Oblivion (38 page)

“Pun intended,” Lilith said, “as our wayward Pinfeathers might have suggested were he here. Had you not incited him to self-annihilation, I mean. But then, you
do
possess a certain knack for impelling lovesick wretches to ruin, don't you? I suppose you and I have that much in common.”

“I am
nothing
like you,” Isobel growled. Slamming her palms flat against the slab, she pushed to her feet and lunged at the figure in front of her. Instead of digging into soft veils and flesh, though, her fingers clashed with hard marble.

Another statue.

As though mocking her, the figure smiled serenely at Isobel from behind its pall.

“You
do
like your epitaph, do you not?” Lilith asked, her voice now emanating from a separate corner of the courtyard.

Isobel shoved away from the frozen effigy. Whirling, she scoured the endless multitude of veiled forms.

“I'd rather hoped you would,” the same voice called, issuing from yet another direction. “Given that it is the prize you've been fighting so hard to obtain. A sorrowful ending to a mournful tale whose greatest tragedy is that it happened to conclude with
your
name instead of mine.”

“Where are you?” Isobel yelled. She twirled in place, and in a kaleidoscope of muted faces, statues wheeled around her. “If you think you can end this, if you want to kill me, then come out! Stop hiding like a
coward
.”

“You seem upset,” Lilith said. “Don't care much for having your own tricks turned against you, do you?”

Isobel rotated again and again. She began to slow, though, when she noticed that none of the statues appeared to hold the same position as before. But when she stopped, the courtyard only spun faster, continuing its rotation without her.

Isobel teetered. Her feet tangling in her ribbon, she fell onto the cold slab bearing her name.

Her surroundings whizzed by in a blur—a merry-go-round of phantoms that halted only when a familiar mausoleum slid into view directly across from Isobel.

Mist, thick and rolling, enshrouded the tomb she recognized as Lilith's.

Its decorative wrought-iron and blue stained-glass door hung wide open, revealing a rectangle of pure black.

Above the void, etched over the archway, Isobel saw a name she knew but had not noticed there before. Not until now.

LIGEIA

“Enough with games, though,” Lilith said, her sultry voice resounding now from within the tomb. “You called. And now, here I am.”

For an instant, the cavity of pitch darkness remained undisturbed. Then, like a dead thing floating up from black waters, the demon's hollowed white face and emaciated form emerged to stand in the door frame.

Lilith's sheer shroud, tattered and stained, hung from her in strips and shreds. Her tangled, dripping hair fell long over her shoulders, its ends still soaked in inky muck.

A pit oozed in the center of the demon's ivory chest, where Reynolds's hamsa-strung blade had impaled her. Only lightly smeared now with the violet-black substance she'd nearly dissolved into, Lilith's pale, papery lips entertained a renewed smile.

“Lilith,” Isobel said, spitting the name from between her teeth as she scooped up her ribbon again. “Ligeia. Lenore. Emily. Lilo and Stitch. Which
is
it?”

“‘Ulalume—Ulalume,'” Lilith replied, her voice going sweet and soft, making the syllables sound like a song. “'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume.'”

As the demon crossed out of the barrier of darkness, her aura of cold ethereal light burned suddenly bright, its glow evaporating the stains from her figure.

Black veins faded from hands that became delicate again as they took up the veils that still clung to her shoulders. Lilith drew the gauzy fabric over her face, and like a bride approaching the altar, she strode toward Isobel.

Her heart rate speeding, Isobel flicked her eyes between the approaching creature and the shifting letters above the tomb.

The name
LIGEIA
melted away, and bleeding through the stone, new letters emerged to spell
ULALUME
.

“‘Then my heart it grew ashen and sober,'” hissed the demon, her thin lips blossoming to bloodred fullness, her face and figure regaining their former beauty. “‘As the leaves that were crisped and sere—as the leaves that were withering and sere.'”

Keeping hold of her ribbon, Isobel drew to her feet. She took several retreating steps until her spine collided with one of the statues, leaving her nowhere to go.

The demon drifted nearer still, her radiance blazing to an ultraviolet shine and her skin to an eye-stinging white.

“‘And I cried—“It was surely October on
this
very night of last year, that I journeyed—I journeyed down here!—that I brought a dread burden down here—on this night of all nights in the year,”'” Lilith continued, reciting lines from one of Poe's poems. The same poem, Isobel knew, whose title matched the name now written on the demon's tomb. The poem Scrimshaw had recited to her the first time she'd found herself within the walls of the blue marble crypt.

The same poem Varen had read to Isobel in his room.

It was the one work of Poe's that mentioned the woodlands by name.

“That poem,” Isobel said. “Poe wrote it trying to seal you back up, didn't he?”

“And we see how well
that
worked,” Lilith replied, coming to a stop in front of Isobel. “But while we're on the subject, and if you don't mind my asking, would you do me the favor of refreshing my memory?”

Isobel gasped when she felt the statue behind her snatch her wrist, immobilizing the hand that held her pink ribbon. A yelp of shock rose in her throat as bony fingers dug into her flesh, but her cry caught there, dying the moment the effigy swung her around to face it.

In place of another of Lilith's stone idols, a skeleton leered down at her from within the shadows of a heavy hood.

Behind a sculpted pall of its own, the skull grinned at Isobel and, looping an arm around her waist, jerked her snugly against its robed body. Then, as though they'd been caught in a fervid dance, the statue threw her low into a dip and, holding her there, refroze.

Isobel whimpered in the skeleton's solidified grip, recognizing all too well where she had seen it before.

This was the Red Death. The same nightmare figure that had collapsed the grave over Isobel when she'd fallen there, trying to rescue Brad.

“I seem to recall you mentioning something earlier about . . . putting me in my place?” Lilith said, her glowing figure sliding into Isobel's periphery, her serene and lovely face half-obscured by the tails of the ribbon still hanging from Isobel's clenched fist.

At the rumbling sound of stone grating on stone, Isobel twisted in the skeleton's hold to peer down over her shoulder.

Beneath her, the long slab bearing her epitaph had slid free, unveiling a pit that reached far into the earth.

Tightly packed walls of red dirt formed a deep grave that terminated in an open pine box.

Isobel ceased her struggle in the skeleton statue's crushing grip, aware that if it were to let go of her now, she would fall into the tomb's waiting mouth—straight into that coffin.

But as she forced herself to look into the face of the skull, a new thought hit her, ignited by the changing inscription on the tomb. Lilith had once admitted to having many names.

“Bess,”
Isobel hissed between haggard breaths, remembering the name the demon had hidden behind when seeking Varen—when dipping into his dreams and luring him deeper and deeper into this world.
Her
world. “That's short for Elizabeth, isn't it?”

Lilith appeared on Isobel's other side, where she offered a grin—and a glimpse of razor teeth.

“‘I don't know what to write,' scribbled the boy, his thoughts winding around and around, always circling back to the cheerleader who had stolen his heart and replaced the lure of his darkest dreams.” As Lilith spoke, her voice dropped, phasing from a woman's to that of a beast's. “‘I can't think. I can't think. Isobel. Isobel. Isobel. . . .'”

Isobel winced at hearing the final desperate lines Varen had scrawled into his sketchbook.

He had written those words in place of an ending to the story he'd been crafting at Lilith's bidding—the story meant to bridge the worlds, to allow Lilith into their reality.

Except now it was Varen himself who had taken on that role. And by choice, no less—even if he didn't see it that way. Even if he didn't fully realize what it was he was doing.

What—Isobel was beginning to dread—might have been done already . . .

In targeting Varen, Isobel realized with a gut-wrenching pang of failure, Lilith had indeed found the perfect tool to work through. A gifted yet bent spirit. A cracked soul ready to break and spill forth the poison it had absorbed, the darkness it had learned to survive on for so long.

But, in following Reynolds's orders to enter the veil, in taking the bait that had led her to incite Varen to destruction, hadn't she allowed the demon to use her own pain and longing against her, too?

So, Isobel supposed, both she
and
Varen had been guilty of walking into the demon's well-laid snares. But maybe, she thought, just maybe, the two of them had inadvertently laid one of their own. . . .

“That story,” Isobel said, turning her head to stare into Lilith's hungry eyes. “It isn't over. Elizabeth never got her ending, did she? Her fate was never decided.”

“And you think
you
would like to finish it?” Lilith asked with a laugh, stepping in close. “Brave. Smart, too. But you can't.” The demon's smile grew into a wide grin, one of triumph and bloodlust. “You burned that book, silly. Or don't you remember?”

“Burned or not,” came a voice from behind the demon, “
I'm
still here.”

Sliding out from between a pair of statues, Varen stepped into view.

“That means the story still exists,” he said, his black glare driving into Lilith. “And this isn't how it ends.”

“
There
you are,” Lilith said, her attention shifting from Isobel to Varen. “I was curious how far you would allow things to progress. How long it would take you to scrape together the remnants of a piteous courage that, until now, had yet to show itself.”

“Varen,” Isobel called, straining in the skeleton's grip to twist toward him. “Listen to me. The link, it
can
be broken. It is already.
Our
bond—it's stronger. Do you hear me? The ribbon.
Look.
” Isobel swiveled her wrist, waving the sash. “It's here in my hand. Please. All you have to do is take it.”

“Tell me,” Lilith said as she strode toward Varen, her long white train dragging after her. “How do you like
my
new sculpture? My own version of
Death and the Maiden
. I made it for you, you know. Thought it would appeal to your tastes. Those grim sensibilities that first drew you to me.”

Varen neither blinked nor flinched as the demon approached him. And despite Isobel's instructions, her pleas, he didn't look her way, either.

“You're speechless, I see,” Lilith went on, “but I assume you must approve, since you've yet to make a single alteration.”

Isobel frowned, eyes falling to the skeletal hand that wrapped around her wrist, and that no thought of her own could loosen.

Was Lilith just goading them again, or could it be true that Varen was
allowing
this?

If he held the power to set Isobel free with a thought, why wasn't he using it?

For that matter, if he was capable of setting them
both
free with one simple action, as Reynolds had told her, then what was stopping him?

“Varen?” she called to him again, but when he once more failed to meet her gaze, she had no choice but to consider what Lilith had said. How she knew he'd been there the whole time.

Suddenly Isobel wondered if Varen had given her the slip on purpose. Could he have been using her as bait? As a means to lure Lilith into this confrontation?

With new wounds so fresh and deep, and a spirit consumed once more by hatred, would he now trade everything—including her—for a chance to exact revenge?

Though Isobel didn't want to believe the doubts casting thick shadows over her sinking heart, the fact that Varen had yet to acknowledge her in any way only served to stoke the embers of her growing uncertainty.

“Varen, please,” Isobel pleaded. “Just . . . come take the ribbon and it'll be over. She won't be able to touch us ever again.”

“Hear how she
entreats
you,” cooed Lilith as she wound her way around Varen to stand at his back. “How
gratifying
that must be.”

The skeleton statue moved again, and twirling Isobel to face the open grave, it wrenched her arm in its socket. She cried out in pain, her knees buckling. But the statue's sinewy stone arm caught her before she could tip forward into the grave. Pulling her snug once more, the Red Death refroze, holding Isobel's ribbon hand aloft as though they had simply entered a new step in their waltz.

“Come now,” Lilith said, speaking into Varen's ear, eyeing Isobel over his shoulder, “she simply must know what this means to you before I send her off to bed. Think back to
how much
you craved the merest of glances from her in the beginning, how badly you longed for one touch, let alone an outright petition for your love. And you hid it so well from her. From everyone but me, that is. You do remember
why
, don't you?”

As Lilith spoke, Isobel could see the rigidness in Varen's shoulders increase, the dullness in his eyes deepen.