by Kit Alloway
Outside, rain fell so hard it blurred the lines of the buildings. Josh and Will ran toward the limo, parked a block south. The first puddle soaked Josh’s slippers all the way through. Will ran beside her with his eyes wide and his auburn hair plastered to his neck, cringing when lightning struck less than half a mile away.
“In!” Will told her, throwing open the limo door. She tumbled into the vehicle, a chilly but safe harbor from the wind and rain. Will followed, slammed the door, and started hitting buttons randomly. “Where’s the intercom?” he muttered as the dome lights flashed on and off. For a moment the moonroof opened, prompting both of them to swear as water poured inside.
“Here,” Josh said, flicking a switch.
“Yes?” a voice prompted.
“Tanith, immediately.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
A moment later the limo rolled forward. Josh and Will both pulled off their soaked robes, and Will found two chenille blankets in a drawer beneath the seats. Josh didn’t realize she was shivering in her yoga pants and T-shirt until he wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.
The thunder came again—three, four times, not so far in the distance. Between the tinted windows and the inky black clouds, the cabin of the limousine was as dim as a cave.
“Does any of this make sense to you?” Will asked. Josh could just make out the line of his head and shoulders sitting across from her.
“What, you mean why my grandfather is blackmailing me to get to my scroll? I have no idea!” She’d thought she felt angry, but the underlying note in her voice was hurt. He’s supposed to be family.…
“He messed up when he didn’t listen to us, and now he’s trying to cover his ass,” Will theorized.
“Do you know what ‘anarchistic use of an inter-universal gateway’ is? It’s what happened when I let Gloves keep my lighter.”
“Josh, that was an accident.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, “but it was still a crime. Maybe I should let Peregrine arrest me.”
“If Snitch and Gloves hadn’t gotten the lighter from you,” Will told her, his voice hardening, “they would have gotten one from somebody else.”
“But they didn’t get it from someone else,” she said. “They got it from me.”
Exasperated, Will asked, “Why are you so determined to be at fault for this?”
Strangely, his anger made her laugh. “Because they always let me off.”
Then, with a recklessness close to hysteria, she blurted out, “‘Go ahead and fall in love even though you’re too young, Josh, ’cause your mom died. Your grades are crap, but we won’t worry about that because you’re sharp in a nightmare. And never mind how you broke every rule in the book and opened an archway without permission and someone died. He was your ex, so you’ve probably suffered enough. We’ll let that slide, too.’”
She felt Will listening, felt his presence in the dark. “I screwed up, I did. Just this once I want them to see me and see exactly what I’ve done, not some censored version. Kerstel nearly died, and it was my fault. Grandma did die, and that’s my fault too. I wasn’t supposed to dream walk, and I went in anyway. You even told me not to, but I did. If that makes me an accomplice, they should arrest me.”
Then she was crying. Will could tell her that it hadn’t been her fault, but that wasn’t going to take the bloodstains out of the carpet or erase the sound of Kerstel’s labored breath as it struggled down the phone lines.
Josh covered her eyes with her palms and the thunder clapped so hard her heart shook in her chest. She felt Will put his hands on her knees.
“Josh,” Will said. He no longer sounded angry.
“Sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry. Keep this in perspective. You chose to break a rule, you’re guilty of that, but you had no idea that you might be putting others at risk. If you had thought for a moment that someone else might get hurt, I know you wouldn’t have gone in. Everybody knows that.”
“But my grandmother is still dead,” she whispered.
He sighed. “I know,” was all he said.
Her chest was tight, but she couldn’t keep crying. The tears balked inside her as if they knew their own uselessness. All she wanted was a chance to say I never meant to put you in danger.
She wanted to say the same thing to Ian.
Lightning cracked like the dome of the sky was being shattered into pieces. Light flooded the limo and, for a moment, Josh found Will’s eyes. She could see him across from her, touching her knees as if determined to hold on to what little she would give him and biting his tongue to keep from asking for things he knew she didn’t want to share.
She was so tired of hiding from him.
“I know I’ve been pushing you away since you got here,” she said tentatively. “Part of it is, ‘Wait, wait, he’s an outsider, don’t show him that.’ Part of it’s just me. But everything you said outside the gym was true: you’re in this as deep as the rest of us. When Snitch and Gloves came out of the Dream, it might just as easily have been you in the archroom as Winsor. I have to accept that.”
She held her breath when she was done. The rain still pounded, as angry as she’d ever heard it, but a pocket of quiet filled the limo. Under the storm she heard her heartbeat and Will’s breathing and the water peeling off the wheels.
Say something, Will.
“I appreciate that,” he told her finally, but it didn’t sound like a good thing. The tone of resignation in his voice set her immediately on edge. He leaned back in his seat, moving away from her. The warm places on her knees where his hands had rested turned cold.
“Will?” she asked. The darkness between them was deep. “Will?”
“I don’t want to be an obligation,” he told her. His voice was grim. “I don’t want to be one of the burdens you’re carrying around.”
“You’re not—” she began weakly.
“I am, that’s what you just said. I know it looks like I got the good side of this deal—suddenly being adopted and offered things I only dreamed of—but it’s hard for me, Josh, hard to know that I’m always going to be the outsider. I’m the guy who showed up instead of Schaffer. I’m the mistake Deloise made. I know that.”
Oh god. She didn’t want to hurt him. He was always so good to her.
“What do you want from me?” Josh asked, feeling stretched as thin as rice paper.
The terrible resignation came back to his voice. “So much more than you want to give me.”
She heard what Will didn’t say. She had heard it in the gym and not known how to reply, she had felt it in his kiss and tried to ignore it, but she recognized it now—recognized the question she still didn’t know how to answer: Are you going to let him love you?
He deserved to know the truth; he was too good a guy for her to keep lying to him. Sooner or later he would find out what she’d done. Better to destroy his illusions now.
“You wouldn’t want to be here if you knew what happened to Ian,” she said.
Will’s voice rose bitterly out of the dark. “Forget Ian, Josh. I don’t want to wrestle your secrets out of you.”
It’s not fair that you feel this way when you don’t know what you’re getting into, Josh thought, or what happened to the last guy.
“I have to tell you,” she said finally.
“Don’t use him as currency.”
Feeling cut, she said, “Will, that’s not it. I just … I have to tell you.”
A gust of wind rocked the limo. “I know more than you think I know,” Will said.
“What do you mean?”
“Whim told me about you and Ian, and how he read his scroll and broke up with you. He told me about Winsor and Haley, and”—Will’s voice dropped slightly—“Winsor and Ian. And how the cabin burned down when you tried to open an archway.”
Stupefied, Josh said, “Whim told you all of that?”
“Yeah. He thought I should know.”
Winsor’s right—Whim is a huge gossip. Josh expected
to feel invaded, but a sense of relief surprised her instead, the way her sadness at the mess with the junta had surprised her. “Did he tell you it was my idea to open the archway?”
“He guessed that it was. Does it matter?”
Will was giving her an out, she knew. All she had to say was no, and he’d let it drop. He’d let her off the hook, the way he always had, the way everyone else did.
Josh was done being let off the hook—too many people had gotten hurt. But she took a moment to breathe, to ready herself, to steady her ax before she brought it crashing through this wall.
“We had this fight, me and Ian and Winsor. After they got back from the—” She was already choked up, and she had hardly begun.
“The woods,” Will said. “Whim mentioned that.”
Josh felt relieved again, for a different reason. She went on. “Yeah, after that. Winsor started the fight, I guess. She wanted to talk about everything that had happened. She wanted Ian to talk too, and he couldn’t talk without getting angry, so he got angry at me. Like it was my fault he broke up with me and then got naked with Winsor in the woods.
“Ian and I hadn’t spoken in a month. We both blew up. We said awful things to each other. I called Ian words I’d never spoken out loud before. He called me worse. We’d been together so long, we knew exactly how to hurt each other.
“We went on for a couple of hours like that, just trying to destroy each other. I was crying, Winsor was crying. I think even Haley was crying. Finally, Ian went outside for a cigarette. He started smoking after he opened his scroll. I decided to be gone before he came back.
“There are only three bedrooms in the cabin, and Kerstel was in one. That left one for me and Del and Winsor, and one for the guys. So I could either share a room with Ian or Winsor. I went into the basement instead.
“I hadn’t been down there since my mother died. Everything was exactly the way it had been when she died. There were mirrors glued to a frame where the new archway was supposed to be and a crate full of stones to build it with. I remember there was a bucket of cement for the arch, too, and it had hardened. I sat on it and looked around at the lanterns and the mirrors and the instruction books, and just being in that house felt like a huge double blow. It was where I’d lost Mom, and it was where I really lost Ian, too, because I guess part of me had always thought he was going through a phase and would get over it and come back to me. But if there was any chance, we killed it that night.
“This guy named Geoff helped my mother open the archway, but he got lost in the Dream and never came out. I imagined what that would be like. All I wanted was to get out of the house, and the Dream seemed like the perfect place to forget everything. I decided to open an archway myself and just get the hell away from everyone. I was setting up the mirrors before I even thought about what might happen.
“One of the mirrors slipped because my hands were shaking, and Winsor came downstairs when she heard it break. She could see what I was up to. When she couldn’t talk me out of it, she got Ian, who yelled at me. And I was so stupid—first I called him a coward. Then I said he was talentless and that he’d made himself look good by walking with me all those years. Next thing I knew, he was grabbing the lantern out of my hands and saying he’d do it himself.
“Winsor said that if the two of us were going to open an archway, she was going to help. She knew it was dangerous. We all knew. Haley came down and hovered at the foot of the stairs just as we were really getting going. He kept shaking his head, like he had a bad feeling.
“The process for opening an archway is nearly the same as what we did for the window. The opening on this side went fine—we just turned on the lasers and traced the lights and, suddenly, there was a … a space.
“Ian went in first, then I followed. This is the dangerous part of opening a new archway. You have to climb into whatever part of the Dream you’ve opened and build a corresponding archway on that side while fending off nightmares at the same time, and you have to connect the two archways to seal off the edges of the Veil or else fairy dust will just keep pouring out and poison you.
“We were holding hands, because once we went into the Dream, there was no way back into the World until we finished the archway on the Dream side—unless we kept physical contact with someone in the World. So Ian held one of my hands and Winsor held the other, and I stood sort of right within the archway.
“I thought we’d gotten lucky. The archway from the World to the Dream opened into a dark room. Just a dark room. I saw a window, a high window—like a dormer, round, and a night sky beyond it. But the room was empty, as far as we could tell.
“Ian set up the archway on the Dream side and lit the lantern, and at first I thought we’d done it. I felt all the layers of the Veil fall out of the archway. But then … I don’t know exactly what happened. Something landed on Ian. He hit the floor, and I had to get on my knees to keep hold of his hand. I couldn’t see what was pinning him down. I could hardly even see Ian except that he was covered in Veil dust. Haley started shouting through the archway, ‘Get out! Get out!’
“And then the dreamfire took us all over. I couldn’t block it out. Everything was so dark, and Haley was yelling, and something made a horrible sound, like a chuckle, and Ian shouted my name.
“For a second, nothing that had happened the last month meant anything, not even the things we’d said to each other that night. When we got down to that kind of danger, nothing mattered but holding on to each other.
“Winsor was holding my hand with both of hers, and Haley grabbed my elbow, and they pulled me out. I was still holding one of Ian’s hands, so I dragged him into the basement with me. Haley knocked over the wooden frame with the mirrors on that side, and it hit the lantern and knocked it into a pile of insulation.
“Then Winsor started screaming, ‘What did you do, Josh, what did you do?’ and I realized I hadn’t brought Ian with me, but I didn’t understand because I couldn’t remember letting go of his hand. I kept looking at my palm, expecting his fingers to be there, and I looked back into the archway, but all I saw was darkness.
“And then … Ian screamed. Not like in the movies—it was a real scream. I couldn’t see what was happening to him, but when he screamed I knew that whatever was in that dream was killing him. And then the screaming stopped. The nightmare killed him.
“Haley started screaming. I tried to go back through the archway, but Winsor grabbed me. I fought her, even after I realized that the lantern had caught the insulation on fire. I kept trying to get back through the archway until the smoke overwhelmed me.
“Whim came downstairs and dragged us all to the floor. But when he started crawling toward the stairs, I realized we were leaving the basement. We were giving up on Ian, and tomorrow Ian would be dead, and the day after, and the day after … I just passed out.
“Whim got us out. Winsor and Haley probably would have made it outside, but not me. He saved my life.
“The week after that is a blur. I was in the hospital for a while and then I was at home, but I don’t remember much except listening to Winsor cry in the room below mine. And some Gendarmerie detectives asking me questions. The first time things came into focus, I was standing in the archroom downstairs with my hand on the looking stone. Nightmares were flying past so quickly I couldn’t even register one before I lost it to the next. I’ve never been able to do it again, but I knew that I was looking for Ian, running some kind of search for him. Three hours later, I was sure he wasn’t in the Dream. I gave up hoping right then and there. I knew Ian was gone.
“The next morning when I woke up, I thought I heard him say, ‘I saw a gate beyond the arch.’ And I’ve been hearing those words ever since, even though I can’t imagine what they mean.”
* * *
The rain had fallen off to a patter. Thunder growled sullenly in the distance, and the cabin of the limousine began to fill with light in an afternoon dawn.
Josh wiped at her cheeks with the edge of the che
nille blanket. She had been crying freely as she spoke, amazed at how quickly the words came, how easy sharing all of this with Will was.
“And, see,” she went on, when he didn’t speak, “the horrible thing is how I’ve picked myself up again. When I realized I couldn’t find Ian in the Dream, I jumped in, resolved six nightmares, and then went to bed. I miss him, every day, but I came out stronger. Do you see that? You didn’t know me before—you saw me at school but you never knew how unsure I was. Ian showed me how strong I am. When we broke up, that was why I didn’t freak out.
“I used Ian. I used him for years, and then when I didn’t need him anymore…”
Will—who had perhaps seen before she had that she wasn’t finished speaking and now saw that she was—said, “When you realized you didn’t need him anymore, you let go of his hand. Is that what you think, Josh?”
There was enough light in the limo by then that she could see his face. His hair had dried in loose waves around his cheeks, and his jeans and gray shirt were damp. His expression was carefully neutral, but she saw a deep sadness in his eyes.
When she didn’t answer, he went on, “When people rebound after a relationship ends, a lot of them do it like Ian did. He wanted to prove that he didn’t need you, so he turned to Winsor. But other people might rebound differently. They might, say, delve into work and fill the holes in their lives very quickly. It’s a different way of rebounding, but it doesn’t make you a murderer.”
His words surprised her into speechlessness. “I get the feeling,” Will said, “that Ian gave you a lot. But Whim made it clear that you gave Ian a lot in return. His death was an accident, no two ways about it. I know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t have let go of him by choice, no matter how much he had hurt you.”
“You don’t think I’m…” She struggled for the right word. “Cold?”
He gave her a small smile. “I think you’re afraid of being vulnerable again. And also afraid of your own strength. Maybe you want to believe that you still need Ian because it helps you reassure yourself that you didn’t kill him.”
