Oblivion (31 page)

The demon, Isobel was sure, would not be far behind.

Tugging her after him, Varen started down the hall at a run, hurrying them toward a gilded archway that filtered into being as they neared the end of the hall. Had he made the escape route for them? Of course, he must have. But where was he taking them?

Isobel fumbled after him on rubber legs, her feet heavy as clubs.

“Wait,” she pleaded.

Pausing, Varen turned to her.

“What are you doing?” he asked as, with quivering hands, Isobel strung the hamsa's chain around his neck, trying to keep her fingers steady enough to knot the chain, since the clasp had been broken.

“There isn't ti—”

The walls at the opposite end of the hall blew out their mirrors with an earsplitting crash.

White rapids gushed into the hallway, turning it instantly into a canal.

The torrents raged toward them with a deafening roar, proving Varen's curtailed warning true: There was no time, no place, to run.

Grasping Isobel close, Varen ducked her head into him.

He swung her away from the approaching floods, shielding her with his body just before the booming waters bowled into them both.

WHOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH.

Cringing, Isobel clung to Varen.

But the floods did not tear them apart as she'd expected.

Instead she and Varen remained standing, unaffected by the wall of water that became something else the moment it met with their joined figures.

Ash.

Cascading past them in a billowing cloud, the dust settled across the hall with a hiss.

A tinkling sound drew Isobel's gaze upward.

Through the haze, she saw the ash-coated chandelier above them sway.

Then it fell, plummeting straight for them.

Isobel dropped her head. She held tightly to Varen, shutting her eyes in anticipation of the impact that—again—never came. She felt only the spray of dust and knew that
he
must be the reason why.

Just as he could create—the gilded door frame, the corridor, this palace, the seashore—Isobel knew that Varen could also abolish. He had to have destroyed the rapids and the falling chandelier.

With his awareness had returned his control. But was it strong enough to pit against Lilith's?

Isobel pushed back from Varen, blinking cinders from her wet lashes. She scanned his collar, where the dust had already begun to seep into his soaked clothing, turning to muck. Her fingers finding the charm she'd managed to secure there, she tucked it beneath his shirt.

Comforted by the knowledge that he was protected, that as long as the hamsa remained on his person, Lilith could not lay a hand on him, Isobel allowed her aching shoulders to sag.

She glanced up to Varen, meeting his gaze, his green eyes grave and searching.

For one heartbeat, she let herself bask in his complete return to lucidity. To himself.

But the brief flash lasted no longer than the instant it took for Varen to turn his head and look away from her. Toward the far end of the hall, from where the waves had rushed them.

Reluctantly Isobel shifted her gaze in the same direction.

Flecks of ash swirled through the devastated hall, providing the only barrier between Isobel and Varen and the white demon who, like an ivory idol, watched them from less than ten yards away.

Behind Lilith and through the ragged mouth of the wrecked hall lay an endless assemblage of trees, a hazy silver light glowing through their prison-bar trunks.

Lilith's face, unveiled, stark and whole once more, showed all the emotion of an ancient ceremonial mask. Like the walls around them—
like this entire world
—her features had become caught in a state between beauty and ruin.

Shadows nested deep within the hollows of her high cheekbones. Dark veins marbled her snowy skin, and the masses of her wild hair clung to her soaked figure in straggly strands.

Sodden veils spilled in weighty folds from her, clinging close to her narrow and gaunt frame.

The demon's eyes, no longer sunken pits but enlarged inkwells, leaked great streaks of the same violet-black substance that had spilled from her cracked skull in the depths of the ocean.

“You forget,” Lilith said, a slick of glossy liquid sliding from her mouth to drape her chin and drench her pristine shrouds, staining the gossamer bright violet. “You
both
forget,” she went on, her voice low and throaty, thick with the heavy fluid, “that you cannot evade what lies within your own mind. You cannot run from yourself.”

Varen shifted in front of Isobel, planting himself between her and the demon, who started toward them, the tips of her taloned feet poking out from the hem of her dragging robes.

“When the light at last dies, as it
always
dies,” she said, “darkness
will
devour. Be it that darkness which is your own”—pausing, Lilith locked her gaze solely on Varen, lips curling, spreading to display a jagged, stained grin—“or someone else's.”

Her eyes darting, Isobel checked the cracked and dusted mirrors.

She saw her own and Varen's reflections—mere shadows beyond the filmy layer of ash.

But just as Isobel had noted once before, in the dreamworld parlor of Varen's house, the demon's figure cast no reflection. Now, though, Isobel noticed something else, too.

The mirrors did not reflect the Gothic, ash-strewn hallway where they stood, either. Instead the murky glass showed another hall, one lined with familiar lockers, their cobalt color only just discernable through the clinging grime.

Trenton?

“Darkness devours because it
must
,” Lilith said, stopping at a distance, and Isobel knew it was because of the hamsa. “And so there
is
no escape.”

Isobel's gaze flicked from one wall of mirrors to the other, recalling how Varen, in her dream, had transformed the north hall into
this
corridor. Did that then mean that all three of them currently occupied a space that ran parallel to that portion of school?

Raising an arm, the demon pointed one black-nailed finger at Varen. “A talisman may guard you for a time, but it can no more liberate you than can this foolish girl, who is as doomed as you.”

“Don't listen,” Isobel whispered against Varen's shoulder, huddling closer, her thoughts racing to formulate a plan before the demon could inflict them with her own.

“Relent now,” Lilith ordered, “cast off the amulet, and I will allow her to live, to return to her world. Refuse, and her soul is as forfeit as yours.”

“Varen,
think
,” pleaded Isobel. “There isn't going to
be
a world to return to if she gets her way. And if she can't be stopped, why go to such lengths to keep us apart? To make you believe I wouldn't come? To let you go on thinking I was dead—that you had killed me?”

“You know I cannot be destroyed,” Lilith called to him. “I
am
destruction. And as I am, so now are
you
. You
will
be the cause of her death.”

“If the bond can't be broken,” Isobel countered, her words fast and low, “then why try to barter with my life? Varen, if she
could
kill me herself, she'd do it. She's been trying this whole time. From that day we met for the project at the library, when I first read about her in your sketchbook. Ever since you started seeing me in your dreams. But she can't. Not on her own. For some reason, she can't. That's why she sent the Nocs after me. That's why she—”

“The tie that binds us
is
indissoluble,” Lilith said, louder now. “You belong to me. At least”—she paused, her smile growing wide—“until death do us part.”

Varen glanced over his shoulder at Isobel, and in that jade eye, she could read what he was thinking, what he was considering, and she knew it was exactly what the demon wanted.

“It isn't true,” Isobel blurted, speaking faster, her own voice rising in volume. “Nothing she says is true. Varen, you
know
that.”

“How else can it end?” he asked her, sorrow sweeping his grime-smeared face.

“Not like this,” Isobel said, taking his hand in hers. “Not here.”

With that, she whirled and began to run, hurrying toward the gilded archway through which she could see another chamber of Varen's palace—a grand foyer filled with standing candelabras, their milky tapers lit with violet flames. More candles lined the steps of the curving marble staircase within, one that wound up to an unseen floor.

“Ask yourself,” Isobel heard Lilith bellow after them, her voice echoing down the corridor, “where can you go that you will not bring me?”

Isobel felt Varen's hand twitch in hers, his hold loosening. She tightened her grip as, together, the two of them shot through the doorway and into the foyer, which presented them with not just one route, but many. Too many.

Multitudes of elaborate, sprawling staircases split off in every direction. They led up and down, overlapping, endless flights of steps crisscrossing and intertwining up and away into infinity.

But stairs weren't what they needed. What they needed was a
way out.
A link back to reality.

A door.

What had Reynolds once told her?

Make a door,
he'd said.
When there is no way, you must make a way.

Isobel conjured an image of her bedroom door in her mind—an entry point she
knew
would work because it had before in the woodlands with Reynolds, and again earlier with Scrimshaw.

At her beckoning, Isobel's doorknob materialized in her grip.

Twisting the knob, she shoved, rushing through the opening and pulling Varen after her.

Her feet met with carpet. She saw her bed with its cubbyhole headboard, her ransacked dresser and messy closet.

Once inside with Varen, she released his hand and sent the door slamming shut with a bang, blocking out the grand stairwell, the armies of flickering candles, and that horrid image of Lilith standing in the gold-framed archway.

Backpedaling into the foot of her bed, Isobel frowned at the quiet that seemed somehow too intense.

Something was wrong. She felt it as a buzz—an electric charge infusing the air.

Turning, Isobel scanned the pink walls, eyes flying around her room.

Everything appeared just as she'd left it. Normal. Unreversed.

And yet, when she'd made the door just now, when she'd opened it, she had not found her things floating in midair. Instead her belongings lay strewn about, scattered across the floor where they must have fallen before, when she'd left Danny in the hallway of the real world. When she'd entered the castle turret with its spiral staircase.

It didn't make sense. Before, when a portal opened between the worlds, objects always rose.

Isobel glanced at Varen to see him staring, transfixed, into her mirror. Reflected in the glass, through the dark square of her bedroom window, beyond her white curtains and the fizzing screen of silent static were . . . the Woodlands of Weir.

Impossible
. They'd crossed into reality. Hadn't they?

Isobel swung to face her bedroom clock. It read
6:17
in brilliant blue numbers that scrambled, then steadied.

No,
she thought.

Returning to the door, she ripped it open to see the gold-framed archway, the foyer, and the candles all still there, the scene missing only the veil-draped, ink-smeared figure of Lilith.

Suddenly Varen was at Isobel's side. Again he took her hand.

“This way,” he said, pulling her back into the foyer. Isobel followed, grateful to know that
he
, at least, had an idea of somewhere they could go.

Varen hurried forward to a descending set of steps flanked by two gilt candelabra, their pronged torches held aloft by the arms of two angels bearing Isobel's features, their sightless eyes wide open.

Rushing past the statues, Varen took the stairs fast, rattling down them with Isobel in tow.

Glancing back at the angels, Isobel saw them turn their heads to watch them go as bleeding slits opened in unison on their cheeks.

Varen swung around the curve of the staircase, then halted, causing Isobel to collide with him.

Below, she saw what had made him stop.

A plain flight of steps descended to a cramped and familiar landing, one encased by tightly set walls.

Dead ahead, dark-paned windows showed Isobel and Varen's reflections, their images pale and filthy, only just recognizable.

They were at school, at Trenton, in the exact stairwell where Reynolds had first appeared to Isobel that morning. In fact, they stood in the precise spot where
he
had stood, their forms now as disheveled and ash-dusted as his had been.

Isobel checked over her shoulder and saw only the door leading into the deserted third-floor hallway.

And yet, though the darkened windows reflected her and Varen, the stairway they showed was the grand and Gothic one they'd just left.

Then, through the dim glass, Isobel saw Lilith's streaked form turn the corner to loom at their backs.

But she
knew
Lilith couldn't have a reflection. And suddenly the truth hit her.

The windows, like the mirrors in the hall, were showing what lay on the
other side
, on the plane parallel to whichever world they currently occupied.

That meant that they really were in school, just as they'd really been in Isobel's room moments ago. Somehow she and Varen
had
re-entered reality.

The worlds were blending. The merging that had nearly taken place on Halloween night, the collision Reynolds had warned her about from the beginning—it was happening now.