Oblivion (17 page)

But the Nocs had caught up to her before he had.

Caught up, and caught wise,
she thought, cursing herself for arousing their suspicions through the show she'd put on to try to convince Varen she was real.

Though her display hadn't been enough to persuade
him
, apparently it had done the trick for the ghouls, who must have glimpsed her in the veil before Reynolds had shocked her back into her body.

A flash of terror flared inside her with a new thought: Lilith must suspect now too.

In her desperation, had Isobel given herself away, tossing aside the one advantage Reynolds had told her she—he—
they
possessed?

Isobel pushed that worry aside for later—if there was ever going to
be
a later—and commanded herself to keep walking.

She dared not look behind her as she continued down the sidewalk, but forced herself to concentrate on her next move, coming up with some sort of plan to elude the creatures that might be—at that very moment—less than two steps away from snatching her up. Body
and
soul.

Isobel fixed her sights on the nearest building—a coffee shop that stood on the other side of a narrow parking lot, kitty-corner to the bus stop.

If she went in, she might be able to create a distraction, then slip through a rear exit. Or maybe as long as she surrounded herself with people, the Nocs would hold off on their attack.

Both hopes were long shots. She knew that as well as she knew that she'd run out of options.

As Isobel drew closer to the entrance, though, what she saw reflected in the shop's glass front windows made her stop.

Dead trees filled the tinted panes, their trunks overlapping the blazing red letters of the neon
NOW BREWING
sign.

Beyond the glass, customers conversed at small tables. They sipped from mugs, scribbled on notepads, and typed away at laptops. At her back, Isobel heard the swish of cars, the chirping of birds, and the high drone of a passing airplane—noises that didn't match the soundless landscape of prison-bar trees.

Black crows filled the inklike splatter of interwoven branches, watching her.

In addition to the legion of Nocs, Isobel saw herself reflected in the glass.

And standing a few yards behind, just within the boundaries of the trees—Varen.

Her heart began to slam in her chest.

Slowly she turned to face him.

But instead of the woodlands, she found pavement. Parked cars. White houses and grassy yards. A steady stream of traffic.

New people began to gather at the bus stop. One of them, a man wearing a backpack, kept staring at his wristwatch. Frowning, he crooked his arm, bringing the timepiece to one ear.

Isobel swung toward the coffee shop again. But the woodlands had vanished, replaced by the same quiet scene she had just witnessed—cars, people, concrete, sky.

As she scanned the surface of the glass, Isobel's mind raced backward through the day in an attempt to pinpoint the last moment she could say without a doubt was
real.

But her speeding thoughts found no stopping point.

There had been the light in her bedroom, the ash in the hall, and the ride through the cemetery. The funeral. Reynolds and then the veil. Officially,
that
was when she'd re-entered the dreamworld. But . . . had it all been part of the same unending dream?

A dark shape entered her periphery—someone standing at her shoulder. Yet her own reflection was the only one in the glass.

A reflection meant for certain that she was in reality. Or at the very least, that
she
was real, present in her body and not in astral form.

But then, hadn't the mirror image she'd encountered in the winding hallways of Varen's Gothic palace proven to have possessed a mind of its own? Could she merely be facing another double?

“They tell me this is real,” Isobel heard him say, his voice achingly familiar—torturous and quieting all at once. “They tell me
you
are real.”

She sensed him looking down on her. In response, Isobel began to angle into him, unable to help herself despite the string of warning commands that screamed inside her head.

Don't. Stop. Run.

But she couldn't.

The two of them were like magnets that way. As equally drawn to each other by invisible forces as they had been repelled.

She focused first on where his hair brushed his black collar, then on the hollow of his throat. His Adam's apple . . .

Triggered by the sight of him, by their sheer proximity, memories began to surface in her mind as if from another lifetime.

Her very own cobwebs . . .

She recalled that day her dad had come home from work and freaked at finding Varen in the house. Varen had left in a hurry, and helpless to stop him from leaving, Isobel had followed him out to his car. Together, the two of them had stood on her street just like this. And just like now, Isobel had wanted nothing more than for him to lean down and kiss her.

She tilted her chin up, forcing her eyes to his.

Sunglasses hid his black gaze from her view, and, in their lenses, she was again confronted with her own image, the slanted scar on her cheek more prominent than ever.

“I'm sure you would tell me the same thing,” Varen went on, his silver lip ring catching a white spark from the sun as he spoke. “You always do.”

Isobel blinked, frowning. So stunned by his sudden presence at her side—so mesmerized by the sound of that low, calm voice that she hadn't been able to register the meaning of his words.

Now her brain scrambled to backtrack, to recall what it was he'd been saying.

“Try to tell me, anyway,” he added, his tone going glacial, sending sharp spikes of cold fear through her.

A soft
click
drew her attention to his open palm, and she almost gasped to see her small butterfly key-chain watch perched on the tips of his fingers. Its wings were open, exposing the face of the clock inside.

Behind the small circle of glass, its three hands spun around and around, winding wildly opposite one another, a sure indication that this
was
a dream after all.

Checking the window again, though, and seeing her reflection there proved just the opposite.

“I came to show them they were wrong,” Varen said, clicking the watch closed, folding his fist tight around it. “And remind myself while I'm at it.”

An invisible pressure settled on Isobel's shoulders, pressing down.

Condensing, the air grew suddenly thick and heavy.

Yet in defiance of the sudden shift in gravity, pebbles and rocks, stray leaves and bits of litter quivered, then rose to hover an inch above the pavement and patches of grass.

The asphalt beneath them buzzed, sending a shiver of electricity into the soles of Isobel's shoes, causing the hairs on her arms to lift.

Varen, it was clear, hadn't come to talk. He certainly had not come to listen.

And wherever they were—whether within a dream, reality, or both—Isobel began to sense that something horrible and irreversible was about to happen.

She had only a moment. A breath's worth of time at most. She felt it.

“I love you,” Isobel said. Because even if the words could not stop what was coming, they were still her first and sole defense.

“I know,” Varen surprised her by saying as he turned away. “That's why you're gone.”

Thunder cracked from above, calling her attention heavenward.

Spun from nothing, billows of violet-black clouds began to roll in from every direction. Fast as a time-lapse video, they converged to swallow all traces of blue. A sheet of solid shadow blanketed the parking lot and strip mall and, as darkness fell, the people gathered at the bus stop lifted baffled gazes from the floating debris to the sky.

On the street, cars halted, brakes squealing, horns blaring.

Isobel looked back to the coffee shop window, but her reflection had vanished, wiped out along with the sun's glare.

Inside, customers rose one after the other. Abandoning their floating cups, their lazily drifting pens, notepads, and other belongings, they gathered at the windows, frightened faces tilted skyward.

Colliding, the clouds began to mesh and meld, mixing in a swirl over Varen, its center following him as he strode toward the street.

The wind blasted stronger, coursing through the lot with a sudden upsurge, carrying with it dead leaves and bits of flittering trash.

Thunder boomed a second time, and as its clap echoed, the eye of the maelstrom ripped wide, opening like the maw of some enormous, toothless beast.

Blackness occupied the void within, the gaping pit marbled with white static.

“Varen, stop this!” Isobel called out to him, her voice sounding so small amid the roar of wind and thunder that she couldn't be sure if he'd heard her.

But when he halted, glancing back at her over one shoulder, she knew he had.

“You stop it,” he said. “If you can.”

Turning forward again, he continued toward the street while ash began to filter down around him, falling from the crevice in the sky.

Isobel latched on to his words, trying to visualize the wound in the clouds closing, but the crater only grew. With Varen's every step, the ash poured thicker.

She started forward, about to go after him, but was halted by the deafening smash of glass at her back.

Shards flew, bursting from the strip mall.

Screams rang out, and Isobel swung away, her own shriek mixing with the noise of sudden chaos while glinting slivers rained over her, tinkling as they showered the cars and the pavement.

A cacophony of alarms blared.

Lowering her arms, Isobel looked around her. Panic-stricken people darted this way and that, flying past her as they streamed out of the strip mall.

Ahead, farther than his slow steps should have carried him, Varen stood among a group of stalled vehicles in the middle of the street. The wind raged through his hair. It pulled at the hem of his long coat, causing the fabric to flutter and snap.

From the chasm came a torrent of crows. Screeching and flapping, they shot into the storm-torn sky.

The pavement crackled and shifted beneath Isobel. She skittered back, but the fissures spread quickly past her, fanning out in all directions.

The ground shook. The fractured glass rattled and slipped into the widening rifts.

The quake sent Isobel to her knees. She caught herself with her hands, bits of glass biting her palms.

Above, the crows squawked louder, their unending buzz like a swarm of locusts.

Isobel did her best to tune out their cries, the people screaming and running, the rumbling of the earth, and the ash that had begun to catch on her clothing and cling to her hair.

Focus,
she told herself as she tried to conceive of some way to halt the rupturing of her surroundings, but she couldn't concentrate. Not while the trees dotting the patches of strip mall landscaping began to twist and shrivel. Not while more trees burst through the fractured blacktop, jutting upward like spikes.

Isobel pictured the lot as it had been moments before, restored, whole, holding the visual for what felt like an eternity.

When this attempt failed too, she tried picturing her and Varen somewhere else entirely, in a desert far away.

Instead of sand, the pavement beneath her dissolved into the gray dust of the dreamworld. Isobel closed her fists around the powder, crying out in frustration as the scrapes in her hands burned with pain.

Nothing was working.

She was too late. He'd become too strong. She couldn't fight against him like she had before.

Whatever this was—
wherever
this was—it felt like the end Reynolds had warned her about.

Opening his arms, Varen threw his head back.

Spears of violet lightning shot up from the ground around him, connecting with the darkness above and forming a cage.

Isobel zeroed in on Varen's illuminated form, his arms spread like the wings of the white bird on his black coat.

As the lightning fluttered in and out of view . . . so did he.

In that instant, Isobel realized that no matter what dimension they occupied, Varen was not there in physical form. He was projecting. Like he had the day of the Poe project. Like
she
had when she'd crossed through the veil.

If that was true, then this—the parking lot, the coffee shop, and the street—must be reality. Because Varen wouldn't
need
to project in the dreamworld. And if he was projecting here, then that meant the veil hadn't completely eroded. At least, not enough to allow Varen to physically rejoin his own world.

But that would also mean that she could not overpower Varen, and she would have no way of stopping this. No way of stopping
him
.

Everything would merge. Reality and dreams. Eternity—it was all headed for oblivion.

Time itself would end.

Unless . . .

Isobel pushed up onto her feet.

Even with her thoughts still spinning, slowly formulating an answer she dreaded, she started moving toward him.

Before, when the two worlds had overlapped like this, the blending had happened through a link—a role previously served by Varen's sketchbook.

According to Reynolds, that role had since been transferred to something else.

Some
one
.

Isobel sped her pace to a run, closing in.

Even as she neared him, dodging cars and entering the forest of lightning, she didn't know if her plan would work. If it could.

Over the din of the whipping winds, the cawing of the Nocs, and the crashing thunder, she screamed his name.

Like before, she hadn't expected him to hear her, to turn. But, just as he had then, he did now.

Launching herself at him, Isobel wrapped her arms around him. They fell backward together, and for one blissful instant, she held him tight.