Dreamfever Read Online Free

decide which risks are stupid? I’m supposed to check in with you before I do anything? You’re the apprentice, Will, remem—”
    A whimper interrupted Josh’s rant. She and Will looked in the direction from which the sound had come.
    The redheaded girl was huddled against the far wall of the archroom, her blue-green windbreaker sparkling with fairy dust.
    Josh saw movement out of the corner of her eye and realized Will was pointing his gun at the girl’s head.
    â€œWill!” she cried, and at the same moment, the girl fainted.

 
    Two
    Shoot her.
    That was the only thought in Will’s mind. The girl had come out of the Dream, just like two others once had, and if somebody had been around to shoot them the moment they arrived, a lot of people wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
    Shoot her in the head.
    His finger twitched against the trigger. Only the sound of Josh shouting his name stopped him from firing.
    Josh rushed forward in a valiant effort to catch the young woman as she fainted. She failed, but the stranger collapsed in a rather neat pile, with her head resting on one forearm. Will kept his sights on her as she fell, like a hunter following the flight of a bird.
    â€œCrap,” Josh said. She got down on her knees next to the girl’s inert form, then glanced at Will. “Could you not point the gun at me?” she demanded.
    Her words broke through the dark tunnel in which Will’s mind was caught; still, he lowered the gun with reluctance. “I’m out of bullets,” he said, realizing the truth of the statement as he spoke.
    â€œDo I care?” Josh asked. “What was the first thing I taught you about guns?”
    It had been Never point a gun at a person unless you’re going to kill them.
    But I was going to kill her, Will protested silently. I think that maybe I still should.
    He aimed the gun at the floor with one hand and rubbed the back of his neck with the other. He had to stop thinking that way.
    Feodor was dead. He hadn’t sent the girl.
    â€œGo get me some smelling salts, would you?” Josh asked.
    â€œYeah, sure.” Will heard how hollow his voice sounded.
    â€œAnd Will? Don’t bring the gun when you come back.”
    â€œSure,” he said again.
    He exited the archroom into the basement, a long, concrete room with small windows near the ceiling. In the center of the room sat the training mats and equipment: heavy bag, kettlebells, cardio machines, a rack of weights. At the far end of the room, where storage bins of holiday décor were piled to the ceiling and out-of-style furniture kept house for ghosts, Will had set up a research center with his files organized in the drawers of a gray metal desk and a timeline of Feodor Kajażkołski’s life strung across mismatched corkboards.
    Will’s friend Whim Avish called the timeline Will’s “stalker wall.”
    Ostensibly, Will was investigating Feodor in hopes of learning something that would help Whim’s sister, Winsor, who had remained comatose since one of Feodor’s goons had attacked her. But Will was self-aware enough to know that his real motivation was more personal and less reasonable: Will was afraid of the man. And he was irrationally afraid that Feodor was coming back.
    Pulling his eyes away from the stalker wall, he locked the .22 back in the gun safe. Then he opened the giant emergency first-aid kit and found a few packages of smelling salts. Plastic tubes in hand, he typed in the code to open the vault door to the archroom.
    The arch to which the room’s name referred stood in the center of curved white walls. Two pillars of gray stone rose out of the ground beneath and up through the floor to create an archway overhead. Nearby, a slab of frosted red glass the size of a textbook stood suspended at waist height on top of a metal pole. At the moment, the archway appeared empty, but Will knew that if he pressed his hand to the red