. He had never really believed in angels until he visited Death. Mirren believed in gravity—that there was a predetermined course that led everyone to their destiny. Josh didn’t believe in anything, as far as he knew.
But he heard Josh’s voice then, and afterward he couldn’t have said whether she had spoken aloud or only in his mind. You have to follow it.
Follow it? Haley wondered. Follow what?
Then he felt a tingle in their joined hands, as if a current were running between them, a purple line of electricity that expanded as he watched.
Follow it, follow it, you have to follow it.
Haley kept his mind trained on the energy as it grew into a beam of purple light, and then it wasn’t just their hands that were a part of it, but their whole bodies, and the light just kept expanding into a tunnel cutting through the darkness of space, and Haley found himself standing in it, holding Josh’s hand.
He blinked. He wasn’t imagining this—he was really there. It felt as real as anything ever had.
“Where are we?” he asked. His heart was beating fast; that, too, felt utterly real.
Josh had a faraway look on her face. “You have to follow it,” she said again, and then she walked toward the source of the light, and Haley followed, still holding her hand.
The light grew brighter and brighter until Haley had to close his eyes, and he stumbled along behind Josh until suddenly the light was gone.
He opened his eyes. They were standing in a room that turned to white nothingness, and in the center rose a pillar of black basalt with water pouring out of the top, and on the water rested a large, white egg.
“Where are we?” he asked again.
Josh just smiled at him and placed their joined hands on top of the egg.
It was not an egg, but a stone, Haley realized, and then not a stone, but a universe, and they were floating inside it, watching the souls come and go.
Each soul was a golden line, moving along its own course. Some had very short paths behind them, and others had traveled so far that Haley could barely see where they began. Deloise was one that seemed to stretch on forever, and as Haley watched her soul move faithfully along, he could see how she was growing from one incarnation to the next. Will, too, had many miles and many lives behind him.
Whim … not so many.
Mirren had been right—they did each have a destiny, an inevitability. And at the center of it all was something good. Something beautiful and made entirely of love. They all came back to it in the end. They set out, individual souls, growing with each lifetime they lived, and when they had been made perfect, they returned to the whole, to make it even more beautiful. There was no hell, nowhere else a soul could end up. Except …
“Look,” Josh said. “That’s me.”
Her soul’s path was silver, and it was very short. Unlike all the others, it originated in the room behind them. And it had no set course before it.
Josh’s sadness throbbed around them.
Suddenly all Haley’s shyness was gone. It couldn’t exist in this place, so close to that source of eternal love. “Don’t be sad,” he told Josh. “It’s like I said before—you’re something new.”
“I’m young and stupid,” she replied, but she smiled.
“We all were, once. But look here, at Feodor’s path.”
Feodor’s soul had left a glowing, jagged trail, chaotic, crazed. But then it crossed Josh’s path, and on the other side, it began to straighten out. The dramatic turns smoothed out, and the golden color intensified.
“See? You helped him.” Haley pointed to his own life, like the line of a constellation drawn between stars. “You helped me.”
But another line, one that had run parallel to his own for a brief time, had collapsed into knots and turmoil.
Ian.
Ian’s life line wasn’t leading back toward Haley’s, it was—
“Why didn’t you tell me—”
And the rest was screaming.
Twenty−eight
Josh didn’t hear her own voice until she opened her eyes and saw the basement stretched out before her. Haley lay curled into a ball on the blue training mat, and Mirren was kneeling beside him and checking his pulse. Will was standing directly in front of Josh, his mouth moving silently.
Josh realized from the angle of the strange tableau that she had backed into the farthest corner of the basement. The reason she couldn’t hear what Will was saying was that she was screaming, and the word echoing off the cement walls was, “Forget!”
Josh took in a deep breath to scream again, despite her raw throat, and Will put his hands on her shoulders and said quietly, “Josh, stop. You’re okay.”
She stared at him. She wasn’t okay, but she couldn’t remember why not, and as soon as she tried to remember, another scream rose up in her chest.
Forget, forget, forget!
“What the hell was that?” Whim asked, running down the stairs with Deloise at his heels.
“Whim, shut up,” Will said. “Josh, you’re safe. You don’t need to scream.”
The scream was a balloon filling with air, waiting to be released, and she wanted to let it out, but Will was giving her a reassuring smile and touching her cheek and saying, “Breathe with me. In … Out … In…”
Slowly, the balloon deflated. Josh didn’t realize she was clenching her fists until she released them and felt the ache in her hands.
“Will,” Mirren said tightly. “Something’s wrong with Haley.”
Will took one look at Haley’s face and said, “We need to get him off the floor.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Deloise asked. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Will said.
In her head, Josh heard him finish the thought.
But it isn’t good.
She watched, motionless, as Will and
Mirren lifted Haley off the floor and set him gently on an old couch. Haley never moved; his body was as rigid as a cemetery angel. Curled up in the fetal position, he reminded Josh of one of those babies that turned to stone in the womb.
“His pupils are huge,” Mirren said.
“I know,” Will said. “He’s in some sort of shock. Whim, get a sleeping bag.”
Josh felt that she was watching them from a very great distance. She watched Deloise touch Haley’s skin and look alarmed, watched Mirren tuck the sleeping bags in around Haley and speak softly to him, watched Whim call his mother at work.
Josh trained her eyes on the stained cement floor until two flats entered her field of vision. When she lifted her head, Deloise was standing in front of her.
So pretty, Josh thought, admiring her sister’s brown eyes.
“Do you remember your name and everything?” Deloise asked.
“Yes. I’m Josh, you’re Del.”
“Do you remember coming down here?”
Josh nodded, and her neck popped painfully. “We were sitting on the mat.”
“And then?”
And then the screaming.
Josh shrugged.
Deloise put an arm around her shoulder—She’s taller than me, Josh recalled—and walked her back toward the couch.
“How’s she doing?” Will asked.
“She’s sort of stunned, but she seems all right.”
“Good.” Will smiled briefly. “I don’t know what happened, but I think Haley’s getting better. His pulse is slowing down and he’s warming up. Maybe the best thing to do is just give him some time with Mirren to calm down.”
“Mom says the same thing,” Whim reported.
Will said, “Haley, we’re going to leave you and Mirren here for a while. We hope you’ll come upstairs when you feel better.”
Deloise and Will dragged Whim and Josh up the stairs.
“That is not just Haley freaking out,” Whim said as soon as the basement door shut.
“No,” Will agreed. “It’s Haley freaking out so badly that he went into some combination of shock and catatonia.”
“Maybe some food would help,” Deloise said.
