Oblivion (37 page)

“When Edgar was captured,” Reynolds said, “when he was pulled back into the woodlands, he'd been in transit on this side, in reality. Traveling between cities. He was trying to complete the ultimate objective of a quest that he believed would save him.”

Isobel looked down to the ribbon in her hand, thinking back to what Varen had said about Poe's final days during their project presentation.

Poe, Isobel remembered, had disappeared after leaving Richmond. He'd been on his way to New York, where he was to meet with Muddy, Virginia's mother—his aunt. Poe's plan had been to collect Muddy and bring her to live with him at his new home in Richmond. But he never made it that far. Richmond was the last place that anyone who knew him personally had seen him.

“The objective of his quest?” Isobel murmured, shaking her head. “I don't understand.”

“His ultimate goal was to return to his place of departure,” said Reynolds. “To the city of Richmond. Where he was to wed.”

Isobel's head snapped up.

“Oh my God,” she said, remembering at once Poe's bizarre string of courtships and engagements during the last year of his life. His pursuits, she recalled, had begun with a widow who, though she had initially agreed to marry him, had ultimately called off the engagement.

Poe's final engagement had been to a woman named Elmira—a childhood sweetheart who lived in Richmond.

“He was trying to turn back midtrip,” Isobel murmured, “to get to Elmira. But why?”

“His plan was to override the bond with another,” Reynolds said. “To create a new soul tie. One strong enough to supersede the dark union he had already made. One of love. It was a gamble. But given the lengths to which Lilith went to retrieve him before the union could occur—”

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?” Isobel asked.

“In essence, I am saying that you have something Edgar did not.”

“Spit it out.”

He nodded to the ribbon in her hand. “You possess a bond already. Perhaps you need only declare it. Name it. Or . . . perhaps only
he
does.”

“Isobel!”

Her brain spinning and numb, swimming as much with information as with shock, Isobel turned her head to find Gwen standing at the base of the stairs.

“We have a problem,” Gwen said, lifting a framed photograph.

With a stab of panic, Isobel took in the three figures posing in the portrait. She and Gwen had seen the same photo earlier that day. Propped next to an open grave and a flag-draped coffin.

Of course Varen would come here,
Isobel thought as she fumbled down the steps, a sick sensation twisting her gut.

This place—this
house
—it was Bruce's.

Dropping the pepper spray but keeping the ribbon, Isobel flew past Gwen. Then, swinging around the corner she'd seen Varen turn, she tore down the cramped hallway, a collage of hanging photos blurring by in her periphery.

That must be where Gwen had snagged the portrait, Isobel thought as she skidded to a halt at the end of the hall. Glancing right, she peered into the adjoining corridor.

A grim-faced grandfather clock seemed to watch her from the shadows. Behind its glass door, a tarnished silver pendulum swayed to and fro, its quiet ticking the only sound in an otherwise absolute silence.

The clock's stationary hour hand pointed to the roman numeral nine, the filigreed minute hand hovering over the six. Below the clock's face, someone had stuck a yellow sticky note that read
AUCTION
in bold black marker.

Aside from the clock, there were only doors. Two on either side, all of them open.

Isobel crept down the hall with slow steps, the ancient floorboards creaking underfoot. As she passed each doorway, she peered into the room beyond.

Her first right led to a study full of boxes and stacked furniture. More sticky notes labeled everything with one of three words:
GOODWILL
,
AUCTION
, and
DUMPSTER
.

Next, on the left, came an empty bathroom with dingy tile flooring, its walls peeling floral paper. The following right opened into a cleaned-out closet, its metal rack cleared of everything except for a black garment bag marked with yet another sticky note—this one bearing Varen's name.

At the top of the partially unzipped bag, Isobel spied a gray suit jacket and a striped tie. She thought they might be the same clothes that Bruce's son, Grey, had been wearing in the photograph.

Isobel pressed on, and finally, glancing into the last room on the left, she found Varen.

He stood with his back to her, staring down at the stripped and dismantled remains of a four-poster bed, its headboard propped against the wall.

The white raven still emblazoned between the shoulders of Varen's coat reminded Isobel, painfully, of how far the nightmare was from being over. How Varen's ties to Lilith still existed.

And though Reynolds had pointed the way, though he'd handed Isobel the ribbon and helped to bring them here, to this moment of all or nothing—how could she tell Varen that everything would be okay when his pain never ended? When the “nothing” part was all he knew?

When in coming home, back to reality, he had found no home to come to.

What good were her words and promises now?

“You knew?” he asked, his voice quiet, disconcertingly calm.

“I—I didn't get a chance to tell you,” Isobel stammered. “I wanted to, but . . . Varen, I'm so sorry.”

“How long?”

Isobel fidgeted with the ribbon, uncertain of what, exactly, he was asking her.

“How long has he been gone?” Varen snapped, louder this time.

“The funeral was today,” Isobel said. “This morning. Gwen and I were both there. I went because I—”

“Goddamn it,”
he said, snatching a small lamp from a nearby nightstand and sending a cascade of empty orange medicine bottles to the floor. He slung the lamp at the far wall, where it smashed and fell.

Isobel flinched. She watched the lamp's fractured bulb sputter before dying out.

Suddenly the objects in the room—books and boxes, a trash can, the medicine bottles—shifted. They rose together and hovered in place.

Tensing, Isobel checked the grandfather clock, the hands of which had started to spin.

“Varen,” she began, but she stopped, her words catching at the sound of a woman's humming.

It was the melody from Varen's lullaby, the heartrending song Madeline had written for him when he was a child. When he'd still been
her
child.

Then the humming dissolved, becoming laughter, low and insidious.

An electric charge filled the air, causing the hairs on the nape of Isobel's neck to stand at attention. And yet she couldn't bring herself to look back in the direction she'd come from—toward the end of the hall where the building laughter rebounded.

Instead she kept her gaze fixed on Varen as he slowly turned to face the door.

Black once more, his eyes stared straight through her.

Radiating fury, Varen stalked toward Isobel.

As he moved, the doorway that stood between them expanded, its rectangular arch rounding as it transformed to stone. Then Varen walked right past her, across the wide threshold and into the hall, where his continuing steps triggered more change.

Like a crawling frost, cracked stone spread out from beneath his boots. Plaster and drywall faded into rough gray brick. While the emerging walls of Varen's palace absorbed the doorways on Isobel's right, the entries on her left morphed into more Gothic arches, and the passageway before her took the form of a cloister.

Through the open arcade, Isobel saw that Varen had returned them to the courtyard of statues.

Or was it that he'd brought the courtyard of statues to them?

But then, this was not the same courtyard she'd encountered before. Not only were there no angels among the gathering of fog-enveloped white forms—no sets of wings, neither tucked nor unfurled—she saw no faces, either.

None fully decipherable . . .

Draping stone shrouds covered the statues' heads, spilling long down their feminine bodies in clinging sculpted folds.

Lilith's laughter echoed all around, trailing off into the eerie garden.

Another trap,
Isobel thought. The demon's final play.

And Varen, with his mind now firmly set on revenge, was about to walk straight into it.

“Varen, wait,” Isobel called after him.

To her surprise—and perhaps to his as well—Varen halted at the corner of the cloister.

“She's right,” Isobel said.

Varen turned his head slightly toward her. The gesture, though small, suggested that at least he was listening.

Fixing her eyes on that white raven, Isobel held her ribbon—
their
ribbon—closer.

“Darkness
will
win,” she said. “It has to. So long as you try to fight fire with fire.”

Half-shielded by his tousled, ashen hair, his eyes flicked in her direction.

“Sometimes,” he said, speaking in that quiet and contained way that always frightened her, “fire is the only way to fight. But then . . . you knew that already.”

With that, Varen rounded the corner, passing out of her sight.

Isobel's chest contracted with fear.

Fire.
Isobel had been referring to Varen's obvious plan to fight Lilith with anger, to pit his own capacity for darkness against the demon's.

But the fire
he
meant was Isobel's chosen tool to banish him from the strip mall parking lot earlier that day. And to sever the original link—to destroy Varen's sketchbook.

Now that Varen knew
he
was the link, would he try something similar?

Immediately Isobel's thoughts circled back to Varen's duel with the doppelgänger Noc. To what had been said between the two. They had reached some sort of agreement—or rather, Varen had come to an understanding with himself.

He'd devised a deadly contract.

Then he had tried to soothe Isobel's fears with a distracting explanation, with a kiss.

Had that kiss been meant as a good-bye?

Panic seized her at that thought, spurring Isobel to charge around the bend after him. But she halted suddenly when she found herself back in Bruce's house, in that dimly lit hall sandwiched between the stairs and the wall.

All the photos now hung askew, their glass panes cracked and splintered.

Dead ahead, she saw Varen cross through the front door, which hung wide, exiting not into Bruce's yard but to the courtyard and its shrouded, mist-wrapped forms.

But before she could follow him through to the other side, Isobel spotted something—some
one
—lying on the stairs.

“Gwen!” Grabbing the banister, Isobel swung down to kneel next to her.

Unconscious but breathing, her chest rising with small, shallow intakes, Gwen lay on her side, head propped on one arm as if someone had positioned her that way. A red welt swelled near her temple, and in one hand, her fingers curled loosely around the canister of pepper spray.

Isobel glanced behind her, to the top of the staircase and the hall, but she saw no sign of Reynolds.

She pushed off from the steps and whirled for the open door. Barreling through it, she ran headlong into the drifts of fog and down a winding path after Varen, whose form she no longer saw.

“Varen!” Isobel shouted.

“Varen,”
a hushed voice echoed back.

Isobel turned in a circle, shoes scuffling stone.

Marble faces peered down at her from every direction, their features half-lost behind carved veils that perfectly mimicked the sheerness of gossamer. Now, even through the stone shrouds, she could make out their solemn expressions—their lidded eyes that, though closed, still seemed to see.

Looking behind her, Isobel also saw that along with the door to Bruce's, the walkway had vanished, its curving path now populated with more enswathed figures.

One of the statues moved, swiveling its head her way.

With a jump, Isobel backpedaled and stumbled straight into another.

Laughter, deep and throaty, filled the courtyard, growing louder and louder until the voice swept down on Isobel—and right into her.

Isobel shrieked as the shrill cackling invaded her head. Her hands leaped to cover her ears, dropping the ribbon. She squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn't block out the laughter as it spiked into a skull-shattering scream.

Legs giving out, Isobel collapsed. Her knees slammed hard onto cold stone, and, doubling over, she fought the urge to be sick.

Then, departing as suddenly as it had descended, the demon's voice ceased and fled her mind. Its reverberation clapped through the newly quieted courtyard.

Trembling, gasping for air as well as for the return of her senses, Isobel lowered her quaking hands. She kept her head bowed, opening her eyes again only when she felt something warm trickle from her nose.

Three blots of crimson fell to splatter the smooth rectangular slab on which she now knelt. There, letters formed, creating trenches for the blood droplets.

Through the matted dreads of her hair, Isobel read the carved words.

ISOBEL LANLEY

BELOVED DAUGHTER, DEVOTED SISTER,

CHERISHED FRIEND

LIVED FOR LOVE, YET PERISHED BY ITS HAND

“Carries a certain Poe-etic ring to it, does it not?” asked a low feminine voice.

A soft shifting followed by a quiet drag of fabric sounded loud in Isobel's ringing ears. Then pooling folds of white and violet-stained gossamer entered her view. Poking through the puddled hem, curved black talons clicked to a stop atop Isobel's engraved name.