Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  More tears filled her eyes. “You’re going to be a great therapist,” she told Will, laughing a little and wiping her face with the back of her hand. She should have realized weeks ago that he would respond to her story with calm psychological insight rather than judgment.

  Josh hoped she wasn’t too late to right things between them. “So where does that put … you and me?”

  Will shook his head. “Don’t ask me. This is why shrinks have shrinks.”

  Somehow, she knew he was holding back. “Don’t deflect,” she said, using another term she’d learned from him.

  He scoffed at her, but with a smile. Then he grew sober again. “I completely understand why you didn’t feel comfortable telling me, but if I had known this when I got here, I would have given you more room. I think it would have been better for you. Now that I know … it seems more obvious than ever that I’m in the wrong place.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Does Schaffer know?” Will interrupted. “About Ian? Would he have understood why you can’t trust anyone right now? Would you have felt so completely responsible for his safety?”

  Josh’s back straightened, and her voice lost its gravelly crying sound. “Will, forget Schaffer Sounclouse. You want to look at all this from a psychological standpoint? Here you go: Schaffer represents all your insecurities now. You’ve never even asked me if I would have rather had him for an apprentice!”

  The calmness left Will’s face, revealing a desperate fear held beneath it. He leaned so far forward that his elbows touched his knees. “Would you?”

  “No!” It wasn’t even a question in her mind. “Schaffer’s untrainable! He can’t keep focused for more than thirty seconds, he misses obvious clues, and he still doesn’t know right from left. Whereas you are so sharp, and so interested, and you remember everything I tell you. You never complain, and I’ve never met anyone with as much looking-stone talent as you. I couldn’t have asked for a better apprentice.”

  He gave her that small smile again, the one full of fondness but lacking any hope. “What about in your life?” he asked in a calmer voice. “Because the way this works, I’m not just a pupil—I’m the guy living in the room next to yours who you have to see at every meal.”

  “Who kisses me in the middle of a sentence for no apparent reason?” Josh couldn’t resist adding.

  Will looked down, but he was laughing a little. “Yeah. I guess I might want to be that guy too.”

  Josh didn’t know what to say next. She dug her fingernails into the knees of her jeans.

  Don’t hurt him, Josh. Don’t you dare hurt him.

  She wetted her lips. “Maybe it’s just been bad timing. You’re a … great. It’s not your fault I’m in a messed-up place. But I don’t know that I can—I don’t know if I can even be a decent friend to you right now.”

  Will reached across the limo and touched her clenched hand. This time his smile was genuine, as worn-out as her own but affectionate. “Let’s just give this a rest for a while, okay?” he asked. “We’ll figure out later whether or not we can keep working together.”

  She hadn’t realized that the stakes were so high, and she knew as soon as the words were out of his mouth that she didn’t want him to leave, that he meant more to her than she had admitted to either one of them. But until she could offer him something more, what could she say?

  “All right,” she agreed.

  Thirty

  Davita had ordered them to go straight home, but Josh told the limo driver to take them to the hospital first. If she was going to get arrested, she wanted to see Winsor and Kerstel first.

  They visited Winsor, but her friend’s silence and sightless eyes unnerved Josh. Kerstel was hooked up to machines and covered in bruises, but at least her face changed when she saw her stepdaughter enter her room. At least her fingers squeezed when Josh took her hand. Winsor’s hand had lain as limp as a dead kitten.

  To Josh’s surprise, Will brushed the wires and tubes aside so he could kiss Kerstel’s cheek.

  “I had a dream about you,” Kerstel told him.

  “I know,” Will said.

  Josh wasn’t sure what he meant, only that he and Kerstel were smiling at each other in a way that made her faintly jealous. Kerstel and Lauren had only taken Will in because he was Josh’s apprentice, but now Josh saw that Will had won his own place in Kerstel’s affection.

  She wondered if Louis Poston would have managed that.

  When she and Will got home from the hospital, he collapsed on the apartment couch in front of a soccer game. The house below them was unusually quiet, Josh thought, lingering in the apartment doorway. It felt empty—she sensed Dustine’s absence from the first floor, Winsor’s from the second, Kerstel’s from the third.

  “You okay?” Will asked her.

  “Yeah. I just need a nap.”

  Will, stretched over the length of the couch, closed his eyes. “I might do the same.”

  Josh went to her bedroom, opened the door, and hit the switch on the wall, which caused the overhead light to come on, which caused Haley—who had been sleeping soundly in Josh’s bed—to fly upright as if he were rising from a tank of ice-cold water. Anyone else would have shouted, but Haley just gaped at her with an expression of astonished betrayal, as if she’d woken him by kicking him in the gut.

  She had forgotten that Haley had taken over her bedroom recently. “You can’t—” she began, and then she saw her scroll spread out on the floor just as it had been two days before, a textbook at each end to keep the parchment from rolling. If Winsor had put it away, Haley had gotten it out again.

  “What are you doing with this?” Josh hissed, and shut the door behind her to keep from waking Will.

  She darted toward the scroll, but Haley was closer and faster and ended up holding it over his head like a trophy. He climbed onto her bed, feet mired in her comforter.

  “Give me that,” Josh said, the anger from her initial discovery returning. “You never should have opened it!”

  Haley changed his grip on the scroll, holding the top edge in both fists. He bit his lip as if thinking, and then his mouth hardened resolutely.

  He tore the scroll in half.

  “What are you doing?!” Josh asked again, and she struggled to keep from shouting. She grabbed at his hands but only came away with a corner of parchment. Haley began ripping the rest into strips. “Haley! Stop it!”

  He tore the strips in half and then, much to Josh’s astonishment, threw them at her like confetti. As bits floated down around her, he said, “It’s a fake.”

  Josh stopped trying to catch the flakes of parchment and stared at him. “What?”

  He sank back against the wall behind her bed. Josh looked at the pieces in her hand and then at him, and finally she just shook her head.

  “It’s a fake,” Haley repeated.

  “How do you know?”

  “I … know.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “I touched it. And I just … knew. I … know lots of things.”

  That had probably been the longest statement Josh had heard Haley make—when he wasn’t acting like Ian—since he’d returned to town. That fact alone made her uncertain.

  “Young Ben wrote it to protect you,” Haley continued. “He’s trying to protect you. We…” And here his voice faltered and faded. “We all are.”

  Maybe. Something in his expression looked genuine. Josh had a hard time disbelieving him. And although she couldn’t make the pieces fit together—literally or figuratively—somehow the idea of a fake scroll seemed in keeping with her grandfather’s strange desire to possess it. Winsor had said that the writing style seemed off, too.

  Except that the idea of a fake scroll was so preposterous that Josh couldn’t even conceive of it. The whole idea of a scroll was to tell truths. It served no other purpose.

  “Protect me from what?”

  Haley considered the bits of scroll scattered on the ground. Finally, he s
aid, “From yourself.”

  He spoke as though the words hurt him. Josh didn’t know why, or even what his answer meant, but she saw a clarity in Haley that was rare.

  None of that, of course, meant that he wasn’t crazy.

  “All right,” she said, shrugging. She began collecting the shreds of parchment. “Whatever. Can you please find somewhere else to sleep?”

  His face sharpened with anger, and for a moment he looked so much like Ian that Josh’s breath caught. Then he darted past her, slamming the door on his way out.

  A moment later, the door burst open again, and this time Haley was dragging Will—who was blinking rapidly at the sudden onslaught of light—by the wrist. “Tell her!” Haley demanded.

  Josh had just gotten an envelope and was putting the torn-up pieces of scroll in it. She paused to watch Will say, “Tell her what?”

  Haley had gone from looking like Ian to looking like a very angry Haley, which was an expression Josh had never seen before. It involved pursed lips and drawn brows and, after Will’s question, an actual foot stomp. Then he whispered in Will’s ear.

  Will ran a hand through his curls, which were even more unruly than usual from his brief nap on the couch. “Oh, yeah. He did ask me to tell you that he’s psychic.”

  Josh didn’t know which was more ridiculous. “He’s psychic? And you, the guy who wants to be a psychiatrist, believe him?”

  “Haley, maybe you could give Josh some sort of demonstration.”

  Haley looked uncomfortable, like a little kid being teased by adults, but he took Josh’s hand. Josh was still too stunned to protest.

  “You told Will about the fight at the cabin on the drive home from Braxton,” Haley said. “But you didn’t tell him how Ian threw the mug at the wall and it broke, or how Winsor slapped you, or how when you went into the basement you threw up behind the radiator.”

  Josh pulled her hand out of Haley’s grasp. Not because she didn’t believe him—because in one brutal, revelatory instant she did—but because she was afraid of what else he would see. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, more stunned by his silence than the news. “I’ve known you my whole life.”

  “Ian said we could, someday. But then he died.…”

  Ian had been intensely protective of Haley. When he and Josh had dreamed about the future, getting married, having their own home, Ian had always insisted on a little guesthouse for Haley to live in. She didn’t doubt that his protectiveness had gone far enough to exclude her from information that might put Haley in danger.

  If he’s really psychic, then my scroll’s really fake, Josh thought. Which is good, because it means no one’s opened the real one. Anything could be written in it.…

  Suddenly, she felt panicked, like a restless child who had been sick for days and could endure it no longer. It must have shown on her face, because Will said, “Josh?”

  “Can I talk to Haley alone?” she asked.

  “Ah, I guess. I mean, yes, of course. I’ll be in my room.”

  Josh waited until he had left, closing the door behind himself, to sink onto her bed.

  “Is Will in my real scroll?” she asked, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Is there an apprentice in the real scroll?”

  Haley’s face softened. He shook his head.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered with each breath. “Oh my god. Shit. Oh my god.”

  “Young Ben made the apprentice up,” Haley whispered back. “Then he sent Schaffer over here that night. Only Schaffer was late, ’cause he got lost.”

  “Why? Why would Ben do that?”

  Haley shrugged. “Schaffer’s not a very good dream walker. Ben thought you could help.”

  “That’s crazy. That’s ridiculous. Ben can’t just make things up! And now Will is my apprentice because Schaffer doesn’t know right from left?”

  Haley tilted his head and asked, “Do you mind?”

  It was such a bizarre question that Josh almost laughed. She had been a stressed-out mess for the last six weeks—of course she minded!

  And yet … she kept thinking of the talk she’d had with Will in the limo. It had never felt so good to pour her heart out to anyone. And she couldn’t deny that they’d had fun opening the window together, or that she might have gone on kissing him all night if he hadn’t stopped her. And God bless Deloise for ordering pizza, because Schaffer would have been an infuriating student, but Will was amazing, and she actually felt really proud of how far he’d come.

  She imagined what would happen if she got up, marched into the bedroom next door, and told Will the truth. His belief that he didn’t belong in her life, that he wasn’t wanted in the dream-walker world—it would only get worse. Josh knew he’d insist on going back to the county home. Her father would continue to send him money—which Will would refuse. All the trust he and Josh had worked for and fought for and built together would be destroyed. Every time they’d bump into each other at school, the combination of tension, guilt, and resentment on both sides would be unbearable. Josh would go into the Dream and he wouldn’t be around to give her brilliant psychological insights and nervous backup. She would be lonely. She hadn’t realized how lonely she had been until Will arrived.

  All her thoughts fell silent in the face of a single, overwhelming truth:

  I don’t want him to leave.

  She finally had a reason to send him away. It was a perfect, irrefutable reason—the sort that she had longed for six weeks ago—and she wasn’t going to use it. Whether or not fate had planned their relationship, she was grateful for it.

  Josh nodded resolutely. This was one secret she would gladly keep from him forever.

  “I don’t mind at all,” she said, and laughed. “But what about everything else in the scroll?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Part of her did. Part of her felt that, now that she’d read the fake one, she might as well at least know how much of it was true. But in the end, that would be the same as opening the real scroll, even if she only read part of it. So she just shook her head.

  “That’s what I thought,” Haley said.

  He was talking more, she noticed. He must know so many secrets, she thought. It must be hard not to blurt them all out. No wonder he stays so quiet.

  “You could have told me about being psychic,” she said. “I would have helped, if I could.”

  “I know.”

  Haley didn’t give her a reason why he hadn’t told her, but Josh already knew. Ian had once told her that—no matter how much he loved her—he would always be loyal to Haley first, because Haley needed Ian more than Josh did. Ian hadn’t hidden Haley’s secret because he didn’t trust Josh; he’d done it because, when it came to his brother, he didn’t take chances.

  “Ian loved you a lot,” Josh told Haley.

  Haley smiled sadly, but he looked far away. “He thought I was weak.”

  Josh tried not to let Haley see her wince; Ian had thought Haley was weak. “He thought I was weak too. He was always trying to toughen me up.”

  “You’re tough now,” Haley offered.

  “Am I?”

  He nodded. “You’re brave. You’re strong. You’re a good teacher.” He smiled again, less sadly. “You’re a good friend.”

  “I want to be.” She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat and just talked with Haley. The last time they had been alone together, they’d found Ian and Winsor in the woods, their clothing hanging from tree branches. Josh had frozen, unable to look away, unable to inhale, until Haley had taken her hand and drawn her away.

  Josh shook the image from her mind. “If you ever need to talk, about the psychic stuff,” she told Haley, “I’m here.”

  Haley reached out and hugged Josh, astonishing her. She couldn’t recall Haley ever spontaneously hugging her. “He loved you a lot too,” Haley said. “Even at the end.”

  Josh was still trying to make sense of his words when Haley stood up and walked toward the door. If he understood t
hat Ian was dead, if he could reflect on it, why …

  “Wait a sec,” Josh said.

  Haley hesitated before turning back, as if he knew what she would ask.

  “Why do you pretend to be Ian?”

  His expression was unreadable; too many emotions like too many beams of colored light shining on a single spot. “I don’t,” he said finally. He voice had dropped to a soft, broken halt. “It’s just that—sometimes—Ian gets confused—he thinks this is his body.”

  Thirty-one

  The next day, Snitch got caught.

  News of the arrest shot through the house, and within moments everyone was crammed into the first-floor living room watching the world’s most exclusive cable channel, DWTV.

  Even with her eyes fixed on the television, Josh was aware that the room looked strange—the carpet had been replaced that morning, but it was not quite the same shade as it had been before, and an old living-room set from the basement had been dragged upstairs. The drapes on the windows were missing, which reminded her that Kerstel and her father—who had spent a good six months trying to pick out those curtains due to Lauren’s complete indifference—probably didn’t know about Snitch’s arrest.

  Laurentius had come home for a few hours of sleep and then returned to the hospital, where Kerstel continued to improve. During that time, he had thoroughly berated his elder daughter for kicking her elderly grandfather in the chest. But Josh had told her side of the story convincingly enough that she got the initial punishment—a month’s grounding—knocked down to being made responsible for making sure everyone ate breakfast while Kerstel was in the hospital.

  “No way!” Will said when she told him. “They really do let you off for everything.”

  “Seriously,” muttered Deloise, who’d lost a week’s allowance after Lauren saw the outfit she’d worn to the dance.

  Winsor’s parents were taking turns staying with her; when news of Snitch’s capture reached the house, Saidy was at the hospital and Alex was home, leaning forward out of the big armchair to get a better look at the TV.

  The hospital televisions certainly didn’t get DWTV. It only aired on televisions that had been carefully modified to pick up what even SETI would think was pure static, and it was run entirely by dream walkers. Josh had always been disappointed that the programming resembled C-SPAN more than the Discovery Channel, but for news from the dream-walker world, it was the only place to go.