Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  “I know all these things,” Haley said again. “I used to tell Ian, but now there’s no one. It scares Whim. It would hurt Josh. Winsor won’t even speak to me.”

  Will watched Haley run his thumb over Winsor’s knuckles, not with Ian’s boldness but with the tenderness of a former lover. Whim had said he never understood Haley and Winsor’s relationship—maybe it had been so simple as to confuse people. Maybe Haley had just loved her.

  Haley sighed and set Winsor’s hand gently on the bed. He looked at Will, and though he didn’t ask aloud, his question was obvious.

  “You can tell me,” Will said, coming to a decision. “You need to tell me. You can’t carry all that by yourself.”

  “Will…” Haley began, and then stopped, and Will wasn’t sure if he was asking a question or speaking Will’s name. Finally, he asked, “Will you believe me?”

  Suspecting that Haley would know if he lied, Will thought the question through before he answered. He saw Haley looking him in the eye, speaking in complete sentences, expressing emotion, free of his notepad and pen … Haley had never appeared more sane.

  Delusions make people act less sane, not more.

  “I’ll believe you,” Will promised.

  Haley smiled, and then, suddenly shy again, turned away. He leaned down to kiss Winsor’s dark hair. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  * * *

  Josh wasn’t prepared for the scene. The clock had just struck four in the morning when they finally arrived home, but there was a Forward Cleaning Service van parked in the driveway. Two thick tubes ran from the van through the back door.

  The kitchen lights were on, and coffee percolated on the counter. From the living room came the sounds of motion, traffic, industrial equipment. Josh stopped dead in the doorway.

  She hadn’t slept all night, but she hadn’t felt it fully until then, when the world threatened to slip away. Two guys were cleaning the carpet, and her stomach turned at the sight of red froth bubbling out of the rug. A woman stripped bloodied drapes off the windows, and the furniture had been piled haphazardly on one side of the room.

  Josh turned as Haley wandered past her into the pantry and, presumably, the archroom. “Whim,” Josh said. “Take Del upstairs. Go through the hallway.”

  Neither one asked any questions. Whim just put his arm around Del’s shoulders, and she leaned gratefully against him, and they left the kitchen through the doorway that led directly to the hall, bypassing the living room. Whim nodded to Davita Bach, who was hurrying toward Josh. Despite the odd hour, Davita was dressed in a royal-blue suit that set off her red hair and the rubies in her ears. She frowned as if displeased with herself when she saw Josh and Will.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, having to raise her voice above the clamor in the living room. “I thought you wouldn’t be home until tomorrow and all of this would be finished.”

  Josh felt the blood rush to her hands when she saw Davita. She probably would have been angry at Davita regardless, but the fact that the woman looked so put together, so untouched, sent Josh into a fury.

  “I warned you!” Josh said. “Grandma warned you—she believed me!”

  “I know,” Davita said, raising her hands in surrender. “I did what I could—”

  “You did nothing!”

  In that moment, Josh could have been moved to violence. She could have kicked in doors and thrown her fists through walls and shattered windows. But even as she lifted a hand to slap Davita’s beautiful face, tears rushed her eyes, and she just stumbled down the hallway instead.

  Davita called after her, but Josh didn’t turn back. Will followed her, his footsteps a soft echo of hers on the stairs.

  She was vividly aware of the emptiness in the third-floor apartment. From far below came the muted sounds of the cleaners. Only the end-table lamp warmed the room.

  Will came in after her. He didn’t speak, but she felt him behind her, and when she turned to face him, instead of the accusation she expected to find, she saw the same look she’d seen during their fight at the dance, the same longing to be let in, so she threw herself down on the couch and blurted out, “All of this is my fault.”

  Will considered a moment before stepping closer and sitting down on the coffee table in front of her. Very calmly, he asked, “How’s that work?”

  “They used my lighter to leave the Dream. Then they got a mirror somewhere and they came here and hurt everyone.”

  Will put his head in his hands as he said, “Josh, you need to go to bed.”

  “No, you’re not listening to me—”

  “No, Josh, I am. And now is not the time to talk about this.”

  “But it’s my fault, don’t you see—”

  She stood up and brushed past him so that she could pace around the living room. Her need to move was closely tied to her desire to escape her own skin.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Will told her, rising. “It was an accident; you had no way of knowing what would happen.”

  “No, I knew they weren’t just nightmares.”

  “And you told your grandmother and Young Ben and Davita. You warned them—they didn’t listen, and that’s on them, not you.”

  “Grandma listened! She listened and she died!”

  The pattern of shadows Josh cast on the floor as she moved was making her dizzy. Will climbed over the coffee table to cut her off as she made another circuit. He grabbed her arm, stopping her pacing. When he spoke, his voice was laden with frustration. “You did what you could. You warned the right people. They didn’t believe you, and there was an accident. That doesn’t make it your fault. You are exhausted and you need to sleep.”

  She tried to shake him off and had to settle for shaking her head vigorously. “What are you doing, Will?” she nearly shouted. “Why are you defending me when this is obviously my fault?”

  “Because,” he replied, raising his voice for the first time, “because—because—”

  And then he kissed her.

  Josh was so surprised she barely had time to respond before Will pulled away.

  “Because,” he said, and only the lowering of his voice suggested anything had occurred between them, “you’re hurting terribly and you want someone to blame, and since you can’t get your hands on Snitch and Gloves, you’re going to blame yourself.”

  Josh stared at him. Will just kissed me, she thought.

  Then she was kissing him, and he had his hands in her hair and her fists were full of his T-shirt and her body was alive with an exhilaration strangely close to dreamfire. She felt like either one of them might fly apart at any moment, and she clutched him as a way to hold him together, hold herself together—

  “Stop, wait,” he said, pulling away. “We can’t do this. This is crazy.”

  Josh forced herself to let go of him, but her hands ached with the emptiness.

  “I can’t handle this tonight,” he said.

  He looked as drained and weary as Josh felt. His black T-shirt had come untucked from his slacks and his auburn hair was tangled from moments of captured sleep on the hospital couch. His blue eyes were almost as bloodshot as Deloise’s, as Josh knew her own must be, and he was shaking. She could tell him that he wasn’t part of her life, her family, her problems, but he was going to hurt alongside her anyway.

  And apparently he was going to kiss her too.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing—”

  “No, I mean, for last night. For attacking you like that.”

  He shrugged slowly, as if even that gesture were exhausting. “Maybe I deserved it. Right now I’m too tired to remember.”

  She wanted to reach out to him, pull him close for a minute, long enough to sort out what those kisses had meant. Had he kissed her to shut her up, or had he kissed her because he was too exhausted and broken-down to stop himself?

  She didn’t want to scare him. She had spent so long pushing him away that now the desire to be close to him
terrified her. So instead of kissing him again, she only laid her palm against his cheek. Will turned his face into her touch and closed his eyes, resting there, and Josh let her fingertips stroke his skin. Why had she been so afraid of letting him in when he had never been anything except kind?

  Will rolled his face against her hand and placed a very slow kiss on the inside of her wrist.

  Oh, Josh thought, and she shivered.

  When he opened his eyes, they had already found hers, as if he had seen her through his eyelids. He said, “Please go to bed, Josh.”

  She took a step back and stumbled on her bad knee. He wrapped an arm around her waist and she didn’t fight him. “Come on,” he said, leading her into her bedroom.

  He didn’t turn the light on, but slid her onto the bed. While he tugged off her shoes, she found her voice again and said, “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to want to talk soon.”

  He dragged a comforter off the floor and covered her with it.

  “You know where to find me,” he told her. When he went back into the living room, he left her door open, just a crack.

  Twenty-eight

  The next morning, Josh woke Will to tell him that they had been summoned to testify before the junta. He had a bad feeling about it, but he started getting dressed.

  He had just pulled on his pants when he remembered that he’d kissed Josh the night before.

  “Oh, man,” he muttered, rubbing his head. “What was I thinking?”

  He’d been thinking that he was so tired, and so sad, and so sick of listening to Josh beat herself up, and that kissing her was as close as he could get to saying, “Shut up, I don’t care what you’ve done, I think you’re amazing.” Then as soon as he started kissing her he panicked because maybe he’d gone too far, and he’d finished by babbling some sort of argument for why she was too hard on herself.

  “Not smooth, Will,” he told himself in the bathroom mirror. “Not smooth at all.”

  He supposed some sort of explanation was in order, but Josh didn’t ask for one as they ate a quick breakfast. Whole-grain toast and eggs for Will, hot chocolate and cherry Pop Tarts for Josh. She didn’t say anything except that Kerstel had made it through surgery.

  The limo was chilly within, and rain threatened without. As they rolled down the long driveway, Davita flipped open a laptop. She looked just as put together as she had the night before, but her fingers were sluggish on the keys. “What’s your full name, Will?” she asked.

  He looked at Josh. She shrugged. “I’m not sure yet,” he said.

  “Well, we have eighty minutes to figure it out. Name some of the men from your mother’s side of the family.”

  “Paul, John, Ralph, Luke, Neal, Mark—”

  “Isn’t there anyone in your family with a name that isn’t one syllable?” Davita interrupted.

  Will had to think. “I have a distant cousin named Toly, which I think is short for Anatoly.”

  Davita nodded her approval. “It’s close to Anatolijus, which is an old dream-walker name. Do you have a historical figure yet?”

  “Sigmund.”

  She glanced up. “What the hell is Sigmund?”

  Will explained and her brows furrowed in exasperation. “Fine, you’re William Anatolijus Sigismondo Kansas. No, Kansisuvth.”

  He gave up. The atrocity she had just made of his name was one he should have expected. Glancing out the window, he reminded himself, You aren’t really one of them.

  “Josh,” Davita said. “Does Will know what people will expect of him?”

  Have you taught him any manners? Will translated.

  A lock of light-brown hair fell onto Josh’s forehead as she turned to look at the older woman. “He’ll be fine.” She had hardly spoken to Davita since they got in the limo.

  Davita tilted her head skeptically. “Does he know how to greet elders? Does he know how the amphitheater will be set up and where to sit when he enters? Does he know whom he’ll be meeting and what subjects can and cannot be discussed?”

  “No,” Will said. “He does not.”

  Josh sighed. “Let’s go over some things.”

  Over the next hour, she attempted to explain how the junta worked and the protocol for speaking before it, but she obviously had little interest in politics and social niceties. Davita made frequent interjections. While Will felt uncomfortable at having been singled out, he was also relieved that someone had thought to tell him these things. Josh was an amazing teacher of how to be a dream walker in-Dream—less so out of it.

  “And, naturally, my grandfather will be there,” Josh added as they exited the highway and plunged into downtown Braxton. “Probably waving sparklers and drinking Champagne.”

  “Josh,” Davita said, her voice full of disapproval.

  “You know he hated Grandma. I’m telling you, if he makes one smart remark about—” Josh’s voice caught in her throat and she had to clear it before she went on. “I’m gonna kick him, just like I did when I was six.”

  “You kicked him?” Will asked.

  “Yeah.” Josh broke into her lopsided smile. “He made Deloise cry, so I side-kicked him, right in the chest. Knocked him over, too.” Her pleasure at the memory faded. “Every time I see him I want to do it again.”

  “There will be no kicking today,” Davita said sternly. “This is a serious matter, Josh.”

  An hour later, they arrived at the junta’s headquarters. Maybe it was just the rain, but the gray skyscraper seemed more sinister than Will remembered from his first visit.

  On the ride up to the nineteenth floor, Will examined himself critically in the elevator’s mirrored walls. Whim had loaned him a gray robe to wear, and Deloise had pinned it so that Will didn’t trail a foot of fabric behind himself, but somehow he still looked like a little kid dressed as a priest for Halloween. The only thing he liked about the outfit was the pin he wore over his heart with the Weavaros family emblem—an arched foot wrought in silver, set against a field of peridot gems.

  “We were having one made up for you, but…” Josh had said as she pinned it to Will’s robe that morning.

  She was almost finished before he realized what she meant. “This was Dustine’s?”

  Josh gave him a sad smile. “She’d want you to have it. She liked you, you know.”

  Will touched the pin and felt the cool stones and silver beneath his fingertips. “I was beginning to think that maybe she did. We had a lot in common.”

  Josh gave him a curious look, but he didn’t explain. To her, Dustine had never been an outsider, and he decided not to change that.

  The elevator opened onto a carpeted lobby where several dozen dream walkers made small talk and drank coffee. Josh led Will through it to the amphitheater.

  The room was a circular ocean of seating with rows of chairs climbing the walls. But despite the hardwood stage, the golden velvet upholstery, and the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, there was no mistaking the courtroom for a theater; armed guards hovered on either side of the door and heavy-duty steel rings for manacles protruded from the polished floor.

  A row of regal, high-backed chairs cut through the first two rows of seating and dominated the room. “That’s where the junta sits,” Josh said. She gestured to several ottomans, covered in studded leather and standing on legs carved of black marble, set on the stage floor before the junta’s thrones. “Those are for witnesses.”

  Josh and Will took seats in the second row near an aisle, and Davita sat in a reserved area to the side of the junta. “I wonder where Young Ben is,” Josh murmured, scanning the room.

  The members of the junta were elegant and smiling figures, wholly unremarkable in a way that unsettled Will. None of them looked particularly wise or enlightened or significantly different from anyone else in the crowd.

  Except, of course, for Peregrine, who was moving from one cluster of people to the next, greeting everyone. His robe was the same as Will’s except that it was red
shot through with black and gold thread, and it shimmered when he walked.

  “Your grandpa looks like a Vegas act,” Will whispered to Josh, and he got her to laugh.

  Once the junta was seated, the room quieted around them, finally falling completely silent. Will’s nervousness turned to impatience as the junta spent the next hour dealing with unrelated matters. Finally, Josh and Will were called, and he followed her up to the row of ottomans arranged onstage and tried not to look like an idiot in a borrowed dress.

  “Journeyer Weavaros.” A female member of the junta rose, and Will was sitting close enough to the junta’s thrones to read the large brass nameplates set on the table before them. Anivay la Grue was elderly, of Native American descent, and she had thick black hair cut short around her chin. She smiled with her greeting and then added, “I believe we have not yet met your apprentice.”

  Josh said, “Your Eminences, fellow dream walkers, may I present Will Anatoly Sigmund Kansas?”

  For a moment, Will completely forgot that anyone else was in the room, although he could hear Minister la Grue saying, “Welcome to the fold, Apprentice Kansas. May you always walk safely.”

  He looked at Josh, and she gave him a tiny, private smile.

  He could have kissed her right then.

  “Thank you,” Will said, speaking as much to Josh as to the junta minister.

  They sat down, and the interrogation began.

  “We have asked you here today,” Minister la Grue said, “to discuss those known only as ‘the men in trench coats,’ whom many in this room have witnessed. Would you please describe your encounters with them?”

  Will let Josh do the talking; she might hate social situations and feel uncomfortable in her own skin at times, but she knew dreams. She told the junta and the witnesses of her three encounters, beginning with a description of the nightmare she was in at the time. She relayed in detail each of the trench-coat men’s actions, their gas masks, their canisters, Gloves’s gloves. She even told them about the bitter smell of chemicals that clung to them.