Dreamfire by Kit Alloway Page B

again?”
    Wonderful. “Josh Weaver. This is Winsor, the blonde is Deloise.”
    â€œDeloise I know,” he told her as Winsor’s father clapped a hand around his.
    â€œIt’s good to meet you, son,” Alex said brightly. He was unstoppably sociable, which was partly where Winsor’s brother got it. Of course, Whim generally managed to be less tedious and irritating. “It’ll be nice to have some fresh blood around the place, and no one better to learn from than Josh!”
    â€œYeah,” Will agreed in a voice anyone but Alex would have recognized as completely baffled. Alex began to wring Will’s hand like it was a stiff doorknob.
    Josh took a step back to whisper to Deloise, “I have no idea what to do,” while Alex started off on a speech about having a positive work ethic.
    â€œI guess … What would you have done with Louis?” Deloise whispered back.
    â€œSat him down at the kitchen table and told him I had a surprise. It would have been melodramatic but he would have listened. Will’s likely to bolt at any time.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I say we go for the shock tactic. Once we’re in-Dream, he’ll have to listen to us.”
    â€œWhat if he panics and runs off? We’ll never find him if the Dream shifts.”
    â€œIn which case we can recruit Louis tomorrow,” Josh finished, with much more bravado than she felt. “Look, Will seems like he can keep his head on straight. I’ll just take him downstairs and show him the archway. If we just tell him what’s going on, he’s going to think we’re crazy.”
    â€œI guess.…” Deloise repeated.
    â€œGo grab Winsor and meet us in the archroom.”
    â€œOkay.” Deloise headed for the kitchen, where Winsor had vanished with the pizzas. Josh stepped forward so that she, Alex, and Will formed a triangle. “And in the end, those long hours count,” Alex was saying. “Sure, we might not see it in this lifetime, but they count.”
    â€œI’m still not sure exactly what you do,” Will began, and Josh quickly cut in.
    â€œWhich is why I think we should go down to the workroom,” she said. “That way I can show you.”
    â€œThe workroom?” Will asked. He eyed Josh skeptically. She had assumed that his auburn hair was dyed, but his eyelashes were the same color. “Downstairs?”
    â€œExcellent idea,” Alex told them.
    Will seemed to consider that for a moment, and she wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Then he shrugged. “O-kay,” he said, breaking the syllables. “Let’s go see the workroom.”
    Josh led him down the hallway, past the little library full of family histories and the diaries of dream walkers long dead, and down the staircase that led to the basement where, twenty-four hours before, she and a hundred guests had celebrated her birthday and put this whole mess in motion.
    The archroom was built into the farthest corner of the basement. It had two entrances, one of which was the secret passage in the upstairs kitchen pantry. That one had been built when the house was designed back in the 1920s, and the bank-vault entrance had been added when the house was renovated, doubling its size, in 1953.
    Josh had to type an access code into the panel on the wall before the steel door would open. Will gave her an odd look, but he didn’t say anything as the basement filled with the sounds of internal bolts drawing back. Josh opened the door and beckoned him inside.
    He stared at the white floor and curved white walls with obvious alarm. Josh knew they looked like every secret FBI interrogation room ever shown on television, but what the FBI didn’t have in the middle of their rooms was a seven-foot-high archway made of straw mortar and chunks of stone. The two pillars grew from the foundations of the house straight up through the bleached tile floor.