Dreamfever Read online

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Gosha,

  my favorite

  List of Characters

  Family

  Josh Weaver (Joshlyn Dustine Hazel Weavaros)

  Will Kansas: Josh’s apprentice

  Deloise Weaver: Josh’s younger sister

  Lauren (Laurentius Weavaros): Josh and Deloise’s father

  Kerstel Weaver: Lauren’s wife, Josh and Deloise’s stepmother

  Peregrine Borgenicht: Josh and Deloise’s grandfather, Dustine’s estranged husband

  Dustine Borgenicht: Josh and Deloise’s grandmother, Peregrine’s estranged wife (deceased)

  Friends

  Winsor Avish: Josh’s best friend

  Whim Avish: Winsor’s older brother

  Saidy and Alex Avish: Whim and Winsor’s parents

  Haley McKarr (Micharainosa): Ian’s twin brother

  Ian McKarr (Hianselian Micharainosa): Haley’s twin brother (deceased)

  Bayla Sakrov: Whim’s ex-girlfriend

  Bash Mirrettsio: a dream theorist, Bayla’s boyfriend

  Mirren Rousellario: heir to the deposed Rousellario monarchy

  Katia: Mirren’s cousin

  Fel and Collena: Mirren’s aunt and uncle

  Young Ben Sounclouse: the local seer

  The Junta

  Peregrine Borgenicht: a member of the junta, and leader of the Lodestone Party

  Anivay la Grue: a member of the junta and leader of the Troth Party

  Davita Bach: the local government representative

  Ithay Innay: a member of the junta

  Gor Speggra: a member of the junta

  First Prologue

  This is my last entry: I’m going into the Dream tonight.

  I didn’t know I was going to do it until this morning. I woke up to the usual pitiful celebration—coffee and pastries on the good china and everyone dressed as if we were going to visit a restaurant. Aunt Collena gave me yet another robe, mostly, I think, out of the subverted hope that I’ll give her my silk one with the peacocks on it. Uncle Fel gave me a computer mapping program, which now holds top honor as the single most ironic gift I’ve ever received; how long does he think it will take me to map our little universe? Katia was the only one who actually took my preferences into consideration and gifted me with Vampire Nazi Hunter 4: Mars.

  A pity I won’t live to play it.

  At the end of the meal, Uncle Fel said to me, “So, how does it feel to be nineteen?”

  At that moment, I knew I was going through the archway, because being nineteen felt like nothing. It meant nothing, just like my life has thus far and may forever if I don’t do something to give it meaning. I will live and die here, in my perfectly mapped cell, having wasted my mind and extensive education playing video games and drawing comic books no one will ever read, a girl who never had cause to wear anything besides luxurious robes and will likely demand to be buried in the silk one with the peacocks on it just to spite her aunt.

  Aunt Collena may be right that the dream walkers don’t need me and that the people of the World—overcrowded as it is—don’t need another rich white girl, but I know for certain that I need them.

  I must go now, before I lose my nerve.

  Amiryschka Heloysia Solei Rousellario

  Mirren

  Second Prologue

  Josh gazed out the windows at Warsaw. Far below ran a wide, tree-lined boulevard set with ornate five- and six-story buildings. Streetcars rushed up and down the boulevard, but on either side, horses drew carriages loaded with crates and burlap sacks. Hundreds of people moved below, swarming and seething, climbing up and down from trams, dodging carriages, migrating in and out of buildings, the men in trench coats and fedoras, the women in calf-length skirts. From four stories up, Josh watched them, astonished at their multitude and how all of them seemed to have a destination to which they could not be late.

  A sound—laughter?—made her turn, and she took in the sunny apartment. Here in the parlor, art predominated. Lamp shades boasted stained glass in shades of green and yellow; on the fireplace screen, three young women in Empire ball gowns dined on a green lawn; and above the mantel, an ornately carved wooden clock ticked away the time with generous lassitude. Someone had left a cloth-bound book open on the striped sofa, and a half-full teacup cooled on the marble-topped coffee table.

  Feeling happy and at peace, Josh sat down at the spinet piano, opened the keyboard cover, and began to play. She couldn’t have named the tune, but she liked how the slow notes resonated in the air above the din from the street below.

  A girl with long blond sausage curls dashed through the room wearing a green velvet dress and white tights. Her skirt’s pleats were in disarray, and the white satin sash meant to tie around the dress’s drop-waist had come undone. A pure white puppy followed on the girl’s heels, barking, and the girl laughed in the breathless, drunken way of children as she ran into the hallway.

  “Bryga, stop!” a young man called, but he had more or less given up by the time he reached the parlor. Seeing Josh, he smiled. He was a handsome youth, perhaps fifteen years old, not tall but nicely proportioned, and very neat in his gray pants and white shirt. With his gray eyes and blond hair, he could have been a charcoal sketch come to life.

  Josh’s fingers missed a note when she saw him, and she fumbled the next few measures. She recognized the young man, she even remembered that his name was Feodor, but she felt uncertain about him. Despite his trim appearance, she sensed that he was dangerous.

  Someday, his eyes would be shadowed by painful memories, hardened by horror like steel thrust into an ice bath, his glance turned strange and clever, his lips thinned by an ironic, grimacelike smile. Josh knew this. Someday, he would be unable to speak a single sentence without disgust or mockery or manic glee clipping his words.

  But not yet. Now he was still a young man, a bit overconfident but full of wit and exuberance and, yes, even goodness.

  “We’ll never get her trained, will we?” he said.

  “The dog, or the girl?” Josh asked.

  Feodor sat down beside Josh on the piano bench. “Preferably the girl—she’ll live longer.”

  He began to play a gentle counterpoint. Bach himself could not have written a sweeter harmony, and for a time, they sat companionably and drew song from the instrument before them.

  But Josh’s eyes lingered on Feodor’s hands. A scrape marred the skin on his left index finger, and she couldn’t help thinking that soon there would be more scrapes, and cuts, and burns, and blood dried beneath the nails, and someday his scarred hands would build things, terrible things.…

  “Josh?” Feodor said, so softly that her name blended with the notes of the piano.

  “Yes?”

  Without warning, he wrenched his hands from the keyboard and slammed the cover shut.

  Josh jumped, and she would have run except that Feodor’s eyes clenched her. He no longer smiled, no longer joked, and she had been wrong—
he was not innocent—they had not gone back far enough—perhaps they never could—

  “What are you doing here?” he asked in a low hiss. “And why did you bring those?”

  He cut his head to the left, and when Josh looked behind them, she saw two devices sitting on the marble coffee table. Their curved metal panels and wire-wrapped crystals stood in contrast with the soft elegance of the room. Josh turned and moved from the piano bench to kneel beside the coffee table, and she reached out to touch one of the devices.

  She explored the wire-wrapped circlet first. She knew it was meant to be worn on the head like a crown, even though it bore little resemblance to one. A bundle of wires and metal bands formed nearly a complete circle, with a jagged crystal on each side situated to rest above her temples and another cluster meant to press against the base of her skull.

  The metal felt oddly warm, and she detected a faint vibration running through it. “What did you do to these crystals?” she asked Feodor.

  She no longer felt afraid of him. In fact, seeing the two devices, she felt excitement stir inside her. She didn’t know what these things were, but she knew they were powerful.

  Feodor reluctantly knelt beside her. All his bravado had abandoned him. When a siren began to wail beyond the open windows, he sat up very straight and looked toward the street with alarm.

  “Feodor,” Josh said. The siren held no interest for her; she knew what it meant. She touched his arm. “What did you do to these crystals?”

  Frowning, he returned his attention to the circlet. “I reversed their polarity.”

  Outside, an explosion. The apartment building shook and the windows rattled. On the coffee table, cold tea sloshed over the rim of its teacup. Feodor clapped his hand to Josh’s back as if he meant to force her to the floor, but Josh didn’t feel concerned.

  “It’s just the war starting up,” she said.

  The second device was meant to be worn on the forearm like a vambrace. Inside a metal sheath, more crystals—some of them flecked with ash—were connected by a network of fused wires made of a variety of metals: copper, selenium, chromium, molybdenum.

  Above the street, air fire filled the sky like a cosmic snare drum. The collapse of a nearby building began as the shattering of stone and evolved into deafening white noise.

  “Feodor!” the little girl called from the other room. Her voice was high with fear.

  “I’m coming, Bryga! Stay where you are!”

  The apartment building shook again. A painted landscape behind the couch crashed to the floor, and in the other room, the puppy barked.

  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 t
oward 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.”