Dreamfever (2 page)

Feodor tried to leave the parlor, but Josh grabbed his arm. “Show me how to put these on,” she ordered.

“Bryga—” he began.

“Can wait. Show me.”

He obeyed, but with angry speed.

“The wires have to run along the cephalic, basilic, and median veins.” When he lifted her right arm, Josh saw all of her veins pulsating just beneath the surface of her skin, as if they were fighting to escape her flesh and join with the device.

The firing of cannons continued outside. Human and mechanical screams wove together in a single wail. The apartment darkened as smoke blocked out the sun.

“Feodor!” Bryga called again.

Feodor snapped the vambrace closed around Josh's forearm. The ends of the wires dug into her skin, and she sensed that she had just hurt herself but couldn't feel it yet. Then she forgot her concern as warmth flowed down her arm and into her hand. Feodor placed the headband around her skull, and when he used a leather cord to close the open ends, he tightened the headband so that the crystals cut into Josh's scalp. For a moment, she had a dire headache; then the same warmth began to fill her head.

Yes,
she thought.
Yes.
She felt as though she were expanding, extending outside her body, into the devices, past them, into the world around her, spreading, unstoppable.

A bomb exploded in the street outside, shattering not just the windows but the stained glass lamp shades as well. Feodor dropped to the floor, covering his eyes, but Josh stood up while the building still shook, shaking her head and flinging glass from her hair.

“Feodor!” Bryga screamed.

“I'm coming!” Feodor called to her, and he crawled toward the hallway.

“Stop!” Josh commanded, and he did stop, though his expression was furious. “Watch.”

She held out her equipped arm. Spreading her fingers wide, she extended her hand toward the window and
reached
.

She didn't imagine what she wanted to happen—that would have been degrading. She didn't have to justify herself by explaining. All she had to do was reach. The warmth crawled down her forearm into her hand and then flooded her fingers. When heat burst out of her fingertips, the world outside the empty windows froze, then repaired itself in fast motion. Shards of glass pieced back into the window frames, the fires sucked up their smoke, the fallen buildings righted like people rising and brushing themselves off after an earthquake. The painting slid up the wall and resettled on its nail. The screams and sirens fell silent and were replaced by the idyllic
ding ding
of the tram and the hollow knocking of horseshoes on cobblestone streets.

Calm, steady sunshine again filled the parlor. Josh, stunned by her own strength, slowly retreated to the piano bench and—after a moment of staring at her hands and thinking,
They aren't even shaking
—resumed playing. After a few measures she recognized Poland's national anthem rising around her. She played it with a decisive, valiant hand, and though she did not know the lyrics, she remembered the first line.

Poland has not yet perished!

This time, when Feodor sat down beside her, he didn't try to play along. He only turned her face with gentle fingers on her chin and kissed her.

Josh hummed as she kissed him back.

*   *   *

She woke, shuddering and aroused, and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. When her blood had stopped pounding, she tiptoed to Will's bedroom and crawled into bed with him. Lying beside him helped her remember who she was with.

And who she was.

 

One

Josh Weaver shaded
her eyes as she mounted a low dune, her heels digging deep into the hot sand with each step. Above her, an oversize sun the color of goldenrods roasted the landscape, and around her the desert stretched endlessly in all directions, like a dusty orange carpet that just kept unrolling.

“I'm getting sand in my shoes,” Will Kansas, walking beside her, complained.

Josh glanced at his torn-up sneakers, one with a ripped heel and the other burdened with black tar, and smiled. Will could destroy a pair of shoes faster than anyone she knew.

Along with the shoes, he wore jeans—also in bad shape—and a navy-blue T-shirt with a Serena's Pizzeria logo on it. Unruly clumps of auburn hair stuck to his damp forehead, his blue eyes were screwed up against the light, and a pink streak was swelling across his cheek where he'd been hit by a shutter in an earlier nightmare, but he looked good to Josh. He always looked good to Josh.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him glance at his watch.

“You too tired for this?” she asked. Since they'd gotten the crap kicked out of them by a zombie and a deranged scientist four months earlier, they both wore out faster.

Will shrugged. “Nah, I'm okay.”

“I could help with this one,” she offered.

“No,” he said firmly. “Stay here. Practice your merging.”

Josh heard the anxiety in his voice but didn't know how to soothe him. His skin graft had healed, his stitches had come out, and he had the feeling back in his fingers, but emotionally he was far from recovered.

She put a hand on his arm. “If you need me, just give a shout.”

“Don't worry,” he said, checking his shoulder holster. “I won't.”

Josh sighed.

The structure atop the dune didn't look quite like anything else Josh had ever seen. Long adobe walls stretched toward the open sky, reminding her of the Southwest, but the lack of roof meant the building offered little protection from the sun.

Closing her eyes, she carefully broke Stellanor's First Rule of dream walking:
Never let the dreamer's fear become your own.
She'd been breaking it for so many years that she didn't even pause to consider the wisdom of her action.

She allowed the dreamer's fear to touch her, just one fingertip, then two, and the taste of panic she felt wasn't the connection with the Dream that she wanted, but it told her what she needed to know.

“It's not a building,” she said, her eyes flying open. “It's a labyrinth.”

She and Will reached an opening into the structure and stopped walking.

“I was pretty sure this is a monster dream,” Will told her. He had been the one who had chosen the nightmare back in the archroom. “And you know what monster lives in a labyrinth, right?”

“The Minotaur. Half bull, half man.”

Will's blue eyes widened in surprise. “Yeah.”

Josh frequently napped during world lit, which Will knew. Six months ago she might not have known the word “labyrinth,” let alone been able to identify the Minotaur. But that had been before a madman with an extensive classical education had downloaded his memories into her brain. Now she not only knew the Minotaur, she could quote lines about him from both Ovid and Dante
.

But Will didn't know that, and Josh had been biting her tongue pretty hard the last four months to make sure he didn't find out.

From inside the labyrinth came a deafening bellow. The ground shook so hard, Josh had to grab Will's shoulder to keep from falling over. She wasn't certain, but she thought she heard a word in the cry.

“Did it say ‘spheres'?” she asked Will in a whisper.

“I thought it said ‘deers.' Are you sure you want to try this
now
?”

Josh nodded. “Just keep it distracted.”

Will unbuckled his shoulder holster and removed a .22 semiautomatic. “I should have brought a bigger gun.”

Today was the first time Josh had let him bring any sort of gun into the Dream. He was not actually much good with them, despite having practiced more than most Olympic shooters. She tried to figure out a polite way of taking the .22 away from him and couldn't come up with one.

“Love you,” was all she said.

He grinned, kissed her quickly, and headed into the labyrinth. “Love you back!” he called over his shoulder.

Josh sank to the ground until she could sit against the labyrinth wall. The heat captured in the adobe felt good against her back and shoulder blades, and she took a few long, deep breaths to settle her heart rate.

She was already losing interest in the nightmare—what she wanted was to merge with the Dream itself. She felt hungry for its ease and expansive freedom. She had felt it once, felt her mind blown open to contain all the World's dreams and nightmares at once, and she had been trying to recapture that sense of unity and connection ever since.

So far, she had been unsuccessful.

Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

She closed her eyes and focused on the air moving in and out of her lungs.

Inhale, exhale. Inhale …

She stopped thinking, as much as she could. Instead she felt her body's weight on the sand, the relentless heat of the sun tightening her skin, and the dull ache in her right elbow that never fully went away. She focused completely on her physical self.

An image flashed in her mind. With a phantom's eyes, she saw the labyrinth as if from above. The walls were moving on tracks hidden beneath the sand, sliding from side to side, blocking off and opening up routes at random. Staying lost forever in such a maze would be easy.

Then the flash was over, and she was back in her body.

The night she and Will and Haley had almost died, she had felt the entirety of the Dream inside her, the whole universe filling her skin. This comparatively meager merger felt like being teased, but it was as close as Josh had been able to come.

More deep breaths, more focus …

The next flash showed her Will, jumping out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed between the ends of two walls, and the dreamer, a little old Middle Eastern man in jean cutoffs and a red tank top that hardly covered his pot belly.

Finally she saw the Minotaur, and she understood for the first time why the Greeks had considered it a terrible monster. It stood taller and overall larger than she had ever expected, so large that its bull's head looked proportional, and its swarthy body rippled with muscle. It didn't even have a neck—its jaw just expanded into its shoulders, and its whole upper body twisted when it turned to look at something. Its horns were chiseled to needle points, each pointing forward and slightly out to the side.

But none of that made the Minotaur anything more than intimidating. What scared Josh was what the monster had done to itself: it was trying to become human, one body part at a time. Swaths of human skin in varying shades of pink and brown had been sewn over its fur. Its cow's eyes had been torn out and replaced with human eyes, one blue and one green, and they were too small to fully fill the Minotaur's cavernous eye sockets. Strangest of all, it had pulled out all its teeth and was wearing a pair of human dentures that filled only the front third of its bull's snout.

It released a roar, half bull's bellow and half human shout, and the word it shouted was neither “spheres” nor “deers” but
“EARS!”

Gross,
Josh thought.

Just before the flash ended, she caught a glimpse of someone else: a young woman, her face hidden by a curtain of dark red hair, collapsed at the end of one corridor. She appeared to be fast asleep.

Who is that?
Josh wondered, the surprise jerking her back into her body.
And how can she be sleeping?

From somewhere nearby came the sound of adobe being crushed. It sounded like the Minotaur had gotten tired of searching the maze and started tearing walls down instead.

Josh tried to settle back into her breathing, but she was distracted by the flash of the young woman sleeping in the sand. She didn't seem to fit in this nightmare, which meant she was probably a second dreamer.

More than one dreamer could participate in the same nightmare; sometimes people really
did
meet in their dreams. But multidreamer nightmares were usually more chaotic than this one thanks to the manifestations of multiple subconsciousnesses appearing simultaneously.

But a dreamer was what the redhead had to be, and since Will hadn't found her, that made her Josh's responsibility.

For the hundredth time since she'd woken up from her coma in February, she felt overcome by frustration. The power of the True Dream Walker that she had used to save Will, Haley, and herself had abandoned her. She had retained only one ability, and it was a small one.

It wouldn't help her now. She was going to have to do this the hard way.

As she jumped to her feet, gunshots echoed through the labyrinth. Josh counted three, and then she heard the Minotaur's inhuman roar:
“SKIN!”

Sounds like a hit,
she thought
.

As Josh ran into the labyrinth, Will fired again, and the bullet must have hit home, because the Minotaur released a bellow more terrible than any he'd emitted before.

“EST!”

She ran toward the Minotaur, whose location was easy to identify because it stood taller than any of the walls around it.

Sooner than she'd expected, she saw the redhead collapsed at the far end of a corridor. She loped down the corridor while calling, “Come on! Let's get you out of here!”

The redhead didn't stir until Josh shook her. Then she opened bleary gray eyes, examined Josh briefly, and went back to sleep.

“You've got to come with me,” Josh said.

“Go away please,” the girl said.

For an instant, Josh considered opening an archway and waking the girl up. But two-dreamer nightmares didn't always play by the rules; if Josh woke the girl up, the nightmare might end, causing the Dream to shift and tossing Josh and Will into different nightmares. He'd never been in-Dream alone before.