Peering between the shoulders of two of the medical personnel, Isobel did not think the battered and bruised girl on the table looked much like her. And yet she knew by the thin scratch on her cheek that it could be no one else.
Isobel lifted a hand to her face but felt no trace of the scratch. Yet she remembered in an instant how it had gotten there.
Pinfeathers . . .
The Noc’s image was the first to spring forth from behind the previously locked door. Then came the memory of the rose garden and the chaos that had transpired there. From there, her thoughts reeled backward in fast rewind, and she recalled being in the graveyard where Poe was buried, and that that place had been the reason she’d come here, to Baltimore.
The tone of the heart monitor continued to sound its long and unceasing note, making it harder to think.
“Clear!” someone shouted again.
The doctor shocked her again, and Isobel saw her body convulse.
The sight made her wonder whether she wanted to continue remembering, and yet she knew she was dying. Or was she already dead? How? What had brought her here, to this point of destruction?
“We’ve lost her,” she heard someone announce.
Lost.
She’d been searching for something she’d lost. No, she recalled. Not something. Some one.
A vision of a pale face and black eyes flashed through her mind.
“Varen,” she whispered. Of course. She’d come all this way to find him, to face Reynolds in the graveyard, and to bring him home. But then, if she was here, where was he?
Had she been able to bring him back? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t delve that deep.
Isobel looked up, distracted from her thoughts when she saw the nurses beginning to unhook the equipment from her lifeless form on the table.
She looked down at her astral body, searching for any sign of the silver cord, but now she could barely see the outline of her astral figure either. It was as if she was fading out, like a ghost.
But it couldn’t end like this, she thought. She had to know what had happened to him. At the very least, she had to know if she’d been able to bring him home. She couldn’t leave, she couldn’t go anywhere until she knew for sure.
“Stop,” she said to the man who’d begun to unroll a smooth, clean white sheet over her body.
“Stop!” she shouted again, and this time, as the lights above him and the equipment around him stuttered and fizzled, he did.
Isobel took her chance. She closed her eyes, using the split second of bought time to imagine the silver cord back into existence.
But it was too late, she was slipping backward, falling away. Dissolving. She opened her eyes to see the world whir into an indefinite blur.
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The snap came like a punch to her gut.
Then her eyes flew open for a second time—her real eyes. She gasped, sucking in air as though she’d been drowning. She looked up and saw the sheet poised above her head and knew she was back in her body. Raising an arm, she pushed away the hands that held the white sheet just over her face.
The pain in her body came first, an intense surge of fire that raged like lava through her veins.
But it could not compare with what followed after.
A wail rose up from her depths. It left her as an inhuman cry.
Finally, she remembered everything.
Epilogue
He walked into the rose garden, passing from the woodlands through the open doorway.
With slow steps, Varen made his way toward the silent fountain.
Beneath his boots, bits of broken Noc and scattered shards popped and crumbled. All around, the fragments lay strewn like smashed artifacts.
Pieces of me, he thought.
He paused for a moment to glance down at the broken face that lay like a discarded mask amid the ash, petals, and ruin. Through the familiar hole in the creature’s cheek, he could see straight through to the marble floor.
Looking away, he passed on but stopped midstep when the sole of his boot encountered a shard that refused to collapse.
He glanced down again, catching the spark of silver that flashed from within the bed of ash and bruised petals.
Bending, Varen retrieved from the rubble a small charm, one shaped like a butterfly.
He realized the trinket was a watch only after pressing his thumb to the wings. Snapping apart, they revealed a trio of spinning black hands within.
He could tell the charm was real and not a dream when it didn’t dissolve into ash at his command. Ironic, he thought as he turned it over in his fingers, that something like this could have found its way here. Butterflies represented freedom and hope, life and peace. Things that couldn’t survive or remain undistorted in this realm, no matter what form they took.
They were things that no longer existed within him, either.
She, Isobel, must have brought it with her.
At the thought of her name, a tightness gripped his chest.
He clutched the watch hard in his fist, determined to destroy it, to prove that it couldn’t be real. That she hadn’t come here because of him, for him.
That he hadn’t done what he knew he had.
The watch remained solid in his fist, the metal burning cold against his palm while, around him, the roses clinging to the dome began to quiver.
All at once, they gave a unanimous shudder, and with a sound like the rush of brittle leaves, they began to shrivel and die. The decay spread before him in a wave, as though wrought by an invisible fire.
Ash rained down around him.
He opened his palm and saw that the watch remained. Still there. Still real.
Varen looked up at the figure that stood atop the fountain.
With a howl of rage, he made it burst apart.
He fell to his knees amid the wreckage and floating dust. Crumpling into himself, he released a choking sob, knowing that he, too, belonged to the ruin.
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