by Kelly Creagh
Standing at the foot of Bruce’s coffin, a familiar blond woman watched them from behind an enormous pair of sunglasses. Dressed in a neat black pantsuit and a wide-brim feathered hat, she seemed to be waiting for them to notice her.
For Isobel to notice her . . .
Isobel rose and took an instinctive step back, already aware that it was too late to make a break for it without causing a scene.
Especially since running was exactly what she’d done the last time she’d encountered Darcy Nethers—Varen’s stepmother—face-to-face.
7
Echoes
“Do you know her?” Gwen leaned in to mutter. “Oooooor, does Funeral Barbie just have a staring problem?”
Glancing away from them, Darcy placed one hand on the side of Bruce’s casket. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I won’t try to chase you this time. ”
Gwen aimed a thumb at Darcy. “Is she talking to us? Or the dead guy? I know grief does funny things to people, buuuut—”
“She’s talking to me,” Isobel said. “I . . . know her. Sort of. ”
“Actually, we’ve never formally met,” Darcy said. She took two slow steps toward them but stopped again, her shielded gaze returning to Isobel. “You know who I am, that is, but . . . I still don’t really know who you are. ”
Isobel folded her arms, uncertain of how to respond.
Ever since Varen’s stepmom had seen her in his car the night before Halloween, the night before he’d disappeared, Isobel had known the woman wanted to speak with her—to find out who she was to Varen and what she knew. Darcy must suspect, Isobel thought, that she knew everything.
“Just an FYI,” Gwen leaned in to mutter. “I do carry pepper spray. Though the Lady Gaga goggles kinda pose a problem if that’s the route you want to go. ”
“Gwen, it’s . . . okay,” Isobel whispered.
“The offer stands,” Gwen said, clutching her patchwork purse.
“You know, I saw you there,” Darcy said, gripping one elbow as though discomfited by her own words. She glanced to the coffin again. “On the other side. ”
Isobel stiffened, already knowing what Darcy was referring to.
While searching for Varen in the dreamworld, Isobel had entered a distorted duplicate of his family’s old Victorian house. In the parlor, she’d discovered an oval-framed portrait of Varen’s birth mother, Madeline. The image within the frame had been the same as the photo from the jewelry box Isobel had found hidden beneath the stairs in the bookshop. When she had picked up the portrait, however, the picture had transformed, shimmering into a mirror, her reflection bleeding through until her own face replaced Madeline’s. Startled, Isobel had dropped the frame and the glass had shattered. In one of the scattered shards, for a single instant, she’d seen Varen’s stepmom looking up at her in shock, each viewing the other from separate realities.
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“I can tell you know what I’m talking about,” Darcy went on when Isobel didn’t reply. “And I know you saw me, too. ”
“Excuse me, Darcy?”
The man with the wavy hair—Bruce’s nephew—stepped out from beneath the tent. As he made his approach, hands stuffed in the pockets of his dress slacks, he gave Isobel and Gwen a quizzical half glance.
“Our flight leaves in just a few hours,” he said, stopping to check his wristwatch. “I hope you don’t mind my interrupting, but is it okay if we go ahead and take care of those papers while I’ve got you here? For the car . . . ?”
“Cue optimum bail time,” Gwen rasped, tugging hard on Isobel’s arm.
Isobel stayed put, fixated on Darcy.
“Now is fine,” Darcy said to the man, and just like that, she started away with him.
Isobel fought the urge to rush after them, knowing the car they were talking about had to be Varen’s Cougar.
Bruce must have left the Cougar to Varen in his will when Varen never returned for it. Without Varen here to claim it, however, she could only assume the car would transfer to his parents instead.
If Darcy had agreed to accept the car on Varen’s behalf, did that mean Varen’s father and stepmom were still waiting for him, expecting that he might stroll through the front door any day?
“Mrs. Nethers?” Isobel said.
Darcy stopped, peering at Isobel from over her shoulder.
Hurrying forward, Isobel started to speak again but stalled, at a loss for what to say when there wasn’t any feasible way to explain all that had happened. Even if Darcy did suspect otherworldly forces, Isobel didn’t know how to affirm her suspicions with a stranger waiting and watching, listening in. She wasn’t sure how to tell Darcy who she was either. That she and Varen had been . . .
Her shoulders sank, the impulse to speak withering under that expectant stare.
But then Gwen bumped one of her arms, her bangles clinking as she handed Isobel a folded slip of well-worn paper that she would have recognized anywhere. It was the final note Varen had written her, the one Isobel had found secreted away in the pocket of his green mechanic’s jacket the night she’d learned that she’d left him behind, in the dreamworld.
Isobel had entrusted the note to Gwen just before Baltimore. And the small scrap of paper still remained her only tangible evidence that Varen had loved her.
Except . . . he didn’t anymore.
The scars she now bore, both the inner and outer, were her proof of that.
Isobel took the note, recalling the instructions she’d given Gwen along with it: that if Isobel failed to return from the dreamworld, Gwen should give the note to Varen’s stepmom.
Isobel had come home, but she’d done so alone. And that made the suggestion Gwen seemed to be offering, in producing the note at this moment, feel right.
So Isobel extended the paper to Darcy, who took it with slow, hesitant fingers. Isobel backed away again, pain squeezing the ruins of her heart.
“C’mon,” Gwen said. Slinging an arm around Isobel’s shoulders, she angled her away.
And as the sight of Darcy, the casket, and the white square of paper left her vision, Isobel felt the sudden lifting of an inward pressure she hadn’t realized was there.
Because giving up the note forced Isobel to accept the most difficult truth of all.
That the quiet, strange, brooding goth boy she’d fallen in love with over the span of a beautiful and terrifying October no longer existed. Just as Lilith had said.
That Varen would have been here, at the grave site. That Varen would have cared that she was too. He would have heard her out.
But he wasn’t there.
The boy who had composed the words written on that slip of paper was gone.
And he wasn’t ever coming back.
* * *
To avoid being seen pulling into Trenton’s main lot, Gwen chose a parking spot on the side street closest to the door they’d used to sneak out.
A pair of senior boys lounged against the building, the smoke from their cigarettes rising in coils. Their presence there meant the bell ending third period had already rung. Before Isobel could let herself out, however, the car door’s lock slid down with a harsh clack.
“Confession. ”
Isobel turned her head and saw Gwen watching her with furrowed brow, one hand poised on her door’s lock panel.
“I totally read the note,” Gwen blurted.
Leaning back, Isobel let her head thud against her seat. Heat crawled up her neck and cheeks. “C’mon, Gwen. I mean, I sort of knew you would. ”
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“I . . . have to admit,” Gwen said, her words turning solemn, “it made me think for sure that you would come back. With him. That you had to. ”
“Yeah,” Isobel murmured, watching the two boys stamp out their half-smoked cigarettes. “That was the plan. ”
“Your dream last night. About Varen . . . all that stuff in the hall. Do you think . . . I mean . . . i
s there any way that he could be—”
“I think that you were right,” Isobel said, and felt the flush leave her cheeks.
“A favorite pastime of mine but . . . about what specifically?”
Isobel’s hand went to the hamsa charm at her neck, her fingers running it back forth on its chain as she recalled how, on the same morning Gwen had given her the amulet, she had also related to Isobel all the known lore surrounding Lilith. That demons operated by luring their victims with false promises, but that Lilith’s treachery and deceit could only accomplish so much on its own. In the end, Gwen had said, a demon’s victim—at least to some extent—had to be willing.
“I think,” Isobel murmured, “Varen is where—and what—he wants to be. ”
An uncomfortable tenseness spiked the air. Quiet buzzed.
Isobel couldn’t meet Gwen’s gaze, so she glanced to the door again and saw the two boys slide inside, one of them giving her and Gwen a fleeting backward glance.
Seconds later the cry of the bell came, muffled through the school’s redbrick walls.
Isobel gathered her things into her lap and peeled her winter coat from her shoulders, planning to leave it in Gwen’s car, since, as she’d feared might be the case, they no longer had time to stop by their lockers.
“We should go,” Isobel said, and pulling up the lock tab, she climbed out.
Wordlessly Gwen shed her own coat, tucked a notebook under her arm, and exited her side. Huddling against the cold, they hurried to the doors.
Inside, the warm stairwell had already cleared of students. A faint odor of mildew hung in the air, commingling with the quiet to give the enclosed space, Isobel thought, a tomblike feel.
“So,” Gwen said, “what happens now?”
Isobel shrugged. “Maybe nothing. ”
“Except you don’t really believe that. ”
Isobel could hear Gwen’s keys clinking in her fidgeting hands. “No,” she admitted, “I don’t. ”
Gwen started to speak again, but for both of their sakes, Isobel interjected.
“If we get caught cutting together—”
“—your dad will have me extradited to Canada,” Gwen finished for her. “I know. ”
“And that’s if he’s in a good mood,” Isobel said, and she forced a small smile, figuring she owed Gwen that much at least.
“Lunch in an hour?” Gwen asked, tucking her keys in her purse, clearly trying to reestablish some sense of normalcy. Nodding slowly, Isobel took a retreating step, hoping now that she’d done what she could to stitch her wounds closed—to move on—normal was within their grasp.
Gwen mirrored her movement, backing in the direction of the hall.
Then they pivoted to go their separate ways, and Isobel started up the stairs. Alone now, she let her smile fall away as she swung herself up one flight to the next, feet slamming hard and fast, heading to the last place she wanted to go. Mr. Swanson’s class.
Despite her conviction to release Varen, to release herself, the pounding beat of her sneakers could not drown out the lines of the note she’d surrendered at the cemetery. Lines that, after an infinite number of readings, she would never be able to expunge from her memory.
In the shadows of the dreamland, he waits. He watches the gaping window to the world he had so longed to open. Now flown wide, bleak and empty, ravaged—like him—it grants his wish. He belongs.
It cannot compare to the memory of her eyes. Blue azure, warm as a summer sky.
If he could but fall into their world.
Would that he had.
Now he writes the end to the story that past its Midnight Dreary—that too late an hour—has its own without him. It was always, he knows now, meant to end this way.
Like that circle that “ever returneth into the selfsame spot. ”
My beautiful, my Isobel, My Love. You Ask me to wait. And so I wait.
Isobel imagined Varen speaking the words to her in her head, his voice low and even. But as she rounded the final stretch of steps to the third floor, his tone grew icy in her inner ear, mocking, and then—with the final line—threatening.
For all of this, I know, is but a dream.
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And when, in sleep, at last we wake,
I will see you agai—
Isobel halted with a gasp, arrested by the two ash-caked boots positioned at the top of the landing.
Her hand tightened around the banister and she looked up, eyes meeting with the black gaze of the dark figure blocking her path.
8
Approaching Darkness
Roses, Isobel thought. Not mildew.
The stairwell smelled of roses—dead and decaying. She hadn’t been able to place the odor, musty and all at once too sweet, until that precise moment. When it was too late.
Ash coated his clothing, smudging his gloves and dusting his slicked-back hair.
Even without his trademark cloak, fedora, and white-scarf mask, Reynolds was instantly recognizable. He glared down at her, his cold, penetrating eyes far more familiar than the sharp and weatherworn planes of the rest of his wax-white face.
Adrenaline flooded Isobel’s veins, urging her to do something, even though there was nothing she could do. Nothing except run.
So why didn’t she?
Perhaps the real question, she thought, was why Reynolds had not yet drawn one or both of the cutlasses he wore at his belt—especially given that he’d tried to slash her to bits during their last encounter, and on Lilith’s orders, no less.
“The dream,” Reynolds said, his low voice reverberating in the confined space. “It was my hand that took you there. ”
An image of her ceiling light flashed in her mind, and she had her answer as to who had entered her room the previous night.
“What do you want?” she demanded, because, as always when it came to Reynolds, it wasn’t remotely clear. If he’d come to complete the assignment of killing her, couldn’t the task have been carried out while she slept?
“We can’t speak here,” Reynolds said. “They’re looking for you. ”
Before she could determine what he meant by “they,” Reynolds stepped toward her.
Dropping her things, Isobel backpedaled to the landing below, her notepads and binders sliding after her. When her spine met with the wall, her hands formed into automatic fists.
But Reynolds brushed past her. “This way,” he said, descending to the second-floor landing, that moldering floral essence trailing him. “Quickly. ” He rounded the corner below, slipping out of sight.
Dazed, still stunned by Reynolds’s sudden appearance, and even more baffled by his breeze-by exit, she could only gape after him.
Did he seriously expect her to follow him? Weren’t they past the whole Simon Says thing? He knew she knew he worked for Lilith—that he’d been under the demon’s command from the very beginning.
And yet, since learning the truth about his allegiance, Isobel had puzzled repeatedly over why he had ignored all the opportune moments he’d had to kill her, and why he’d continually intervened on Isobel’s behalf. Like when he’d pulled her from that collapsed grave in the dreamworld. Or when, in a surprising act of seeming compassion, he’d carried her home after she’d nearly died following his orders to destroy the link between worlds, Varen’s sketchbook.
At the time, of course, she’d believed Reynolds had returned Varen home safely too. Like he’d told her he had. But if he’d truly been against her from the start, why would he have wanted that link severed in the first place?
Pushing off from the wall, Isobel ran a hand through her hair, and her thoughts returned to last night’s dream. If Reynolds had transported her to the other side, stealing her astral self from her sleeping body as he’d done the night he’d first introduced her to the woodlands, then he must have known Varen would find her there.
Had Reynolds been counting on that? P
erhaps he’d even staged the whole thing.
Drawn by the possibility of answers, Isobel took a step toward the descending stairway but paused again, unsure whether she was willing—or ready—to hear what he’d come to say.
Reynolds lied like it was his hobby.
And she had promised herself to let go of her part in all this.
I keep having bad dreams, Danny had said last night.
This involves me, too, Gwen had reminded her less than an hour ago.
And then there was the problem of the entire school witnessing the effects of last night’s dreamworld encounter with Varen.
His abilities were expanding, that much had become evident. And if he could shatter lights and bring the other world with him when he came, then what more would he soon be capable of?
The nightmare had to stop. Varen had to be stopped.
Terror bubbled up inside of her as she spurred herself forward, each step taking her closer to her greatest fear. Toward the darkness that continued to prove it would catch up with her no matter what. As she neared the ground floor, though, she slowed at the sound of muffled voices.
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“How should I know?” Isobel heard Gwen say. “She and I aren’t even friends anymore. ”
Isobel ducked below the stair railing. Balancing on her haunches, she rose up just enough to peek over the low wall.
Catching sight of Mr. Nott’s salt-and-pepper hair and Principal Finch’s gleaming bald head, she realized that the administrators must be the “they” Reynolds had been referring to. She was a little relieved, seeing as the other option possessed claws and smiles filled with jagged teeth.
How long had the school known she was missing?
Had someone contacted her parents?
Her dad was going to go nuclear.
“Of course,” Gwen went on while she glowered at the two men, “you might have known that if you cared to tune into more than this school’s paltry sports channel. Vocab word of the day: ‘paltry. ’ Adjective meaning measly, lackluster, or otherwise disappointing. There. Proof I’ll make you guys look good with my ACT scores. Everybody wins. For once. Can I go to class now?”
Scanning the area, Isobel searched for Reynolds but saw no sign of him anywhere. The propped door leading into the darkened gym, however, told her where he must have gone.
Isobel frowned, wondering how he’d managed to pass through the corridor unnoticed.
His pasty complexion and grim-reaper wardrobe didn’t exactly scream “substitute teacher. ”
