A dark shape entered her periphery—someone standing at her shoulder. Yet her own reflection was the only one in the glass.
A reflection meant for certain that she was in reality. Or at the very least, that she was real, present in her body and not in astral form.
But then, hadn’t the mirror image she’d encountered in the winding hallways of Varen’s Gothic palace proven to have possessed a mind of its own? Could she merely be facing another double?
“They tell me this is real,” Isobel heard him say, his voice achingly familiar—torturous and quieting all at once. “They tell me you are real. ”
She sensed him looking down on her. In response, Isobel began to angle into him, unable to help herself despite the string of warning commands that screamed inside her head.
Don’t. Stop. Run.
But she couldn’t.
The two of them were like magnets that way. As equally drawn to each other by invisible forces as they had been repelled.
She focused first on where his hair brushed his black collar, then on the hollow of his throat. His Adam’s apple . . .
Triggered by the sight of him, by their sheer proximity, memories began to surface in her mind as if from another lifetime.
Her very own cobwebs . . .
She recalled that day her dad had come home from work and freaked at finding Varen in the house. Varen had left in a hurry, and helpless to stop him from leaving, Isobel had followed him out to his car. Together, the two of them had stood on her street just like this. And just like now, Isobel had wanted nothing more than for him to lean down and kiss her.
She tilted her chin up, forcing her eyes to his.
Sunglasses hid his black gaze from her view, and, in their lenses, she was again confronted with her own image, the slanted scar on her cheek more prominent than ever.
“I’m sure you would tell me the same thing,” Varen went on, his silver lip ring catching a white spark from the sun as he spoke. “You always do. ”
Isobel blinked, frowning. So stunned by his sudden presence at her side—so mesmerized by the sound of that low, calm voice that she hadn’t been able to register the meaning of his words.
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Now her brain scrambled to backtrack, to recall what it was he’d been saying.
“Try to tell me, anyway,” he added, his tone going glacial, sending sharp spikes of cold fear through her.
A soft click drew her attention to his open palm, and she almost gasped to see her small butterfly key-chain watch perched on the tips of his fingers. Its wings were open, exposing the face of the clock inside.
Behind the small circle of glass, its three hands spun around and around, winding wildly opposite one another, a sure indication that this was a dream after all.
Checking the window again, though, and seeing her reflection there proved just the opposite.
“I came to show them they were wrong,” Varen said, clicking the watch closed, folding his fist tight around it. “And remind myself while I’m at it. ”
An invisible pressure settled on Isobel’s shoulders, pressing down.
Condensing, the air grew suddenly thick and heavy.
Yet in defiance of the sudden shift in gravity, pebbles and rocks, stray leaves and bits of litter quivered, then rose to hover an inch above the pavement and patches of grass.
The asphalt beneath them buzzed, sending a shiver of electricity into the soles of Isobel’s shoes, causing the hairs on her arms to lift.
Varen, it was clear, hadn’t come to talk. He certainly had not come to listen.
And wherever they were—whether within a dream, reality, or both—Isobel began to sense that something horrible and irreversible was about to happen.
She had only a moment. A breath’s worth of time at most. She felt it.
“I love you,” Isobel said. Because even if the words could not stop what was coming, they were still her first and sole defense.
“I know,” Varen surprised her by saying as he turned away. “That’s why you’re gone. ”
Thunder cracked from above, calling her attention heavenward.
Spun from nothing, billows of violet-black clouds began to roll in from every direction. Fast as a time-lapse video, they converged to swallow all traces of blue. A sheet of solid shadow blanketed the parking lot and strip mall and, as darkness fell, the people gathered at the bus stop lifted baffled gazes from the floating debris to the sky.
On the street, cars halted, brakes squealing, horns blaring.
Isobel looked back to the coffee shop window, but her reflection had vanished, wiped out along with the sun’s glare.
Inside, customers rose one after the other. Abandoning their floating cups, their lazily drifting pens, notepads, and other belongings, they gathered at the windows, frightened faces tilted skyward.
Colliding, the clouds began to mesh and meld, mixing in a swirl over Varen, its center following him as he strode toward the street.
The wind blasted stronger, coursing through the lot with a sudden upsurge, carrying with it dead leaves and bits of flittering trash.
Thunder boomed a second time, and as its clap echoed, the eye of the maelstrom ripped wide, opening like the maw of some enormous, toothless beast.
Blackness occupied the void within, the gaping pit marbled with white static.
“Varen, stop this!” Isobel called out to him, her voice sounding so small amid the roar of wind and thunder that she couldn’t be sure if he’d heard her.
But when he halted, glancing back at her over one shoulder, she knew he had.
“You stop it,” he said. “If you can. ”
Turning forward again, he continued toward the street while ash began to filter down around him, falling from the crevice in the sky.
Isobel latched on to his words, trying to visualize the wound in the clouds closing, but the crater only grew. With Varen’s every step, the ash poured thicker.
She started forward, about to go after him, but was halted by the deafening smash of glass at her back.
Shards flew, bursting from the strip mall.
Screams rang out, and Isobel swung away, her own shriek mixing with the noise of sudden chaos while glinting slivers rained over her, tinkling as they showered the cars and the pavement.
A cacophony of alarms blared.
Lowering her arms, Isobel looked around her. Panic-stricken people darted this way and that, flying past her as they streamed out of the strip mall.
Ahead, farther than his slow steps should have carried him, Varen stood among a group of stalled vehicles in the middle of the street. The wind raged through his hair. It pulled at the hem of his long coat, causing the fabric to flutter and snap.
From the chasm came a torrent of crows. Screeching and flapping, they shot into the storm-torn sky.
The pavement crackled and shifted beneath Isobel. She skittered back, but the fissures spread quickly past her, fanning out in all directions.
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The ground shook. The fractured glass rattled and slipped into the widening rifts.
The quake sent Isobel to her knees. She caught herself with her hands, bits of glass biting her palms.
Above, the crows squawked louder, their unending buzz like a swarm of locusts.
Isobel did her best to tune out their cries, the people screaming and running, the rumbling of the earth, and the ash that had begun to catch on her clothing and cling to her hair.
Focus, she told herself as she tried to conceive of some way to halt the rupturing of her surroundings, but she couldn’t concentrate. Not while the trees dotting the patches of strip mall landscaping began to twist and shrivel. Not while more trees burst through the fractured blacktop, jutting upward like spikes.
Isobel pictured the lot as it had been moments before, restored, whole, holding the visual for what felt like an eternity.
Whe
n this attempt failed too, she tried picturing her and Varen somewhere else entirely, in a desert far away.
Instead of sand, the pavement beneath her dissolved into the gray dust of the dreamworld. Isobel closed her fists around the powder, crying out in frustration as the scrapes in her hands burned with pain.
Nothing was working.
She was too late. He’d become too strong. She couldn’t fight against him like she had before.
Whatever this was—wherever this was—it felt like the end Reynolds had warned her about.
Opening his arms, Varen threw his head back.
Spears of violet lightning shot up from the ground around him, connecting with the darkness above and forming a cage.
Isobel zeroed in on Varen’s illuminated form, his arms spread like the wings of the white bird on his black coat.
As the lightning fluttered in and out of view . . . so did he.
In that instant, Isobel realized that no matter what dimension they occupied, Varen was not there in physical form. He was projecting. Like he had the day of the Poe project. Like she had when she’d crossed through the veil.
If that was true, then this—the parking lot, the coffee shop, and the street—must be reality. Because Varen wouldn’t need to project in the dreamworld. And if he was projecting here, then that meant the veil hadn’t completely eroded. At least, not enough to allow Varen to physically rejoin his own world.
But that would also mean that she could not overpower Varen, and she would have no way of stopping this. No way of stopping him.
Everything would merge. Reality and dreams. Eternity—it was all headed for oblivion.
Time itself would end.
Unless . . .
Isobel pushed up onto her feet.
Even with her thoughts still spinning, slowly formulating an answer she dreaded, she started moving toward him.
Before, when the two worlds had overlapped like this, the blending had happened through a link—a role previously served by Varen’s sketchbook.
According to Reynolds, that role had since been transferred to something else.
Someone.
Isobel sped her pace to a run, closing in.
Even as she neared him, dodging cars and entering the forest of lightning, she didn’t know if her plan would work. If it could.
Over the din of the whipping winds, the cawing of the Nocs, and the crashing thunder, she screamed his name.
Like before, she hadn’t expected him to hear her, to turn. But, just as he had then, he did now.
Launching herself at him, Isobel wrapped her arms around him. They fell backward together, and for one blissful instant, she held him tight.
And even as the flames conjured by her mind engulfed him, Isobel could not bring herself to let him go.
White-hot and blinding, the blaze enveloped them both.
Colliding with the pavement, Varen’s figure disintegrated on impact, his form dissipating against the dusty ground that caught her fall alone.
18
Ashes, Ashes
Blood. Pain. Grit.
Opening her blackened hands, Isobel found only those three things in her grasp.
Varen was gone.
Her plan to banish him had worked.
The fire had vanished with him, snuffing out the moment he had ceased to exist in this world, and as they had before when she’d summoned them in the bookshop, the flames had left her unscathed.
Breathing out in a rush that caused the cinders beneath her to disperse, Isobel found herself wondering how it could have happened again.
Before, when she’d asked Reynolds why she had survived the summoned flames, he had told her that since the fire she’d created had been a dream, it had ceased to exist when the realms parted. He’d also told her that the underlying strength of Varen’s feelings for her had provided protection.
But that protection, which once shielded her from the Nocs, had been lifted. That was why Pinfeathers had been able to scar her. And why he had. So she would know.
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Could that protection have somehow been reinstated?
If so, did that mean some small part of Varen—conscious or not—still hoped she was real?
Isobel wasn’t sure.
Rolling onto her back, she gazed up past the gray-powdered grilles and bumpers of the surrounding cars to where Varen’s storm unraveled.
Bleeding white, the clouds evaporated, giving way to blue.
Sunlight burned through the cascade of ash, the remnants of which floated down to light softly upon her.
Her skin prickled, alive with the sensation of pins and needles, and Isobel blinked long and slow as the car alarms continued their frantic blaring—though now without the underscoring cries of the Nocs.
Along with Varen, the crows had receded into the dreamworld, through the veil that somehow—despite its now accelerated disintegration—still managed to separate her world from his.
From somewhere far off, the howl of sirens rose, and she knew she needed to move. To get up and get out of there.
As the full weight of what she’d done came crashing over her, though, she found herself unable to lift even one limb.
She’d sent him back. Back into that world of despair. Back into his empire of shadow.
But doing so had been the only way to prevent him from bringing it all here with him.
The only way of closing the link.
Soon, she was sure, Varen would return, stronger and more malevolent than before—bent on wreaking the havoc that would bring his darkest imaginings to life. Because even if there was a small part of him that did suspect she could be real, there was an even stronger part that had lost the capacity to trust in anything other than the nothing he’d come to know so well.
The nightmare. How would it ever end if she could not reach him?
How, when she had already gone to every length, faced each monster, risking all in the process?
His darkness remained—impenetrable. And it would stay that way as long as he refused to believe her.
To believe in her.
In himself.
The thought floated up through the mire of her anguish in a whisper. As her eyes traced the open sky, she knew it was true. Reynolds had been wrong to suggest that Isobel could dispel the darkness, could stop the worst from happening, by proving herself to Varen.
That power, in the end, lay with Varen alone.
Then again, at this point, maybe Reynolds—wherever he was—would see his mistake.
She doubted she would ever find out. He wasn’t coming for her. That much was obvious. If her name had still been penciled in his murky agenda, he would have found her by now, before Varen had.
Soon, though, it wouldn’t matter even if Reynolds did appear. The two worlds were already blending, merging as they had Halloween night. It was the reason Varen could no longer tell the difference. And why the hands of her butterfly watch had spun out of control. They would do so wherever he went. So long as he remained the link.
Varen must have discovered the trinket in the rose garden. After the cliff.
And he’d kept it with him. She’d seen him fiddling with it in the courtyard of statues, she realized. What had he been thinking as he held it?
Tasting ash, smelling the sharp scent of ozone, Isobel clutched at her collar. She wrapped the hamsa in one fist. The pendant could not instill her with the same strength it had that morning, though.
Muscles aching, she managed to climb onto unsteady feet and survey the damage.
Dust covered all.
Though the charcoal trees had disappeared with the storm, the buckles, rents, and pockmarks they’d made in the pavement remained.
Looking down, Isobel found herself standing in the center of a scorch mark not dissimilar to the one in the attic of the bookshop, where she’d burned Varen’s sketchbook.
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The shrieking sirens grew louder.
Backpedaling from the charred starburst, Isobel began to weave her way through the maze of stalled and abandoned cars.
Then she paused, turning slowly in place—because no matter which way she faced, she could not see where the blanket of ash ended, or where the preexisting trees had not twisted and gone black.
Whirling, she started running in the direction of Cherokee Park, toward the path that would take her to the home she hoped she still had.
19
Double Exposure
Only when Isobel arrived at the next bus stop, her stop, did the field of damage caused by Varen’s storm reach its end.
Car horns honked as drivers steered slowly past the cop-car barricade blocking the intersection. A police officer directed traffic while pedestrians stopped to gawk at the mess and confusion, holding up camera phones and pointing.
Isobel, trying not to draw attention to herself, slowed to a jog as she hurried over the place where the layer of dust terminated, its blanketing white giving way to the curb and the painted lines of the crosswalk.
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Someone shouted at her as her feet found the sidewalk, but she didn’t stop, not until she arrived at the side entrance to the park—the same she’d taken that night after meeting with Varen at Nobit’s Nook.
Until this moment, her plan had been to use the shortcut to get to her house. Now, though, even with the midafternoon sun blazing and the sight of people strolling within, bundled in their coats and scarves and still unaware of the chaos that had rocked the world mere blocks away, something held her at bay. An inkling that warned her against entering.
Isobel told herself she didn’t have time to deliberate—or to take the long way around. She didn’t have time for inklings, warranted or not.
She needed to get home, to check on her parents and Danny, to warn them about what was coming. And to tell them she was sorry.
Pounding pavement, her feet carried her up the snaking road, past thickets of trees that flanked the narrow lane. As she rounded one bend after another, winding farther into the park, flashes from her previous nighttime run along this same stretch began to flip through her head.
Murky figures skirting through the brush. Whispers in the woods.
Something hissing her name.
Isobel shoved the memories aside. Keeping her pace up and her head down, she focused on the pavement, on putting as much of it behind her as quickly as possible.