Oblivion (14 page)

Unconstrained, her summoned sunbeams ricocheted through the woodlands. Patches of moss sprang to life, crawling up the tree trunks. A blanket of lush grass rolled outward in every direction, forming a floor of eye-stinging green.

Without allowing her concentration to waver—even for a moment—Isobel continued to alter each element of their surroundings as it occurred to her, knowing she had to create something Varen himself would never conceive. She needed to build a dream he would know had come from
her
. The real her.

So she imagined the craggy tree limbs sprouting countless buds, and in an explosion of pink, a million tiny blossoms burst into bloom. The sudden eruption of color sent the crows fleeing into the overcast sky, their simultaneous liftoff releasing a cascade of petals that tumbled like confetti between her and Varen.

Laced with the scent of cherry and vanilla, the flurry replaced the flecks of falling ash. More petals poured from the sky where the crows swarmed in a mass of black, their cries of shock turning to shrieks of fury.

But Isobel ignored the Nocs, and, focusing next on the statues, those lifeless forms that represented her memory—her presumed loss—she shattered them all into still more blossoms.

Pink spilled onto green, petals settling into a patchwork carpet.

High above, the Nocs drew in tighter and, circling, formed a dense whirlpool. Flapping, cawing with growing agitation, the birds focused the eye of their spinning storm directly overhead.

While Varen looked to their gathering ranks, Isobel took the opportunity to cast the sky above the ghouls—the final unturned element—a brilliant blue.

Blue azure,
she thought, recalling the shade Varen had named her eyes in his final letter.

Without consciously meaning to, she'd rendered for him the world he'd wished for in that note.
Her
world, complete with the warm summer sky he'd longed for in the moments after he'd believed all was lost.

Varen's gaze dropped away from the birds, returning to her in confusion.

The flecks of pink caught in their clothes and their hair, collecting in the collar of Varen's black coat and on the cuff of the sleeve she still clutched, even though he'd long since lowered his hand from her cheek.

“How can you write me out,” she whispered, “if you never made me up to begin with?”

Fear flashed in his eyes. Varen recoiled. As his arm jerked from her grip, their surroundings shifted again.

The crystal blue of Isobel's sky melted to coal-fired orange. The horizon blazed crimson. Shivering, the canopy of flowers dissolved to dust. The grass beneath them withered, and the trees crackled dead in one fell swoop.

Her spell broken, Isobel reached for Varen, unwilling to let him slip through her fingers again. But the army of Nocs chose that moment to descend. Swooping low, the birds cut between them in a fierce current of feathers and ripping talons.

Lifting her arms to shield herself, Isobel swung away from the sharp hooks that tore at her. The creatures attacked from all angles, their wings whooshing loud in her ears, rubbing out all other sound.

“Varen!” she shrieked.

An arm hooked her around the middle from behind, drawing her close.

Yanked to one side, Isobel felt herself leave the fury of attacking birds and re-enter a realm of muted noises and blurred shapes—the veil.

But how—
why
had—?

“Gluttons for punishment, aren't we?” a low, static voice whispered in her ear. “We both just keep coming back.”

Looking down as the arm that held her loosened, Isobel caught sight of claws.

“Wait,” she gasped, but the Noc—Pinfeathers—had already released her.

She felt a familiar tug at her midsection and flew forward. Everything blurred into one colorless smear, and with a whoosh and a snap, she rejoined her body. She opened her eyes to find herself lying on the floor in the gym, but still in the gray-white between-space of the veil.

Reynolds stood over her, his image the only clear form against the fuzzy backdrop.

Those dark eyes glared down the curved length of his rusted blade, aimed straight at her.

Through the open rift behind him, a flood of screeching black shapes—crows—rushed out to fill the ceiling.

Like blots of ink dropped into water, they began to unfurl into smoke tendrils.

Then the wisps and coils took on new shapes, pouring into an army of tall silhouettes that drew in close, encircling them both.

Staticky whispers joined into one unintelligible hiss.

“I thought I told you,” Reynolds growled through gritted teeth, “
not
to engage.”

Isobel focused on the sharpened blade tip that hovered less than an inch from her nose.

In her periphery, she saw the dark ring of collecting figures close in tighter, their whispers growing louder. She heard one of them hiss her name.

“Leave,” Reynolds snapped, “now.”

She started to speak, but silver sparked as he slashed at her with the blade.

Isobel flinched away. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that the gym had returned to normal: empty, dark, and soundless.

Reynolds was gone. The Nocs, too.

She'd emerged from the veil. Now fully awake, she'd rejoined with both her physical body and with reality.

Her limbs tingled, alive with the electric sensation of pins and needles. Though her arms stung where the crows had clawed and pecked at her, her flesh bore no wounds.

The doors leading outside still hung wide before her. White sunlight streamed through. Winter's chilling breath blew over her, wafting across the parking lot, stirring a layer of tiny pink petals.

Isobel wrestled to her feet to survey the scene before her.

It had happened again. The dreamworld had met with reality—blended.

Hurrying through the doors, Isobel saw that the small blots of pink she had imagined into being covered the windshields of parked cars, the cracked asphalt, and the sidewalk, too.

She glanced toward the gym again.

She knew Reynolds was still there, fighting in the veil. Or had he fled, leading the Nocs away?

The Nocs.

Pinfeathers . . .

Could he truly be back from the dead? But, then, had he ever really been alive?

Isobel wrapped her arms around herself, over her midsection where that clawed arm had held her. She recalled how, after Varen had written her name in his sketchbook, drawing her into his story and binding her to the link he'd created, she'd been able to see the Nocs in the real world.

After Isobel had burned the sketchbook, though, she'd also severed
her
ties to the dreamworld, and that had to be why she could no longer see the ghouls. But like Varen—whose ability to project into reality broke all the rules—Pinfeathers had always been the exception.
What one can do,
Pinfeathers had cryptically told her the night he'd appeared in her living room,
so can the other
.

So why, if the Noc had been restored, could she not see him now? Had he already gone? Vanished back into the dreamworld, leaving Isobel on her own?

She switched from foot to foot, hesitating. Unsure of what to do next.

Reynolds had told her to leave, but . . . where did he expect her to go?

For an instant, she thought about trying to re-enter the veil. Knowing what waited for her on the other side, however, she dared not. Her spirit wouldn't stand a chance against all those Nocs. And she'd already jeopardized so much. She'd endangered herself and Reynolds—the only source of knowledge she had on how to break the bond between Varen and Lilith.

But she hadn't been able to help herself. She'd
had
to show Varen her true nature. Show him that, like before, what he believed was a lie. And now, now she knew for sure that he still cared for her. She'd seen it in his face the moment he'd wrapped his arms around her ghost double. Yet she hadn't done enough. Not even draining the darkness from his dead world and replacing it with light and life had been able to convince him that she'd returned for him yet again.

There was more to Varen's darkness, it was clear now, than could be sifted through from within. More than the empty suit and the doll and the lullaby and the pieces of him that she'd found in the dreamworld. More at play in all of this than just
her
involvement.

You're going to need more in there than backflips and cute tricks,
Pinfeathers had said to her moments before she'd come face-to-face with Lilith for the very first time. Isobel had no doubt that the Noc had been right, like he had been about so much else, and that she would soon find herself confronting the demon once more.

When that happened, she would need Varen by her side.
On
her side.

Isobel knew that she had never been part of Lilith's original design. Even before Isobel and Varen had grown close, Lilith had preyed on Varen for a reason. Not just for his ability to create, the demon had once said, but also for his capacity to destroy.

According to Lilith, Isobel had entered Varen's life as a distraction. But when Varen's feelings for Isobel had grown stronger, protecting her from the Nocs, Lilith had been forced to switch tactics. So she used Isobel as a catalyst to ignite a dangerous fuse within Varen, and in so doing had awakened his powers, transforming him into a new link.

His darkness didn't end in the dreamworld, though. Nor did it begin there. There were pieces here, too. In the very reality Varen had so desperately sought to escape.

Varen had been drawn to the woodlands because of the peace they promised. Because unlike his life, the dreamworld was something he could control. And because Lilith had represented all that was missing for him in
this
existence.

For the heart whose woes are legion

'Tis a peaceful, soothing region—

The bell dismissing lunch rang, interrupting the lines of Poe's poetry her memory had somehow retained.

Beyond the blue doors, she knew the halls were filling with students.

Isobel took a step backward, and then another, glancing toward the passing traffic on the road nearby.

There was a city bus stop two blocks away. She and her mom passed by the covered bench every day on the way to school.

Dipping a hand into her pocket, she retrieved the lunch money her mother had laid on the counter for her that morning.

It would be more than enough, she thought, to get her to the city's preservation district.

The house loomed over her, blank-faced, ordinary.

This was not how she remembered Varen's Victorian home.

Instead the image of the reversed, cracked, slanted mansion from the dreamworld, its windows blacked out, forced its way through her memory, making
this
house seem like the strange one.

Behind her, rows of parked cars lined either side of the serene, sun-filled court. Among them, Isobel saw the champagne Lexus Varen's stepmom drove, its sparkle-flecked finish gleaming bright. Knowing this meant that Darcy had to be home, Isobel climbed the steps to the porch and lifted a fist to knock. She hesitated, though, and a full minute elapsed before she could admit to herself that she was stalling, waiting for piano music to drift from the parlor, for the amber stained-glass window of the door to bleed violet, for the knob to melt or the concrete beneath her to transform into a pit.

But the house remained silent, the doorknob as solid as the cement under her feet.

Sucking in a breath, Isobel rapped twice.

More seconds ticked by, and the urge to bolt grew strong, as if, by knocking, she had somehow triggered the countdown of a bomb.

Her fear stemmed less from the prospect of facing Darcy than it did from being this near to the house itself. Monsters, in one form or another, had shown up each time she'd entered its walls.

Thudding footsteps, heavy and fast, interrupted Isobel's thoughts. She shifted, her uneasiness escalating, because those footsteps didn't sound like they belonged to—

An enormous figure filled the stained-glass window. The door opened, and a man dressed in a spotless gray business suit—the exact twin to the one she'd seen in the dreamworld attic, complete with red tie and silver cufflinks—appraised her with a hardened glare.

“Yes,” Mr. Nethers said, holding the door open by a foot, as if he needed only one half of a good reason to send it slamming home again. “What is it?”

“I—I” Isobel stammered. She hadn't expected Varen's father to be home. Not this early in the day. “Um—”

As she scanned her brain for something comprehensible to say, she couldn't help but marvel at the man's six-foot stature, his bulky shoulders and steely gaze. This, after all, was the first time she'd ever encountered Varen's father one-on-one, in person.

On the night Mr. Nethers had stormed up to his son's bedroom in a drunken temper, shouting slurred obscenities at him, she'd caught only a brief flash of the man's face from the closet where Varen had forced her to hide. Red and blotchy, knotted with fury, that face had seemed like an ogre's.

And early last month, Isobel had glimpsed Varen's father a second time through a keyhole after he had entered Bruce's shop looking for Varen. Sober but just as angry, Mr. Nethers had slammed his giant fist on the countertop, issuing threats and demanding answers of the elderly bookstore owner.

But here, up close, Mr. Nethers looked drawn and tired, sapped of his ferocity. His soot-colored hair hung loose in greasy strands around his ashen features, as if he'd run his hands through it a thousand times that morning. Heavy bags underlined his leaden, red-rimmed eyes, and their hooded dullness made her wonder if he'd already been drinking.

“How old are you?” he asked. “Aren't you supposed to be in school right now?”