Doomsday Can Wait (Phoenix Chronicles, #2)(73)

"Did it count when he and Summer—" Sawyer made an obscene hand gesture. "He knew you'd see, that he'd break your heart. He didn't care."

True enough. Still, two wrongs didn't make a right. Or perhaps, in this case, it did.

"How am I going to find him?" I murmured.

Sawyer stared at me for several ticks of the clock, but he'd decided before I had that the only choice was Jimmy.

"I don't know," he said at last. "Summer could hide them forever if she wanted to."

Or at least until Jimmy was better. I needed to get to him before that happened. And I knew exactly how.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, or at least the answer to my most desperate question. A plan formulated in my mind, unfolding with all its twists and turns, paths and possibilities.

"Don't do it," Sawyer murmured, I glanced up. Reading my mind again, or perhaps just my face?

"I have to find him."

"Dream walking requires you to walk the line between life and death. What if you cross that line?"

"What if I do?"

"I won't do it, Phoenix. I won't kill you just so you can walk through Sanducci's dreams and find out where the fairy has hidden him."

"I don't need you to," I said, and shot myself in the head.





CHAPTER 27


Everything went neon white. In the distance rhythmic-thunder, maybe guns, or horses, then a final burst that sounded like a word I couldn't quite make out.

Home? Come? Some? Done?

Whatever.

Had I made a mistake? Had I actually killed myself for real?

No. A kill shot would only work on me if it were done twice. So unless Sawyer had picked up the gun and finished the job, I was safe enough.

My eyes felt as if they'd been scalded with boiling oil. When I opened them, Jimmy was with me. Or rather I was with him. He was in a bedroom—stark and sterile. White sheets, single bed, a battered dresser with a mirror on the wall. Night shrouded the windows, but I could still see the bars.

He lay on the bed, naked, the moon shining through the glass, turning his olive skin the shade of alabaster. His body was long and lean, finely muscled, damn near perfect.

His eyes were open. He seemed dead, until he turned his head and saw me.

"Lizzy," he murmured. He sounded drugged, looked it, too.

"What has she done to you?" I asked.

"She's trying to help." He sat up, muscles rippling across his stomach and arms as he rubbed a palm over his face. "I think it's working."

Dread clogged my throat. If he was better, I was doomed. Nevertheless, beneath the dread, a tiny ray of joy fluttered. I wanted him to be better. I wanted him whole again. I didn't want to have to betray him the way I planned to.

"What do you need?" he asked.

"Need?"

"I know you're not really here. You must be pretty desperate to dream walk."

"Desperate." I laughed, thinking of the gun I'd put to my head. "You might say that."

Jimmy held out his hand. "Ask me."

I glanced at the windows, but the moon must have gone behind a cloud and it was too dark to see where we were. I reached for him, my mouth opening, my mind forming the words Where are you?, but the instant our fingers touched, I was thrown backward at a sickening speed. Jimmy was gone, so was the room. Instead I flew through a long, dark corridor with a whole lot of doors.

I'd been here before. Well, not here, here. But in someone's mind, so I recognized the decor. Memories lived behind those doors.

The wind took me, around one corner, then another, sometimes flinging me so fast I bumped an edge, hissed with pain, but the wind kept on.

Papers scattered, some hit me in the face, the hand; one stuck to my chest, and I snatched up the stub of Jimmy's first magazine paycheck. He'd sold some of the photos he'd taken at a dairy farm the summer I'd gone to Sawyer and he'd stayed in Wisconsin to milk cows. Jimmy'd made the most of it, as Jimmy always did. Those photos had gotten him a scholarship to Western Kentucky. Not that he'd used it.

Littered across the floor were old baseballs, a few knives with suspicious stains, negatives, and in one corner the shirt I'd been wearing the day I'd lost my virginity. Amazing what strata haunt the corridors of the mind.

The wind suddenly died, depositing me in front of a pristine white door. Harmless enough, especially when compared to some of the others in this hall. Faded gray wooden slats to my right, so warped I could see light shining through them from the room on the other side. The rusted heavy enclosure from an old meat locker hung to my left. Behind me loomed something that appeared to have been hijacked from Bram Stoker's nightmares—a large, dark, curved entryway with a huge black bat for a door knocker. My hand itched to give that a rap, but Jimmy would probably end up with a brain tumor, or at the least a helluva headache.

Farther down the hall, one door keened outward, hanging from a single brass hinge. Wonder what had been behind there?

Curious, I took a step in that direction. Or tried to. My sandals felt glued to the floor. If there was a floor. When I glanced down, all I saw were my feet, my shoes, and a whole lot of nothing beneath.

"Okay," I murmured. "Guess the answer to my most desperate question is behind door number one."