by Kelly Creagh
“That’s enough, Miss Daniels,” she heard Principal Finch say, his words echoed by a scratch of fuzz from his walkie-talkie.
“—not in class,” Isobel heard a woman’s voice utter through static.
More walkie-talkie fuzz. Then Finch’s reply of, “Thank you, Mrs. Tanager. ”
Mr. Nott spoke next. “We have two witnesses who say they saw both of you sitting in your car just now. Right outside those doors. ” He turned to point, and Isobel ducked low.
“Oh!” Gwen blurted, the exclamation letting Isobel know that Gwen, at least, had seen her. Isobel cringed.
“What?” Mr. Nott asked. “What is it?”
“What do you mean, ‘what is it’?” Gwen snapped, recovering quickly. “You just called the two kids with the rolling papers in their pockets ‘witnesses. ’ And if that’s the terminology we’re gonna use, then I think it’s high time I give my legal adviser a ring. Let’s just hope he’s not in the middle of performing a laser procedure. Thank you, speed-dial and—”
“Stop that. Put your phone away—”
“Daddy?” Isobel heard Gwen say. “Yeah, listen, I know you’re probably with a patient right now, but the school Feds wanna talk to you. Do me a favor and tell them who our lawyer is. ”
One of the two men growled in frustration. Rising again, Isobel saw Principal Finch snatch Gwen’s glowing cell from her. Pivoting, he pressed the phone to one ear.
“Hello,” he said, while Mr. Nott watched, hands at his hips. “Hello?”
Gwen shot Isobel a pointed glare. Go home, she said, mouthing the words, eyes round, brow furrowed.
Isobel tilted her head, unsure if she had misread the lip-synched message. But when Gwen kicked a foot at her, skirt flaring, Isobel moved.
“There’s no one on the line,” Isobel heard Finch say as she scuttled down the stairs and darted to the gym. Kicking up the metal stopper, she ducked into the darkness, guiding the heavy door behind her until it closed.
Isobel whirled around to scan the wide room.
Shadows blanketed the space, casting the decorations for that night’s Valentine’s dance in tones of gray and black. Opposite Isobel, the red exit sign emitted an eerie glow that mixed with the sunlight peeking through the closed doors.
Against the far wall, beyond the basketball hoop, a balloon arch waited in front of a backdrop set up for photo taking. A disco ball hung motionless from the center of the ceiling. Small cloth-covered tables lined the bases of the bleachers, which had been folded away to turn Isobel’s old cheerleading practice grounds into a dance floor.
Isobel could no longer make out what Gwen or the administrators were saying, though she had no doubt her friend was already en route with them to the main office. With her cell still in the pocket of her coat—which she’d left in Gwen’s car—Isobel suddenly felt very alone.
Noticing tiny piles of ash blotting the floor, she moved forward with careful steps, following the dust to the center of the room, where the trail abruptly ended. Halting atop the emblem of Henry the Hawk’s scowling head, she turned in a slow circle.
“I did not expect to see you in that churchyard. ”
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Reynolds’s voice, deep and gruff, came from the empty space directly behind her.
The shadows shifted to her left, and fighting the urge to dart, Isobel forced herself to stand her ground as his hawkish profile entered her periphery.
“I thought for certain you would forget him,” he said, and Isobel knew he was talking about Varen.
“Yeah,” Isobel said, “and I didn’t expect you to be a liar, a murderer, and an evil henchman. I’d say in terms of trumping first impressions, you’ve got me beat. ”
“You have mistaken me,” Reynolds said, “and I freely admit that I have mistaken you. ”
“You sent me to die,” she said. “The only mistake I might have made was agreeing to listen to anything else you have to say. ”
“The fate I lured you to was one I thought would befall you regardless,” he said. “And because of your willingness to do as I instructed, your world, unlike my own, remains intact. Forgive me if I chose to cut your losses for you. ”
Isobel folded her arms. “Yeah, you’re good at doing that for other people, aren’t you?”
He stayed silent, and lifting her chin an inch, Isobel awarded herself a secret victory check mark. But her smugness didn’t last.
“You have already proven you would die for the boy by doing it,” Reynolds snapped. “Now, you will listen to what I have come to tell you or you won’t, but decide. Our time wanes. ”
Isobel blinked, startled less by this rare outburst than by what his words revealed.
There was only one way for Reynolds to know that she had actually died.
After waking in the hospital in Baltimore, she’d been questioned by the police about the stranger who had brought her to the ER and then disappeared moments after the medical staff took over. The conflicting reports and scrambled security footage had failed to offer any leads, however.
Though Isobel had not lied when she’d told the officers and her parents that she didn’t know who the man had been, she’d kept her suspicions to herself along with everything else. In a practical way, it made sense that Reynolds had been the one to return her to reality. After all, he had displayed the ability to pass from one world to the other at will. But given all that Isobel had discovered about Reynolds’s true moral code—or lack thereof—she couldn’t figure out the deeper reason he’d bothered to rescue her once again.
That reason, she knew, would have everything to do with why he was here now.
Looking down, she focused on Reynolds’s dust-encrusted boots. However he’d gotten here, it hadn’t been without a struggle.
“The blending of the worlds,” Isobel whispered. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
“Do you remember what transpired here, in this room?” Reynolds asked, ignoring the question, his eyes searching the gloom. “The day you fell in front of that crowd. ”
“I didn’t fall,” she corrected him. “I was pulled. ”
He was referring to the Halloween day pep rally. After she had climbed to the top of her squad’s pyramid, one of the Nocs had yanked her base Nikki’s wrist, causing Isobel to plummet straight to the floor. Just before she’d hit, though, she’d entered a twilight consciousness. The people around her became fuzzy silhouettes, and the world a blur of muddled shapes, muffled noise, and static. While she’d been in that between state, caught halfway in the dreamworld and halfway in reality, the Nocs had attacked her, attempting to draw her spirit out of her body and into the woodlands. Reynolds had appeared from nowhere to come to her defense.
“You fell regardless,” Reynolds replied. “And then you entered the veil. I asked if you remembered. ”
“And I asked you what the hell you wanted,” Isobel said, her anger flaring anew. He needed to get it straight right now that she wasn’t interested in being his puppet anymore.
“He thinks you’re dead. ” Reynolds locked gazes with her. “The boy. He thinks he killed you. ”
Isobel’s lips parted in shock. Of all the things she’d expected Reynolds to say, this was not on the list. Her mouth went dry, and trapped again by those two black, coin-size holes, she found herself unable to look away or reply.
He was lying. He had to be. Varen had sought her out in last night’s dream. He’d zeroed in on her. He’d made his intentions clear.
They were enemies now.
“Your disbelief is a factor I have already accounted for,” Reynolds said, interrupting her thoughts. “That is why I risked crossing you through the veil while you slept. So you could witness the truth for yourself. ”
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“Witness what exactly?” She shook her head. “That he—”
“—sees you everywhere,” Reynolds finished for her. “You haunt him at every step. The g
uilt for what he believes he has done has all but devoured his sanity. His subconscious conjures your image without end. In short, your memory has become his everlasting nightmare. ”
Isobel swallowed hard. Reynolds’s words sent a seismic tremor through her, shaking the dirt from all she’d attempted to bury that day.
Taking a leaf from Reynolds’s own book, though, Isobel did her best to keep her face smooth, impassive. She’d learned through experience that she couldn’t afford to let him see he’d struck a chord, to allow him to believe he still had the power to manipulate her. Not when he held so much power already. Power he should not possess, Pinfeathers had once told her.
“You’re telling me that he didn’t think I was real,” Isobel replied in a monotone.
“No more, I suspect, than he did that night you approached him on the cliff. ”
Reynolds stepped away from her, making his way toward the double doors that lead to the world outside.
More dust fell from his frame as he moved, tumbling from his boots and shoulders.
The room seemed to tilt as Isobel watched him. Her arms fell limp to her sides, and her mind, trying to grasp the full weight of that statement, threatened to collapse. She took an involuntary step after him.
“Wh-what did you just say?”
“Tell me, Isobel,” he said, glancing at her over one shoulder, the crimson glow from the exit sign casting his pale face in a wash of warning red. His ash-caked, gloved hand delved into his waistcoat pocket and retrieved his watch. “Did the boy assume you were real when you first gave him your word that you would return for him?”
He clicked the watch’s little door open, but Isobel knew he wasn’t checking the time.
No, Isobel thought, her heart hammering. In fact, when Isobel had found Varen in the dreamworld the first time and had spoken to him through the narrow stained-glass window in the purple chamber of Poe’s masquerade story, she’d done her best to convince him that she wasn’t an illusion. Varen hadn’t believed she was real at all. Not until she handed him the ribbon from her dress, proving it with something tangible. Something from reality.
Something he couldn’t bend or dispel or change . . .
“Did you yourself not carry a timepiece with you into the rose garden?” Reynolds pressed, snapping the watch closed. Tucking it away again, he turned to face the doors once more. “Do you suppose I have not learned the same trick? That I, who have dwelled on the other side so long, do not still require an instrument to tell me in which realm I stand?”
On that morning after Halloween, Isobel had pulled the very watch Reynolds had just checked from his waistcoat pocket as he’d carried her home. There was a name engraved on the inside. When she’d asked Reynolds who “Augustus” was, though, he’d simply told her that he was dead, long since.
“Last night,” Reynolds continued. “The hallway of mirrors—he transported you to that corridor for a reason. Why else except to ensure that you were just another torturous figment? Another eidolon with no reflection?”
Scowling at his back, Isobel tried to keep up with his words, wondering, at the same time, how Reynolds knew about the pink butterfly watch Danny had given her. And why was he staring at the doors like that, as if he expected them to fling wide at any moment?
“What about before?” Isobel asked. “When he used the mirrors to find me. You did too. He would know. He’d be able to see—”
“He isn’t looking, Isobel. Because she isn’t. They both think you’re dead. And that is the best chance we now have. ”
“Chance for what?” Isobel demanded. “Who are you really?”
“If you still hold any love for the boy,” he said, glancing at her over his shoulder again, “then you need only rely on the fact that I am not, nor have I ever been, your enemy. On some level, you must already know that. Otherwise, would you have followed me here?”
The halo of light surrounding the door flickered. Flitting shadows slid to and fro along the base, gathering there.
“What’s happening?” Isobel asked, but she didn’t have to guess to know who—what—lurked on the other side.
“I am being hunted,” Reynolds replied, drawing both of his swords with a single, spine-freezing scrape. “Although I cannot return to the woodlands without facing certain capture, I can still travel within the veil. What yet remains of it. You, however, could pass through, undetected, to the other side. Provided you were so willing. ”
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“You mean astral proj—?”
The doors flung wide with a deafening crack.
Midday sunlight flooded the gym.
Swinging one of his swords upward, Reynolds spun into an attack against an unseen assailant—and vanished midstrike.
9
Beyond the Veil
Isobel staggered forward. Then she ran.
Skidding to a halt at the spot where Reynolds had disappeared, she turned in place, but she didn’t see him or his attackers.
Listening hard, she heard only the chatter of birds, the distant swish and hush of nearby traffic.
He was gone. Into the veil.
The veil.
He’d asked her if she remembered being there, in that hazy space between worlds. She did, but that didn’t mean she knew how to get there. Not on her own.
She shut her eyes and scowled in concentration, willing her limbs to relax.
Varen had done this multiple times over, she reminded herself, separating himself in two with ease, leaving his body behind as he crossed over the threshold that stood between dimensions.
Now she needed to do the same.
Focusing on the rapid thudding of her own heart, Isobel waited for the disconnecting sensation she’d felt before, when Pinfeathers had drawn her out of herself and into a haunting vision of the past.
She recalled in a flood of images the events the Noc had shown her in that memory.
That old hospital. Poe on his deathbed—screaming repeatedly for Reynolds—writhing in agony as Lilith and the Nocs tortured his captured soul.
When Reynolds had finally appeared, however, instead of answering his friend’s cries for help, he’d done the unthinkable. Drawing one of his twin blades, Reynolds had severed the silver cord that tethered Poe’s astral form—his spirit—to his body, killing him instantly.
But the doctor at Poe’s bedside had seen nothing. Not Reynolds’s betrayal, not Lilith descending through the black chasm in the ceiling, not the Nocs as they spiraled through the walls in thick smoke tendrils.
The dreamworld demons had all been in the veil, Isobel realized. Reynolds, too. As they were right now.
And not only that—even in the veil, Reynolds had performed Poe’s murder cloaked and masked. Lilith hadn’t known him then; in fact, she had shrieked in protest.
Isobel had unmasked Reynolds herself after tackling him in Baltimore. Had she not seen his face then, she would never have known him in the dreamworld, when he’d stepped out to face her on Lilith’s orders. When Lilith had called him . . . Gordon.
And then today, even as he was being hunted—today he had appeared to Isobel without his usual disguise. But then, why hide if he no longer had a reason to? If he’d been found out . . .
Suddenly Isobel knew she could be sure of at least one thing: that even if she couldn’t bring herself to trust Reynolds completely, or to believe he’d told her all that he knew, he was still her enemy’s enemy.
So for now, if there was even one kernel of truth to what Reynolds had said—that a modicum of the boy she loved still existed behind those black eyes—then sharing a mutual opponent indeed counted for something. And seeing that Reynolds was her only way to the other side, that something would have to be enough.
Isobel drew in a deep breath, picturing herself in the veil. Tuning her senses inward, she released her breath in a slow exhale, and as she did, the noise of the birds and the passing cars and the brush of th
e wind outside faded.
Her skin tingled. Electricity crawled up her arms, wrapping her body in numbness until she felt only the faint, everywhere prickle of pins and needles.
When she opened her eyes, she found herself within that white and nebulous world of shapes and muted sound.
A muffled shout drew her attention to one side. Then something came crashing to her feet, where it splintered into pieces.
Isobel backpedaled, and in doing so, parted from her body.
Her vision went double for an instant, and she felt a surge of panic. Then, focusing on the blurred outline of the person in front of her—on the sleek sheet of her own hair—Isobel rejoined her body with a jolt. She peered around to find herself alone again, still facing those gaping doors to the school’s rear parking lot.
Hissing a curse, she straightened, determined. Again she shut her eyes, released her clenched hands, breathed, and tried letting go a second time.
Fading under, Isobel resisted the temptation to open her eyes as the sounds surrounding her dialed down to a low hum. Holding on to her calm, she allowed the buzzing numbness to overtake her. Then she stepped forward.
Blurred shapes and shadows seeped into view despite her closed eyelids.
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Another stifled screech, followed by a muted crunch.
Isobel turned her head, and at her feet, a felled Noc peered up at her, his form shimmering between shadow and clarity. He tilted his head at her in a motion that suggested curiosity. But it was also a motion that caused the creature’s neck to fracture. Sputtering out, his inkwell eyes went hollow.
The indistinct image of his empty, cracked face recalled the bittersweet memory of Pinfeathers’s final moments in the rose garden. So much so that she could almost have knelt beside him, brushed his cheek—until, with a high-pitched shriek, the Noc at her feet burst into life again and sent a clawed hand straight into her chest.
Isobel stiffened in shock, locked in place by the clutching sensation of the hand that held her steady, as if its claws wrapped her very heart.
She gripped the Noc’s arm but could not pull herself away. She tried to scream for help, but her voice had become lodged in her throat.
Then, from nowhere, a flash of silver sailed between Isobel and the Noc, severing the creature’s arm at the elbow with a crash.