Nevermore

“No! I’m not going to lower my voice!” Isobel yelled, incensed. What gave him the right to talk to her like she was a child? “You say you’re helping me, but then you just disappear. You show up just to freak me out, and then, when I need you the most, you aren’t anywhere, while those other things are everywhere!”

“Isobel—”

“So far I’ve been jerked around, thrown through a window, molested by a monster, and now practically abducted! What do you want from me? Why won’t you or anybody else tell me what’s happening? Why can’t I tell what’s real and what’s not anymore? Why am I inside this nightmare story?”

“There is no time for this. You should not even be here.”

“That’s it! The next person who tells me I shouldn’t be where I am gets decked! I know I shouldn’t be here, but I am, and as far as I can tell it’s because you—”

“It is because of the boy and his utter carelessness,” Reynolds corrected, and with such sudden ferocity that it made her swallow against the anger boiling inside her.

“Where is he?” she asked, quieter now.

“With her,” he whispered, as though pronouncing a death sentence.

“Who?” She remembered Varen’s earlier mention of a “she.” And then those hands that had dragged him into the darkness. She thought about the white light from the woodlands and the figure reflected in the clock pendulum with those black-socket eyes.

“I have no time. You must return to your world immediately. You must seal the link that has been made, because I cannot. Otherwise, your entire world will be forfeited to this one. Come. We must make our way to the woodlands. Hurry.”

He held a gloved hand out to her, just as he had done that first night he’d brought her to the Woodlands of Weir.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

He studied her with those dark eyes, as though trying to gauge the level of her seriousness.

“You refuse?”

“Do you think I would leave him here?”

He stepped toward her, and she had to resist the urge to shrink back. “Isobel, there are countless realities at stake. There are entire existences. You have no idea of the scope. And believe me when I say that whatever in your world does not die from such a merge will surely wish it had. You would sacrifice everything for the sake of one who is already lost? Think of your home. Your family.”

As she weighed his words, doubt crept over her resolve. Was he telling the truth? What reason did he have to lie? Then again, what reason did he have not to? When it came down to it, what did she know about him or any of his reasons except that, as far as she had seen, those reasons had always been his own?

Well, two could play at that game. “Tell me how to find him first. Help me and I’ll do what you want.”

He spoke fast, his words heated. “Do you not see what has become of him? He is no longer part of your world.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It is true enough,” he said. His coldness cut her like a blade of jagged ice. “And if you do not follow me now, it will be too late for you, and all for whom you care.”

“Are you Poe?” She surprised herself with the question.

“Edgar is dead. He is the fortunate one.”

“Then you knew him,” Isobel said with authority, sure of the truth behind that statement as soon as she spoke it aloud. There had already been too much evidence. Too much proof. “That’s why you’re here now, isn’t it? This all happened before, didn’t it? To him? To Edgar.”

“The past, too, is dead.”

Isobel stared at him in disbelief. They continued to stand opposite each other, neither of them moving while an invisible force seemed to pulse between them—an intangible sensation like the push of opposing magnets.

“Fine,” she said at last.

He whirled and strode into the passageway on the right again. Clearly he expected her to follow.

Isobel did not move.

“I don’t need you,” she called after him. He stopped again. She spun away from him and stooped to gather her shoes. “I don’t need your secrets.” She slipped on the once pink flats, now caked in grit.

“I’ll find him myself.” She rose, smoothing back a straggling strand of hair from her eyes, and turned toward the passageway on her left.

“Stop,” he commanded.

She ignored him and kept walking, certain that before her lay new chambers. New nightmares.

“He wouldn’t leave me behind,” she called.

“You are so certain?”

“Yes. Because just like you, he’s not everything he pretends to be,” she said. “And even though you’re saying this now . . . you still didn’t leave Edgar, did you? You helped him get back, didn’t you? So don’t tell me there’s no way!”

“Isobel.” His voice, a whisper, came sharp now. Wounded.

Her stab in the dark had done more than just graze the truth. It had found the very marrow . . . good enough at least to strike a deeper chord in the monotonous dirge that was Reynolds.

She would leave him with that.

She kept her steps steady into the darkness and the dampness. Ahead, through the webwork of shadows, she saw that the passageway turned sharply. Around that corner, she knew she would find herself utterly alone.