One
A corpse lay slumped on the floor in the center of the coffee shop, right in front of the holiday mug display. Customers stepped lightly around it as they passed from the counter to the cream and sugar station, their wet boots squeaking on the floor. The Christmas-caroled air smelled of ginger and cloves, and trays of frosted snowmen grinned from the display cases. Beyond the open doorway, shoppers thronged the mall hallway.
“Christmas nightmares,” Josh said. “They come earlier every year.” She glanced behind herself at Will—
But it wasn’t Will standing behind her. It was Feodor.
He wore his usual expression—a mishmash of contempt and amusement—and his usual outfit, a white button-down shirt and high-waisted, pleated slacks, the creases ironed as crisp as the lines of his lips. Arms crossed over his chest, he waited patiently as Josh assessed the nightmare around them, as patiently as he had once collected souls in canisters, his congregation growing slowly, year by year.
Finally, though, he made a little fluttering gesture with his hand, as if to say, Get on with it.
Josh sighed and turned back to the corpse. Two months and she still expected Will to be at her side.
Stop thinking about Will, she ordered herself. There’s work to be done.
The dead man wore blue jeans so dirty they looked black, broken-down shoes, and no shirt. Burst blood vessels stretched across his nose like networks of roots, suggesting years of hard drinking, but Josh doubted it was the bottle that had killed him. His entire chest had exploded, revealing a mashed cobbler of internal organs.
Josh knelt and touched his cold, stiff hand. This close up, he stank like a two-week-old steak. She closed her eyes and imagined the stone walls that protected her from the dreamer’s fear.
Her mother had been the one who taught Josh to imagine herself surrounded by stone walls. They had begun working on the visualization when Josh was only eight—a year before she was even allowed to accompany Jona into the Dream. Now the image of white rock and gray mortar and the sense of security it provided felt as familiar as the weight of the plumeria charm she wore around her neck.
In her mind, she imagined using her fingertips to pick a well-worn cork from between two stones in the wall. When it popped loose, a waft of blue smoke slipped through, and Josh breathed it in, inhaling a taste of the dreamer’s fear as she did so.
She will reclaim me, the fear whispered. What has been promised must be paid. Tlazolteotl is hungry.
Josh opened her eyes.
“What did you sense?” Feodor asked.
“This dead guy isn’t the dreamer.” Josh stood up and wiped imagined death germs from her hand. “She’s over there.”
Josh nodded toward a caramel-skinned woman in her fifties whose arms were strung with so many shopping bags that she was having difficulty pouring sugar into her coffee.
“And?” Feodor asked.
“And Tlazolteotl is coming to get her.”
Feodor considered. “The name sounds Aztec. Try again. Try to see the shape of the nightmare.”
Josh closed her eyes again, imagined those stone walls, pulled the cork from the hole, and breathed deep. Technically, she was breaking Stellanor’s First Rule of dream walking: Never let the dreamer’s fear become your own. There was a good reason it was the first rule: getting caught up in a dreamer’s fear could render her helpless to the nightmare. But Josh had been breaking the rule almost since the day she’d learned it, and Feodor had a theory that her ability to do so was the key to accessing her abilities as the True Dream Walker.
She breathed in a big ole dose of fear.
That which you have lost you must give up. Tlazolteotl is hungry.
Tlazolteotl was somewhere in the mall, and she was coming closer. Josh tried to imagine what would happen when she found the dreamer.
She’ll … what? Kill her? Eat her?
Strangely, what came to mind were the woman’s packages.
But what does the corpse have to do with it?
Josh pictured the dead man, but he didn’t fit with the images in her head. She just kept coming back to the packages.
Opening her eyes again, she saw that the woman was pouring creamer into her drink. One of her bags had knocked over a squeeze bottle of honey.
Tlazolteotl’s going to steal her Christmas shopping?
Frustrated, Josh tried again. This time she thrust a fist through the imaginary wall, the stone crumbling around her knuckles. Blue smoke rushed through and billowed around her.
You have to follow it, Josh reminded herself.
She still didn’t fully understand what that meant, any more than she understood why Tlazolteotl wanted the dreamer’s Christmas shopping. But she’d first heard the words during a moment of wisdom, and she repeated them to herself when she was hoping for insight.
Now she waited, allowing her mind to show her whatever it wanted. From the darkness behind her eyelids, an image emerged, stepping out from the shadows and into the light of Josh’s understanding. She saw Tlazolteotl—a huge, primal figure dressed in animal skins—coming into the coffee shop, grabbing the woman, opening the shopping bags, and thrusting her muzzlelike face inside, devouring the contents. Whatever was in those packages, it was more precious to the dreamer than her life, and Josh felt the chill of the woman’s fear like a gulp of ice water.
Tlazolteotl is here. Tlazolteotl is hungry.
Josh moved before her eyes were open and managed to trip over the corpse at her feet. After jostling a table of ornaments, she found her footing and rushed through the coffee shop to where the woman was struggling to get the plastic lid back onto her drink. Her hands were shaking.
“Tlazolteotl is here,” Josh said. “What’s in the bags?”
“No,” the woman begged. “Please. I can’t.”
“I need to know—”
“No!”
But Josh had already yanked one of the bags off the woman’s wrist. She pulled the twine handles apart and looked into the pale pink paper bag.
At the bottom of the bag sat the woman’s innocence.
Later, Josh wouldn’t be able to recall exactly what she had seen. Perhaps innocence had no physical form. All she would remember was starlight the color of rose quartz and a sense of hope so grand it left no possibility for anything other than joy. Josh was still blinking when the woman grabbed the bag back.
“I can’t lose it!” she shouted at Josh.
She ran out of the coffee shop, and Josh and Feodor ran after her. But Josh needed to close her eyes—Someday, I’m going to figure out how to do this with my eyes open, she swore to herself—so she took hold of Feodor’s arm and said, “Lead me. Don’t lose her!”
Trying to ignore her own motion and Feodor’s voice calling, “Pardon! Make way for this young blind woman!” Josh went back to the stone walls. They stood close around her, like the walls of a well, and they were so real to her that when she began yanking stones out, they scraped her palms.
The blue smoke poured in around her, clouding her vision with the woman’s terror. Josh felt the familiar burn of dreamfire. But she needed to see past the smoke, and she imagined herself crawling through the hole she’d made and out past the walls entirely.
On the other side, where the blue smoke had cleared, she saw the woman as a little girl in a pale green bathing suit, cowering behind the flimsy plastic curtain of a locker room shower. The outline of a man darkened the curtain, and thick fingers curled around its edge—
“No!”
Josh’s own horrified scream snapped her back into her body. The shoppers who surrounded her stopped walking to stare, even the dreamer.
Josh ran to her, pushing startled shoppers aside. “You already lost it,” she told the dreamer. “You lost it years ago.”
“No,” the woman said, beginning to push through the crowd again. “No!”
“Your innocence is already gone,” Josh insisted. “Give it to her! Tlazolteotl can’t steal what you offer freely.”
“It’s mine!”
“Don’t make her take it!” Josh grabbed the woman by the shoulders and turned her so that they were face-to-face. “Listen to me! You have to accept what happened and let it go! She won’t hurt you if—”
“I can’t!” the woman wailed, and she tore herself away.
Behind them, something roared.
In the center of the mall food court, her head brushing the third-story ceiling, walked a giant copper-skinned woman. A curled gold bar pierced the septum of her nose, and enormous turquoise earrings hung to her shoulders. She wore an elaborate horned headdress and a red and green skirt, but her breasts were bare except for a multitude of beaded necklaces. Instead of a lower jaw, she had a muzzle, and when she opened it, she revealed a mouth full of dirt, blood, and very sharp teeth.
Tlazolteotl—the eater of sins.
“Oh, shit,” Josh said.
The shoppers began to stampede away from Tlazolteotl, their screams drowned out by the goddess’s furious roar.
“I believe this would be an appropriate time to abort,” Feodor said.
Each of Tlazolteotl’s steps shook the floor. With a growl, she knocked a forty-foot-high Christmas tree onto a jewelry kiosk.
“I can still resolve it,” Josh insisted, even though her first instinct was to run like hell. “Come on.”
She dashed after the dreamer, shoving people left and right. They were only figments of the dreamer’s imagination, after all. It didn’t really matter if they got trampled or eaten. The only person who mattered was the dreamer.
Josh found her cowering under the escalator.
“You have to give Tlazolteotl the bags,” Josh said. “It’s the only way to satisfy her.”
The woman shook her head and clutched the bags to her chest. “No, I can’t. I’m not ready.”
“You are,” Josh insisted. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be having this nightmare.”
For the last two months, Josh had been entering the Dream and diving into dreamers’ fears. It hadn’t been easy and it sure hadn’t been fun, and if Feodor hadn’t been there to keep an eye on her, she would have lost herself entirely on more than one occasion. But in witnessing so much fear, she had noticed a pattern: nightmares had purpose. They were almost designed like tests intended to force the dreamer to grow or evolve in some way.
You have to follow it, Josh thought again.
“Nightmare?” the woman repeated.
“Yes. And if you just let your innocence go—”
But she’d said too much. The woman must have realized she was dreaming and woken up, because the Dream shifted, sending Josh and Feodor spinning through space.
They landed hard on an evergreen forest floor covered in pinecones, and the corpse from the coffee shop landed right between them, hitting the ground so hard it sent pinecones bouncing.
“Gross,” Josh said. A hundred yards away, she noticed a pair of black bears climbing a tree. Squinting, she was able to make out two people clinging to the tree’s upper branches.
This nightmare could wait—at least for a few minutes.
“There is only one explanation for how this body passed from one nightmare to another,” Feodor said.
“It’s a real corpse,” Josh said, like a good student. It disturbed her that she sounded like Will used to, when talking to her. What was she becoming—Feodor’s apprentice?
The body seemed grosser now that she knew it was real, and the fall hadn’t done it any favors. The man appeared to be in his sixties, but he’d obviously lived a hard life: his hair was long and greasy, and his open mouth exposed missing and rotting teeth. Black tattoos that had faded to blurry ashen smudges covered his arms.
“I haven’t heard about any dream walkers being lost in the Dream recently,” Josh said.
“This man does not strike me as a dream walker,” Feodor said, a note of elitism in his voice. “He stinks.”
“Dream walkers can be alcoholics, too,” Josh told him, thinking of Will again. But she was more than certain that Will wasn’t drinking these days.
The man’s chest appeared to have exploded from within. Ragged, torn flesh revealed the jagged ends of broken ribs and a meaningless mass of shredded organs that Josh couldn’t identify. The cavity ran from the man’s breastbone down nearly to his belly button.
“This is an unusual wound,” Feodor admitted. With a fallen stick, he poked around between the ribs.
“Let’s drag him out of the Dream.”
Feodor made a hmm sound, but he seemed intrigued rather than irritated. Focusing her mind, Josh flung her arm out from her body and felt power soar through her palm and into the midst of the forest, where a shimmering archway formed.
She grabbed the corpse’s legs and Feodor caught him under the shoulders, and together they carried him out of the Dream.
Josh tried to set him down gently, but the dead man made a thud when he landed on the archroom’s white tile floor. Kerstel’s going to make me bleach this floor, Josh thought regretfully, wishing she’d put a towel down first. But her irritation was overcome by the excitement of realizing she had been right: the dead man was real.
“Do you have a scalpel?” Feodor asked, getting to his knees beside the corpse.
“Why would I have a scalpel?” Josh asked. “Never mind—don’t answer that.” She sat back on her heels. “This wound is too ragged for a knife, and too big for a bullet. Maybe if he was shot from behind with a hollow-point…”
They were rolling the man over to check for a bullet entry point when Whim Avish walked in.
“Oh, sweet Mother Mary!” he cried, jumping back so fast his shoulder slammed into the door frame. “What am I walking in on?”
Josh was on her butt, pulling on the dead man’s hips so that she could roll him. “Do you see a bullet wound in his back?”
“I don’t know! Who is that guy?”
“We found him in the Dream.”
Feodor, wedging his foot under the corpse’s hips so he could get down on the floor and see beneath the man’s torso, said, “I don’t believe he’s been shot, but it’s difficult to tell. There’s been considerable seepage of fluids.”
“Stop talking!” Whim shouted. “And stop parbuckling him! Dear God—my eyes!”
Josh and Feodor let the corpse fall back onto the floor.
“Parbuckling?” she asked.
“It’s a word!” Whim insisted.
Will Kansas stuck his head into the archroom.
Will met Josh’s eyes without hesitation. He always did. Over the last two months, he had been unfailingly polite and unreasonably friendly. He had acknowledged Josh’s presence, asked her to pass the salt, picked up her gloves when she dropped them once. Sometimes he even smiled at her, in a genuine, forgiving way.
It was awful.
“Whoa,” Will said at the sight of the dead man.
Could anyone else tell how wrong his voice was? It sounded so natural, so casual, with just a hint of acknowledgment that they used to be more to each other than they were now. Josh had never thought she’d miss Ian’s cold shoulder, but this was worse. Will wanted them to be friendly—to be friends. Josh just didn’t know how to do that.
Work to be done, she reminded herself.
She tried to focus on the corpse in front of her. “All I can think is that someone stuck a bomb down his throat. But that would have messed up his back, too.”
“If I’m not mistaken,” Feodor told Josh, “I believe this is the heart. Do you see how it has ruptured? Both chambers of each lung seem to have burst.”
Whim started gagging.
“Whim, can you please go call the Gendarmerie and tell them that we just pulled a corpse out of the Dream?”
“Yeah.” Whim coughed. “I’m going. Gladly. Come on, Will.”
Josh glanced at Will as he left the room. He gave her another one of those honest, kindly, understanding smiles.
Does he not miss me? Josh thought. Is that what he’s trying to tell me? Is that why he looks so good?
He looked better than he had since they’d first met, now that he was in counseling and on anxiety medication. The circles under his cornflower-blue eyes were gone, and his previous pallor had been replaced by a healthy, ruddy color.
Breaking up with me was the best thing he ever did for himself, Josh thought.
That was her real fear—that his equilibrium and contentment weren’t an act, that he was legitimately fine without her. Was he hiding his pain, or did he just not feel any?
Feodor made a little ahem sound, which was his way of laughing at her. “The corpse?” he said.
“I’m thinking,” Josh told him.
“Perhaps you would like to think of something more relevant,” he suggested.
After giving him her best glare, Josh returned to examining the body, and only moments later, she found something that drove all thoughts of Will from her head.
“Feodor,” she said tightly. “Look.”
At the base of the man’s throat, near where the skin began to split, were numerous small cuts. They didn’t appear to be part of the fatal wound—they were straight and clean. Several cuts intersected to form a triangle at the end of a long, straight line.
Feodor cursed softly in Polish.
“Is it…?” Josh asked, even though she knew it was.
He sighed heavily. “Yes. Someone carved the symbol we used on Peregrine into this man’s chest.”
Two months earlier, Josh had been faced with the choice of either killing her grandfather or risking letting him live. She’d compromised and carved an ancient symbol into his chest, one that would prevent him from entering the Dream universe. The only people who currently had access to the symbol were Mirren Rousellario and Peregrine himself.
“But I thought the symbol would stop the wearer from entering the Dream,” Josh said.
Feodor gestured to the dead man’s ravaged torso. “Obviously, it did.”
* * *
Josh sent Feodor upstairs to hide in the library—only a dozen people knew he was back from the dead—and then rolled the dead man up in a sheet. It was a good sheet, too, and she’d probably catch hell for using it, but she thought he deserved something nice. It seemed like the least she could do, after dragging him out of the Dream and landing him like a trout on the archroom floor.
A gendarme named Burnette arrived at the house to collect the body. The Gendarmerie were the approximate equivalent of dream-walker police, but they only dealt with issues that couldn’t be taken to the real police. Josh was pretty sure pulling a corpse out of an alternate universe counted.
“You don’t look surprised,” she noted when she’d finished explaining how she’d found the dead man.
Burnette sighed. “Look, I wouldn’t tell this to anyone else, and I’m trusting you to keep it to yourself.”
Josh nodded.
“This is the fifth corpse we’ve pulled out of the Dream in the last six weeks.”
“The fifth?” Josh asked, aghast.
Burnette nodded, blond curls falling into her eyes. “Looks like we have a serial killer. We still can’t figure out how they’re being killed. Our best guess is one of those shark knives that blows things apart with a burst of air.”
Josh said nothing. She’d always wanted to use one of those knives—but not on a person.
“We’ve only managed to identify one of the bodies. Homeless guy.”
Josh wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that this man was also homeless, and suddenly the entire scheme clarified itself in her mind.
Peregrine is going to homeless men, offering them a meal or a place to stay, and then using them as guinea pigs to try to find a way around the symbol.
A sickening rush of guilt hit her so hard she reached out for the wall.
“You okay?” Burnette asked. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Peregrine had done some despicable things in his life, but this ranked near the top.
How is it so easy for Peregrine to kill people and still so hard for anyone to kill Peregrine?
Josh’s grandfather had been missing for six weeks. After staying in the hospital for two weeks, having the stump where his hand should have been treated and the cuts in his chest stitched, he’d snuck out and disappeared. No one had heard from him since. He’d been supposed to take the reins of the new dream-walker democracy, but since he hadn’t showed up, the junta was still in charge while they tried to figure out what to do.
Josh didn’t know where Peregrine could have gone. She’d hoped that his disappearance meant he’d died, but she’d never kidded herself. Now she had proof that not only was he alive, he was actively trying to reenter the Dream.
“Do you have any leads on my grandfather?”
Burnette’s pen paused in its travels across her notepad. “Do you think he’s connected to this?”
There was no way Josh could explain what she knew without admitting to the fact that she’d mutilated her grandfather, or without exposing her friend Mirren.
“I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
After helping Burnette carry the dead man to her vehicle, Josh went to find Feodor in the library, where he was browsing the family diaries. She told him what Burnette had said, and her own conclusions about Peregrine’s activities.
“One cannot fault the man’s tenacity,” Feodor said when Josh was finished.
“Let’s try to avoid complimenting him,” Josh said.
Feodor shrugged. He had the most graceful, elegant shrug Josh had ever seen, a little ballet-movement of a shrug.
“He has overcomplicated the testing process,” Feodor replied. “I would have experimented on animals in his position.” He considered, tapping his lip with one finger. “Cats would have been of sufficient size.”
Trying to ignore that thought, Josh said, “Glad to hear it.”
“However, we may be able to use his thoughtlessness to our advantage. If we map out where each body was found, we might be able to pinpoint the archway from which he’s operating.”
Clever, Josh admitted to herself. “I’ll ask Burnette if she’ll send me the case file.”
“Do you think she will?” Feodor asked skeptically.
“Sometimes people give me special access because I’m Peregrine’s granddaughter.”
That was only part of the truth. Josh had a reputation among dream walkers as a prodigy, and they were usually more than happy to bend over backward for her.
“Ironic,” Feodor said, but he smiled at her in a way that made her feel like he saw right through her. “Unfortunately, triangulating the bodies will give us, at best, a rough idea of where Peregrine might be.”
Not to discount the lives of the five men Peregrine had killed, but Josh had a larger concern. If he found a way back into the Dream, he was likely to hurt a lot more people. “What are the chances he’ll figure out how to deactivate the symbol?”
Feodor considered. “I could do it. But then, Peregrine is not me.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Josh said.
“However … the power of obsession to propel a man to acts of which he might not otherwise be capable should not be underestimated. I believe Peregrine will continue until he finds a way.”
That was not reassuring.
Copyright © 2017 by Kit Alloway
