Oblivion (13 page)

She paused in front of the gap and, peering up at the bust one more time, drew strength from the warrior's image, from the suggestion of courage it gave.

Then, as she watched the sculpture's smooth face, a thin crimson split appeared on one alabaster cheek. Blood seeped from the wound, blazing bright.

A phantom pain emanated from Isobel's own mirroring scar.

She ignored it, though, and taking one knob in each hand, she pushed the doors apart.

Darkness waited for her in the long, silent hall.

Heavy chandeliers floated above untethered, their underbellies dripping shards of crystal.

The ominous, rolling presence of the smoke ceiling alerted Isobel that she was back in Varen's Gothic palace, though now she wondered if she'd ever left its boundaries.

She leaned into the hall and glanced left. A pair of violet velvet curtains framed a high wooden archway that led into a joining corridor.

Craning her neck right, toward the opposite end of the hall, she squinted through the gloom—and started. Someone was there, peeking at her from behind a matching pair of curtains midway down.

Isobel withdrew fast into the purple chamber. Waiting a beat, she risked a second glance around the jamb.

The same figure moved in time with her, the stranger's straight blond hair draping long, just like hers . . . leading Isobel to realize she wasn't viewing a long corridor at all.

It was a short hall. One that terminated in—a mirror?

Venturing into the center of the passage, she faced her reflection, frowning in confusion. Because she knew she shouldn't
have
a reflection. Not as long as she was here in astral form. Not as long as she was dreaming.

With cautious steps, Isobel started toward the image of herself. Taking in the details of her own dust-coated figure, she tilted her cheek slightly to one side to ensure that her reflection shared her scar. It did. She drifted closer before stopping a few feet away.

The image in the mirror matched her movements—her stillness—perfectly.

Until it winked.

Isobel blinked in surprise.

Smiling, her duplicate whirled—and ran.

Isobel darted after the double.

Passing through the curtains ahead, the entity skidded to a halt, opening its arms to keep balance. Following suit, Isobel staggered to a standstill in front of the mirror, unable to fight the sensation that, without meaning to, she'd performed the exact same movement.

Next, she whipped her head around to see her doppelgänger standing under the archway at the opposite end of the corridor. The specter had whipped its head around too, giving the illusion that there was another mirror at the opposite end of the hall. Then the figment grinned again and, sticking its tongue out at Isobel, dashed to the side, disappearing into the adjoining hallway.

Isobel sprinted after, recalling as she did what she'd overheard the two cloaked figures in the cathedral say about her dream-selves—that they always went to the same place. To the same person. Varen.

She sped around the corner, and up ahead, she glimpsed a fleeting whip of blond hair as her double vanished around the next bend.

Isobel rounded the bend too, to find herself in a new corridor, this one empty.

The drapes at the far end hung motionless. She slowed as she approached them, then stopped, carefully drawing back one side of the hangings.

There, at the end of the next hall, her look-alike mirrored her stance, peeking around one drape into the connecting corridor.

Confused, Isobel pulled back. Pressing her spine flush with the wall, she glanced down the passage through which she'd just come.

Nothing. There was no one. And yet . . . one of the curtains swayed.

With bewilderment, Isobel lifted an arm, extending it out into the passage.

And an arm appeared at the far turn.

Isobel withdrew. The phantom limb copied her, vanishing, the drapes rippling. She repeated the test, and keeping her arm extended this time, she stared at the copycat arm, trying to grasp what was happening.

Had she somehow become caught in a looping illusion created by her own mind? Was this dream version of herself toying with her? Could dreams do that? Or was something else at work?

She let her arm sink to her side again—and felt her stomach plummet when the hand sticking out from the far end remained extended.

Twiddling fingers at her, the hand then swept out of sight.

At the sound of a giggle, Isobel pushed away from the wall. Resuming the chase, she dashed around the corner where she'd seen the arm, ending up not in the corridor she'd passed through moments before, but in altered surroundings. New, but utterly familiar.

Trenton's reversed north hall lay before her, its lockers and linoleum flooring still covered in the ash of last night's dream.

Facing Isobel, her double stood in the center of the debris. Its smile was gone now, though.

With its eyes closed, the dream held a single finger to its lips, offering the same warning as the doll in the attic.

The clone then turned and went to the stairwell, where Varen's boot prints trailed off. Isobel hurried to catch up as the specter shoved through the blue, push-bar doors that, in reality, led to the same room where she'd left Reynolds—and her body. Sliding through after the double, though, Isobel found herself in an enormous, mist-filled courtyard.

Ash rained from above, filtering over an assembly of statues.

Like ascending spirits, the winged angels jutted up through the stagnant white fog. Posted atop short pedestals and tall columns, under the domes of carved marble gazebos, standing alone on the ground or in pairs flanking mist-shrouded steps, some tilted their faces heavenward; others bowed their heads, as if in reverie or prayer.

All the stone maidens' eyes were shut, their expressions serene with sleep. All bore Isobel's features.

Soft as snow, the ash fell to collect in the grooves of sculpted gowns. It gathered in the folds of trailing robes, pooled in the palms of outstretched hands and on the curves of fanned seraphs' wings.

Scattered between the figures, gnarled woodland trees twisted toward the clouded gray sky like thorn bushes, their limbs dotted with the black bodies of crows.

Nocs,
Isobel thought when the ghouls-in-bird-form began cawing, rankled by the presence of her and her double.

As Isobel followed her own ghost into their midst, the birds flittered and flapped. They croaked back and forth to one another, frill feathers bristling. One of the larger birds, its plumage scraggly and ragged, launched itself from its branch to cross the courtyard. Its dark shadow skimmed the fog, and glancing up, Isobel saw the bird crane its neck toward her, as if to get a better look with its single good eye.

When the bird lighted on another knotted bough, the layers of fog thinned, and Isobel was suddenly aware of a form seated on the low brick wall directly across from her. Of feathery edges of jet hair and slumped black-clad shoulders. Someone living.

Varen.

He sat with his head hanging, his attention fixated on the small object he kept turning over and over in his hand.

Another of Isobel's stone twins sat at his side. Arms stiff and shoulders hunched, she clutched the edge of the wall. Her wings tucked, the statue leaned toward him as if patiently waiting for him to take notice of her. Or for a kiss.

A wreath of ash-dusted stone flowers crowned her head, and the layers of her dress spilled onto the floor in folds that, like the statue itself, held only the appearance of softness.

While Isobel stalled at the sight of him, her ghost double sprinted straight for him, and disturbed by the sudden burst of movement, the crows in the trees began to squawk.

Their shouts of warning echoed across the courtyard, ricocheting from wall to wall.

Varen looked up. Setting eyes on Isobel's double as it closed in on him, cutting a straight path through the fog, he stood. His fist closed around the item he'd been studying, and his arms fell open.

That single gesture, so helpless, caused something inside Isobel to leap out of dormancy.

Though her heart had been restarted in a literal sense once before, jogged from a state of dead matter into a beating force of life, she had not since felt the electricity of her renewed existence. Not until that precise moment when Varen enwrapped her ghost, pulling the phantom in close as it swung its arms around his neck.

His face pinched tight with pain, though, as if he knew what would come next.

Almost the instant the two collided, Isobel's double shriveled in Varen's grip. Its limbs fell limp and its skin sucked inward, its face hollowed out, flesh contracting. Blond hair faded to scraggly gray. Now a skull, the phantom's head lolled backward, its jaw falling open as if in a silent scream.

Still Varen refused to release the double. He held tight to the bones even as they broke apart.

Transforming to ash, the entity's remains fell through his grip, cascading into the vapors that swirled in their wake.

Varen lowered his arms. He looked up, his face smudged with the gray dust of the phantasm's essence. His dull eyes, despondent, black as nothing, flicked to Isobel.

A beat passed, and she knew how this must seem to him. That a replay was about to begin.

When he began striding quickly toward her, she felt her heart stop all over again.

Isobel's terror returned, dousing the bittersweet spark that had flickered awake inside her.

Dropping open of their own accord, her arms invited him in the way his arms had her ghost.

But Isobel could sense what Varen intended to do. He'd send her away like he had last night. He'd obliterate her to nothing to prevent her from deteriorating in front of him again.

Reliving her demise over and over, seeing her image all around him, frozen in the form of these cold, unfeeling monuments locked in eternal sleep—
this
had become his fate in this horrendous realm. His existence.

This
was his darkness.

His hell.

But she wasn't dead. And she wasn't ready to be sent back, either. Not yet.

Brushing aside the nagging memory of Reynolds's warning not to interact, Isobel focused her mind on doing the only thing she knew
to
do. The only thing that would hold any power at all.

More power than any words.

Shifting her thoughts, she channeled her concentration on one single objective.

To do what a mere dream could not. And change
everything
.

The light that she summoned came cold.

Though it didn't match the sharp blast of warm sunlight Isobel had called forth in her mind, it
did
accomplish the goal of halting Varen.

He swung toward the silver glow. Pearly like moonlight, it streamed through the surrounding windows of the courtyard's high walls, bouncing off the fog, which, though Isobel commanded it to disperse, refused.

Frowning, she clenched her fists tight at her sides.

She had to fight to keep the light there. Doing so felt like trying to maintain tightrope balance, or shoving against an invisible wall.

She didn't understand. She'd never had to strain like this before to affect something in the dreamworld.

After Reynolds had taught her how to alter her surroundings and shown her the power of lucidity in her dreams, she'd been able to take control. In the past, her battle had been in
recognizing
her power, not wielding it.

She should be able to annihilate this gathering of statues like she had the duplicates of herself in the hall last night, or the deathwatches in the attic.

But the cold memorials remained, solid and imposing.

Varen's gaze returned to her, and the sight of those two unchanging black eyes sent a spear of sorrow straight through her. The poison of that stare proved fatal to her light.

Her glow winked out. Darkness returned, and a new fear opened wide inside of her.

Varen.
He
had to be the force she'd been fighting against.

These constructs around her were of his imagination. His subconscious had to be what was holding it all in place. In his unbending belief that she was gone, he had created an immovable fortress.

The fog swelled thicker as Varen stepped forward again, closing the distance between them. Lifting a hand, he touched her cheek.

Isobel's eyelids flickered, and she waited to feel herself crumple as she had last night.

She didn't fade out, though. And neither did he.

From the trees, the crows' cawing rose in a drone. All of them rasped the same deranged call, as if urging Varen to act on his impulse, to dispense with her and deliver them all from her presence.

As the seconds ticked by, though, she began to wonder if . . . if he could be stalling.

Was it possible her attempt to prove her realness, however feeble, had achieved this small pause, this brief moment of uncertainty?

Isobel seized the chance. Placing her hand on his sleeve, she tilted her face to his and clamped down hard on both his wrist and her thoughts.

Then, as though they'd been there all along, awaiting the return of her resolve, Isobel's imagined rays of light returned. Bursting through the windows, sharper and more intense than before, the beams sliced through the ramparts like blades, shredding them. The Gothic facade of the castle evaporated, eaten through by the heat of Isobel's beckoned dawn to reveal the innumerable trees of the woodlands. Varen whipped his head away from her, looking to the eye of blinding light that bled his violet horizon gold.

As Isobel's sun rose higher, the slanted shadows of the trees and stone angels shifted, rotating in unison like a thousand synchronized clock hands.

The fog vaporized, and Isobel's heart swelled in sudden triumph. That she'd penetrated Varen's illusionary kingdom had to mean he'd lowered his guard. Enough for her to slip into a tiny crack of hope he had to be harboring somewhere within. Hope that, beyond all reason or doubt, she would find a way keep her promise.