Kelly Creagh - Nevermore

Blood oozed from the embedded glass in her shoulder, and she reached up to yank the splintered shard out. She hardly felt the pain, only the blood as it trickled warm down her shoulder to stain the neckline of her dress. She was angry enough to throttle him. Yet at the same time, she could have just as easily rushed him, thrown her arms around him, and buried her face in his cloak. Somehow, though, she figured Reynolds probably wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and if you’d asked him beforehand to fill in an option bubble on the questionnaire, she thought he’d probably have opted for the shoes anyway.

“Don’t you look at me like that!” she snarled, her teeth chattering. The quaver in her voice betrayed her emotion.

He continued to stare as Isobel struggled unsteadily to her feet. Her knees wobbled.

“This is all your fault!” she shouted. “None of this started happening until you showed up! I don’t even know who you are! I don’t even know what you are!”

“Lower your voice.”

“No! I’m not going to lower my voice!” Isobel yelled, incensed. What gave him the right to talk to her like she was a child? “You say you’re helping me, but then you just disappear. You show up just to freak me out, and then, when I need you the most, you aren’t anywhere, while those other things are everywhere!”

“Isobel—”

“So far I’ve been jerked around, thrown through a window, molested by a monster, and now practically abducted! What do you want from me? Why won’t you or anybody else tell me what’s happening? Why can’t I tell what’s real and what’s not anymore? Why am I inside this nightmare story?”

“There is no time for this. You should not even be here.”

“That’s it! The next person who tells me I shouldn’t be where I am gets decked! I know I shouldn’t be here, but I am, and as far as I can tell it’s because you—”

“It is because of the boy and his utter carelessness,” Reynolds corrected, and with such sudden ferocity that it made her swallow against the anger boiling inside her.

“Where is he?” she asked, quieter now.

“With her,” he whispered, as though pronouncing a death sentence.

“Who?” She remembered Varen’s earlier mention of a “she.” And then those hands that had dragged him into the darkness. She thought about the white light from the woodlands and the figure reflected in the clock pendulum with those black-socket eyes.

“I have no time. You must return to your world immediately. You must seal the link that has been made, because I cannot. Otherwise, your entire world will be forfeited to this one. Come. We must make our way to the woodlands. Hurry.”

He held a gloved hand out to her, just as he had done that first night he’d brought her to the Woodlands of Weir.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

He studied her with those dark eyes, as though trying to gauge the level of her seriousness.

“You refuse?”

“Do you think I would leave him here?”

He stepped toward her, and she had to resist the urge to shrink back. “Isobel, there are countless realities at stake. There are entire existences. You have no idea of the scope. And believe me when I say that whatever in your world does not die from such a merge will surely wish it had. You would sacrifice everything for the sake of one who is already lost? Think of your home. Your family.”

As she weighed his words, doubt crept over her resolve. Was he telling the truth? What reason did he have to lie? Then again, what reason did he have not to? When it came down to it, what did she know about him or any of his reasons except that, as far as she had seen, those reasons had always been his own?

Well, two could play at that game. “Tell me how to find him first. Help me and I’ll do what you want.”

He spoke fast, his words heated. “Do you not see what has become of him? He is no longer part of your world.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It is true enough,” he said. His coldness cut her like a blade of jagged ice. “And if you do not follow me now, it will be too late for you, and all for whom you care.”

“Are you Poe?” She surprised herself with the question.

“Edgar is dead. He is the fortunate one.”

“Then you knew him,” Isobel said with authority, sure of the truth behind that statement as soon as she spoke it aloud. There had already been too much evidence. Too much proof. “That’s why you’re here now, isn’t it? This all happened before, didn’t it? To him? To Edgar.”

“The past, too, is dead.”

Isobel stared at him in disbelief. They continued to stand opposite each other, neither of them moving while an invisible force seemed to pulse between them—an intangible sensation like the push of opposing magnets.

“Fine,” she said at last.

He whirled and strode into the passageway on the right again. Clearly he expected her to follow.

Isobel did not move.

“I don’t need you,” she called after him. He stopped again. She spun away from him and stooped to gather her shoes. “I don’t need your secrets.” She slipped on the once pink flats, now caked in grit.

“I’ll find him myself.” She rose, smoothing back a straggling strand of hair from her eyes, and turned toward the passageway on her left.

“Stop,” he commanded.

She ignored him and kept walking, certain that before her lay new chambers. New nightmares.

“He wouldn’t leave me behind,” she called.

“You are so certain?”

“Yes. Because just like you, he’s not everything he pretends to be,” she said. “And even though you’re saying this now . . . you still didn’t leave Edgar, did you? You helped him get back, didn’t you? So don’t tell me there’s no way!”

“Isobel.” His voice, a whisper, came sharp now. Wounded.

Her stab in the dark had done more than just graze the truth. It had found the very marrow . . . good enough at least to strike a deeper chord in the monotonous dirge that was Reynolds.

She would leave him with that.

She kept her steps steady into the darkness and the dampness. Ahead, through the webwork of shadows, she saw that the passageway turned sharply. Around that corner, she knew she would find herself utterly alone.

“Isobel,” he hissed after her. “If you turn your back on me, you leave me with no choice but to turn my own on you. Continue and we are as good as adversaries.”

“Then at least now I know.”

Determined, she took the turn sharply without so much as a backward glance. Another damp stone corridor stretched before her.

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Her footsteps were her only company now. Even the voices behind the walls had ceased. She did not expect Reynolds to follow. She knew enough about him now to understand that he meant what he said. He had his own agenda. His own ghosts to chase.

Just as there was no way to know what lay ahead, there was no way to know how much time she had left. It was safe to say that midnight was close, though.

But maybe—just maybe, she thought as she rounded the next corner, where ahead she could make out a dim aura of deep purple light—she was closer.

Isobel came to the place where the next torch stood. Here the dank passageway smelled of kerosene and must. Orange flames cast their glow over a deep purple stained-glass window set into the stone wall, and she knew that beyond it lay the purple chamber of Poe’s story.

There was no hidden door or secret nook leading in as with the green chamber, however. At least none that she could find in the wall or on the floor.

Stepping around the torch, Isobel sidled up to the narrow window and pressed her hands flat against the stone wall beside it. She passed her fingers over the grooves and mortar, feeling for some clue to a way in. She leaned her shoulder to the wall and strained to hear either voice or movement. The heat from the fire, warming her face and arms, threw her shadow onto the wall beside her. She heard nothing at first, but soon she sensed a fluttering from within.