by Kelly Creagh
“Gwen,” Isobel began. She shut her eyes, hoping that if she didn’t allow herself to look at her friend or read the fear on her face, she could keep her own at bay. “We’ve been through this. You know I’ve made up my mind. ”
“I know,” Gwen said. “That’s why I’m coming with you. ”
Isobel opened her eyes and whipped her head to face Gwen. “What did you just say?”
Gwen tossed the bag back into Isobel’s lap. “Friendly reminder,” she said. “The fries go in your mouth, not your ears. I said I’m coming with you. ”
Gwen ate the onion ring she held in one bite.
Isobel gripped the bag of fries. She shook her head, uncomprehending. “Um, Gwen. ” She waved a hand at her. “Reality here. Yeah, my dad’s never going to let you go with us. Not to mention how bringing that up would make both my parents even more suspicious than they already are. ”
Gwen chewed and chewed, her gaze distant yet determined as she continued to stare forward. At last, swallowing, she turned her head to look Isobel square in the face. The lenses of her glasses glinted in the dark, making her eyes disappear, so that for a moment she looked like some kind of mad genius.
“Not everyone in high school still lives in the Stone Age, Pebbles,” she said. “I have one of those motorized things with wheels? I believe you’re sitting in it right now. In your language, I think they call it a car. ”
“You’re going to drive?”
“No, I’m gonna hopscotch. Yes, I’m gonna drive. ”
“But what about your parents? Won’t they—”
“Unlike you, I live in a land of democracy. Convinced them to let me take a road trip up to Brooklyn to visit my cousins and see a concert. Shelly and Greta owe me one. They already know to cover for me when my mom makes her inevitable check-in calls. ”
Again Isobel shook her head, dumbfounded at how much of the scheme Gwen already seemed to have figured out. “Gwen, there’s no way I’m going to let you—”
“Let me?” Gwen barked a laugh. “Since when have you ever let me do anything?” Snatching the bag back, she pulled out a french fry and aimed it at Isobel’s nose. “I do and you deal. Besides,” she went on, “how are you going to get to the cemetery? You gonna walk there? At night? Alone? Do you even know what part of the city you’re staying in? Have you even looked at a map?”
The truth was that Isobel hadn’t thought that far ahead. At least not about the specifics. At least not yet. All her energy had been poured into getting to the city and keeping up the alternating “I’m okay” and “I know nothing” charade in the meantime. She’d had to work overtime just to keep all her masks in place. And then with the dreams and the visions . . . she’d been so distracted.
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“They have taxis there,” Isobel said, even though she wasn’t sure.
“Yeah,” Gwen said, “right along with a crime rate that makes the Big Apple blush. And in case you forgot, taxis cost money. A lot of money. And forgive me for mentioning it, but last time I checked, your brother’s troll bridge tax rate hadn’t gotten any lower. Like I told you before, you’re going to need a plan. And you’re going to need help. ” This time, Gwen aimed the fry at herself. “My help,” she said, then popped the fry into her mouth.
Isobel struggled to come up with some valid reason why she didn’t.
“You know there’s gonna be a ton of people there that night, don’t you?” Gwen asked. “And security, too. Turns out the Lone Ranger’s got quite a following,” she added before chomping down on a handful of fries bundled together between her fingertips.
“I might have heard something about that,” Isobel mumbled. “How—how did you know?”
“Google is a verb now,” Gwen said.
Isobel lifted the shake’s straw to her lips. She took a long tug, swallowed, and then took another. Brain freeze radiated through her skull like a crawling frost, but the pain felt good in a strange way, an active reminder that she was, as yet, still among the living.
“And you’re right,” Gwen said. “It probably is better if I don’t know any more than that. Otherwise, I might actually come to my senses and try to stop you. So I’m figuring why not just cut the crap and go along so I can keep you alive myself?”
Isobel smiled sadly as the slow freeze inside her head gradually subsided.
“You’re really coming?” she asked.
“Couldn’t stop me if you tried. It’s one of those pesky things we have in common. ”
“You do and I deal, right?”
“Finally,” Gwen said. She lifted her tea from its holder and raised the foam cup toward Isobel as though in a toast. “You’re starting to catch on. ”
THAT NIGHT, NO MATTER HOW hard she tried, Isobel could not fall asleep.
She rolled back and forth on her mattress, flipping from one side to the other, unable to make up her mind whether it was better to face her window or to have her back to it.
Neither felt comfortable. Or safe.
Nothing did anymore.
Finally she settled on lying flat on her back and staring up at her ceiling. But then her doorway, which stood open and empty across from the foot of her bed, took on a menacing presence, as though it might fill at any moment with some horrible new nightmare, or the scenery beyond would transform from white walls into woodlands back-lit by violet light.
She already knew it would do no good to shut the door. So she shut her eyes instead.
As she lay there, exhausted and yet firmly wired into wakefulness, Isobel thought she was beginning to understand something Pinfeathers had once told her in the moments before she’d first come face-to-face with Lilith.
Open this door, and no matter what, you’ll never close it.
By degrees, Isobel had grown to fear the night, to fear what the veil of sleep would allow to worm through her slumbering mind, what holes its images could burrow through her heart. And the seeds of doubts it could plant in her soul.
She rolled onto her side again, facing her closet. Huddling into herself, she clutched her blankets tightly. What she’d seen in the dreamworld, with Varen in the attic of the reversed bookshop, couldn’t have been real. It had been a fabrication meant to confuse and detour her. Something Lilith had concocted to distract her and cause her to lose hope so she would give up.
Because if it had been real, Isobel would have found the ribbon that afternoon. It would have been in the bookstore, just like the gramophone and the crooked sign and the black burn mark on the floor and everything else that had been the same. But the ribbon, the only thing that had mattered, hadn’t been there at all. And that alone should have proved to her that what she’d seen had been an illusion. That Varen still had to have the ribbon in his possession. He would never let it go. He would never let her go. She had to believe that. They’d been through so much.
Sitting up, Isobel wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging herself into a tight ball, and lifted her eyes to the smooth surface of her mirror.
If Varen existed within the world beyond the mirror, trapped there without the ability to return, then what or who had his father seen last night?
Had Varen truly stepped out of nowhere, causing his dad to swerve and almost careen into the fountain that sat in the center of their old Victorian neighborhood?
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The fountain.
Isobel’s thoughts bounced back to the dream in the rose garden, when Varen had taken her to the very same fountain. She thought about the bookstore, too, realizing that she had now dreamed him in two places that paralleled reality. And like Varen’s father, she’d even seen him once in reality itself.
On Halloween. The day their project on Poe had been due.
Varen had shown up in class, yet supposedly he’d been at Nobit’s Nook at the exact same time.
Isobel frowned, recalling how Varen had refused to shake Isobel�
�s father’s hand during their presentation. In fact, he hadn’t touched anyone. And when he’d picked up her boom box, the speakers had spiked with static, even though it had no batteries in it. Then, right after class, he’d vanished into thin air.
Just like a ghost.
I don’t believe in ghosts, Varen’s father had said.
And yet, he’d seen one.
Just as she had that day in Mr. Swanson’s class.
With that thought, Isobel tossed back her covers and climbed out of bed.
Her digital clock read 4:40 A. M.
That left her with just under two hours before she was supposed to be up for school.
Isobel scrambled to get dressed in the dark, thinking that it might be just enough time to get there—to the fountain—and back before anyone noticed she was missing.
PEDALING FAST ON DANNY’S MOUNTAIN bike, it took Isobel just over twenty minutes before she arrived at the entrance to the stately and quiet neighborhood.
She had dressed in layers, but the stinging predawn air still managed to singe her lungs each time she drew a breath. The ski cap that she wore, pulled low over her ears, protected her head from the cold, though her cheeks burned from the sharp wind that had pressed against her the whole way, almost like an invisible force trying to hold her back.
Isobel’s heart thrummed as she steered the bike around the last corner and onto St. Francis Court, the street where Varen lived.
Used to live . . .
Brown leaves plastered the pavement beneath her wheels, their slick bodies smoothed sticker-flat by the rain and the tires of passing cars. The gas lamps lining the grass median between the two one-way lanes glowed with live flames that fluttered tall and thin within their glass holders.
She stopped pedaling and let the bike roll on its own, gliding between the two rows of darkened Victorian homes while she took a moment to catch her breath.
Their wide windows, like so many eyes, seemed to follow her as she went.
Isobel clutched the handle brakes as she drew nearer to the solemn redbrick house Varen had once invited her into. Even though she had not planned to, as soon as the darkened stained-glass front door came into view, Isobel extended one foot and pressed her toe to the pavement, stopping the bike. From the middle of the street, she watched the house.
Looking up at Varen’s bedroom window on the third floor, she felt as though something within was watching her back. But she could see nothing beyond the darkened panes.
Isobel turned away and pushed off on the bike once more, telling herself she couldn’t afford to linger. Not when she needed to be back in her room before her mother woke to make her dad’s coffee and pack Danny’s lunch.
As she approached the fountain, she again squeezed the handlebar brakes. The tires squealed very slightly, and she did not wait for the bike to reach a complete stop before standing up on the pedals, swinging one leg over, and dismounting.
She walked the bike to the circular curb that surrounded the fountain and, gently lowering it to the pavement, strode across the brief strip of grass all the way up to the ornate grillwork railing that separated the dry concrete reservoir from the frozen turf.
Wrapping her already numb hands around the painted metal, Isobel peered up at the fountain. Floodlights, nestled just below the drained concrete base, lit the tarnished bronze basin from every angle, illuminating the leaf-and-scroll-flourished underside of the shallow and empty, goblet-shaped basin.
Isobel glanced to her left and then to her right.
Even though a row of parked cars lined both of the lanes and a few sconce lights glowed beneath porticos and wrap-around porches, the neighborhood felt eerily deserted.
Her grip on the railing tightened, and with a sinking sensation, as though she were standing in quicksand and not on solid ground, she began to wonder why she’d come. What had she been hoping for? That he would appear before her the way his father’s note said he had last night?
Maybe, she thought, she’d been holding on to the distant hope that, like the bookstore, the place he had told her she would find him in the dreamworld had some connection to its real-world counterpart. Some traversable link.
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But if not Varen himself, then there at least had to be something for her here. Some kind of token or sign that would reassure her that he was still waiting for her, still holding on.
Even something as minute and simple as a single red rose petal.
There was nothing, though.
Instead the entire street felt hollow, drained of the timeless beauty it had possessed that autumn afternoon when he’d first brought her here.
Isobel looked back at the fountain.
Curly-haired cherubs frolicked beneath the basin in a captured moment of abandon. Though the figures might have seemed playful in the daylight, something about the mix of shadows and stark light cast on their small faces by the floodlights made them appear more mischievous than free-spirited, more impish than gleeful.
The large swans that reveled with them, rearing back with wings outspread, looked somehow frantic.
Isobel took a step back and then another.
Blocked by the wide bowl of the basin, the lights could not reach the sultry figure of the nude woman who stood at the very top of the fountain, her veil billowing out behind her. She remained swathed in shadow, a silhouette that belonged to the night.
“You won’t win,” Isobel whispered under her breath.
Her gaze locked on the woman’s face, featureless in the dark.
“Whether what I’ve seen is true or not,” she went on, her voice growing louder with conviction, “no matter what you’ve made him believe, you won’t stop me. As soon as I find him, as soon as he sees me, he’ll know you’ve lied. Demon or not, you can’t scare me anymore. I will bring him back. And then I’ll find a way to stop you for good. To keep you from doing this to anyone ever again. I swear it. ”
Isobel turned her back on the fountain. She strode to the curb and bent to pick up Danny’s bike.
“Is that some kind of bad habit of yours? Making promises you can’t keep?”
Isobel halted. That voice . . .
Slowly she turned, glancing toward the fountain again. Then, lowering the bike, she let it drop at the last second before hurrying to make her way around its circumference in quick strides, stopping when she found him.
He sat with his back pressed to the fountain’s base, just below one of the unfurling swans. To his right, one of the bronze cherubs seemed to lean toward him with cautious interest.
The buckles of the Noc’s tight straitjacket-style coat were open, exposing a portion of his alabaster chest. Right where his heart should have been, Isobel saw an open crater the size of a softball.
Next to him sat a pile of what at first glance looked like a collection of small rocks. That was when she realized they weren’t rocks at all but shards, broken bits of Noc.
Isobel did her best to keep her face free of expression as he lifted one of the shards between the crimson claws of his finger and thumb. He held the shard up to the floodlights and studied it like a jeweler would a diamond. Then he brought the shard to his chest, carefully fitting the sliver into the gaping black cavity. She heard the piece attach with a quiet tink.
“Our jacket,” Pinfeathers said, selecting yet another shard without glancing up from his task. “The one you found on your closet door. Have you guessed yet that wasn’t me?”
22
Secret Deeds
Though it was a gruesome thing to witness Pinfeathers piecing together the gaping black hole in his chest, Isobel couldn’t seem to bring herself to look away. She also couldn’t help but wonder how he’d acquired the damage, but she knew better than to ask.
“Why are you following me?” she demanded, doubting the Noc would give her a straight answer. “Is she sending you to spy on me?”
“On the contrary, cheerleader,” he said. “I’ve been here all along. Waiting for you. ” He smiled his jagged grin. “Of course. ”
“How—”
“—did I know you would come?” he asked, finishing the question for her. “Because. ” He glanced up for the first time, his soot-black eyes locking with hers. “You said you would. ”
She shook her head, a slight motion. “I never—”
“You did,” he corrected, interrupting her a second time. “Even if you haven’t been listening, cheerleader, we have. Speaking of . . . ” He cocked his head to one side and blinked. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
Isobel’s jaw tightened. She pinched her lips together, not allowing herself to speak until she could trust herself not to say something that might provoke him. She liked him right where he was: at a distance, sitting and with hands occupied.
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She had heard what he’d said about Varen’s jacket, though.
“If it wasn’t you,” she asked, deciding to humor him, “then who?”
“Us,” Pinfeathers replied, his gaze dropping as he fixed another chalk-white piece into the shrinking crater in his chest, his work nearly complete. “But not me. ”
Isobel’s mouth twisted with unease and frustration. When it came to dealing with Pinfeathers, she’d learned that whenever possible, no reaction was the best reaction.
“You’re saying it was Varen then. How?” she demanded. “If he can come into this world like you, then why isn’t he here right now?”
Pinfeathers remained silent, rooting through the remaining shards with one claw.
Isobel stomped up to the fence. “Answer me!” she cried, and gripped the railing.
“The masked man,” Pinfeathers said, ignoring her questions. “The hidden one you’ll soon leave in search of. He took that jacket from us, you know. He has the power to take what he wants. And go where he pleases. Power he should not possess. ”
Isobel felt her scalp prickle and the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand at attention. But it wasn’t the chill in the air that was making her skin crawl.