I try to lift my arm and find it paralyzed.
I will myself to shrink, but that doesn’t work either.
The fire spreads through my holographic brain’s neurons—but this, too, doesn’t go as it did for everyone else.
Whenever the fire meets the furry parts of my brain, it fails to take them over.
I blink at the image, and suddenly everything slides into place.
Of course.
“Two as One” didn’t refer to me and Asha. It was about me and someone else.
Someone who is closer to me than any sibling.
Someone with whom I share all my nutrients.
Someone who feels my emotions.
Someone who’s always there for me in the dream world.
Someone who shares my brain—and is thus the obstacle Phobetor’s power has just encountered.
Pom and I live as a single symbiotic organism.
We’re Two as One.
Pom! I mentally shout. I need you. Please be brave. I know you can do this.
In the hologram, the furry tentacles turn from black to teal and begin pushing the fire back, clearing the other portions of the brain.
I regain the feeling in my arm, but I remain still, not letting Phobetor see it.
Let’s end this, I shout inside my head.
Like we’ve practiced. Pom’s voice is filled with determination.
What?
Phobetor’s eyes narrow. He’s realizing something is wrong.
A furry bracelet appears on my wrist, and I understand what Pom means.
We’ve trained together to defeat the monsters in the subdreams.
He’s been my weapon all along.
He elongates into a furry katana, one proportional to my enormous size.
My enemy is finally within my reach.
With all my might, I slice with my furry weapon—and in the black pools of Phobetor’s enormous eyes, I see both horror and surprise.
My blade bites into his neck, cutting through skin, muscle, and veins, severing cartilage and spinal cord.
As it comes out on the other side, the pull of his hypnotic stare disappears, and his head separates from his giant body, rolling over to my feet.
“I keep my promises.” Vehemently, I kick the ginormous head in the face, launching it in the air like a soccer ball. “That’s for my grandmother.”
I feel it then.
I feel the being that was Phobetor evaporate out of existence—and as he does, a shockwave of power is unleashed.
Like a nuclear blast, it crashes into me, and everything goes totally dark.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I come to.
I’m alive. Yay. It would’ve sucked to have killed Phobetor but paid for it with my life—like a true hero of legendary prophecy.
There’s a tiny, warm hand on my wrist.
I open my eyes.
I’m in the medical bay, with Chloe, my niece, at my bedside.
Seeing me awake, she springs to her feet.
“You’re finally up!” she shouts with childish exuberance. “Stay there, I’m going to get someone.”
“Wait, is your mommy—”
She’s already gone.
Questions swirl through my groggy brain.
Where is everyone? How long was I out? Is Valerian alive? Is Dad still Overtaken? Is Asha? Is everyone else?
I push up to a sitting position and look around.
The gurneys that we were strapped to earlier are now empty—a good sign.
Mom is still here, but someone moved her onto a bed.
My heart leaps. With Phobetor gone, I can finally go into her dreams and try to get her out—but I’m going to wait for some answers before I attempt it.
My gaze falls on my furry bracelet.
Wait, Pom. That’s who I need to check on first. He was there when the blast of power knocked me out, so he could’ve also gotten hurt.
A touch and a moment of concentration later, I’m in my dream palace once more.
Pom is here, grinning at me, his fur a deep purple.
“You’re okay.” I grab him in a hug and squeeze for all I’m worth.
He grunts comically, so I put him down.
He floats up to be eye-level with me. “Never been better. How about you?”
“I’m fine. Just clueless about the others.”
Speaking of the others, what happened to Felix, Ariel, and the other people who kept me safe from subdream monsters?
I take Pom to the tower of sleepers to find out.
Felix and Ariel are asleep, as are the members of the New York Council.
I check on Ariel first. She tells me she’s great, and that the whole thing was actually fun. I make a mental note to reject any future invitations to do something “fun” with her.
Felix is also okay, and a lot more healthily unenthusiastic about the violence he lived through. Same with everyone else I check on.
When I exit the siren’s dreams, I spot a person in the tower of sleepers that I haven’t seen here for a long time—not since the beginning of all my misadventures, back when she was Ariel and Felix’s roommate.
Is it a coincidence that she’s here now that I’ve thwarted an apocalypse?
No way. Given everything I know about this one, she’s dreaming at just the right moment so we can chat.
Pom points at her. “Isn’t that Princess Peach? Haven’t seen her in forever.”