Kelly Creagh - Nevermore

“What—what are you talking about?”

“Did your masked guardian fail to mention your own fate? I am not surprised. I suspect he is selective in what he chooses to share with you. It would be an inconvenience for him, I think, if you were able to make too many decisions of your own. But it doesn’t have to end this way. It appears to me that we have been pitted against each other by men. Why? When we both have something the other wants.”

“I’m not giving you this book,” she said. Her footsteps took her backward until her heels found the edge of the top stair.

Lilith laughed, a soft and almost melodious sound, haunting and even beautiful. “Do you not see that you yourself are now something of far greater value?”

“What?” Isobel blurted, her mind unable to wrap around Lilith’s meaning.

“However unwittingly, you have become a link between realms. Your name in those pages has transformed you, has made you better than a poor lost boy’s sketchbook, for you are not a link to power, but power itself. Together we would have free rein over all, for I know all routes and you, dreamer, hold the ability to traverse them. I would no longer need an ending. Why, when we would live forever? Bound as one with you, I would no longer have any hold over your Varen. He would be released, free to be with you, with us.”

The woman moved toward her, the veil falling away from her face as she drew closer. She was dark beauty perfected, her cheekbones high and regal. Her skin held the sheen of stardust and her hair, dark, massy waves of silk, seemed to float about her like a black halo. It was her eyes, though, almost alien in essence, that held Isobel so completely transfixed. Fringed with dark lashes, twin wells of bottomless ink, they trapped her, and she found herself no longer able to blink. “Take my hand,” she whispered, and raised her white palm once more. “Come with me.”

Isobel felt her hand lift.

The pull of those eyes was magnetic, a force that couldn’t be fought or resisted. She was so beautiful. Isobel paused, her fingers hovering just over the cold set of white ones.

This was how she must have lured Varen.

The thought came to her suddenly, buoying to the surface through a deep and cloudy sea of confusion, doubt, and longing. How easy it must have been for her, she thought. She’d made promises to him just like this. Only she had promised him more. So much more.

Like a serpent, this demon had coiled and nested into those empty and cavernous spaces of his heart. Like a harpy, she had preyed on his absolute aloneness—on his need for a “Lenore.”

You could never be Lenore, Varen had once told her.

In her mind, Isobel imagined the future. A future void of herself. But also void of the creature before her. She pictured Varen safe at home. Sitting at his desk, he filled the pages of a new sketchbook by candlelight. His purple-inked poetry packed the crisp white sheaves of paper, her name printed more than once within those lines of elegant handwriting. In the company of soft, feathery drawings, those lines would be his last farewell to her.

Would he write about her? She liked to think that he would. About how, forevermore, the syllables that made up her name would continue to drift to him on the wings of his dreams—dreams now free of the ghouls and demons that had once haunted and stalked his mind. Finally, in this small way, she would be his Lenore.

She blinked at last. Her fingers twitched and retracted.

This witch had nothing to offer her. She had no spell to cast, not while Isobel knew Varen was safe, in her world. When the link was sealed, it would be that way forever.

Isobel’s gaze fixed directly with Lilith’s. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you three’s a crowd?”

Those black eyes widened in shock.

“It’s too late,” Isobel whispered, “for you to do anything.” She brought both arms tight around the sketchbook. It was still her dream, even if it meant she went with it when it ended. She squeezed her eyes shut tight.

“What are you doing!” shrieked a voice like a screech owl’s.

At first Isobel focused the heat in her chest. Guided by her mind, it traveled into her arms and then burst into flames over the sketchbook.

Someone screamed. Was it her? She opened her eyes. White heat engulfed her, consumed her. She was grateful not to feel the pain. A gift perhaps from her subconscious to her conscious? Like a hallucination, the vision of the white, black-eyed figure dropped away. The lamplight through the windows grew brighter—or was that the reflection from the fire?

She looked down to see fire course the length of her arms. It danced over the sketchbook held close to her, and she watched the edges of the paper curl and turn from orange to brown to black—taking on all the hues of autumn.

Everything died in the fall.

The book in her arms collapsed, tumbling into ash. The fire snuffed into blackness and with it, the world.

She had smelled this smell before. It was that too sweet, deep scent of decay. Dead roses. The aroma of it was so much more potent than she remembered. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too strong in such a concentrated dose. Oppressive.

She tried to turn her head from it but for some reason found little room to move.

She wondered if she was dreaming. Or still dreaming . . .

Or was she dead, locked away forever in a flower-filled casket?

Did the dead dream?

She became aware of a pressure across her shoulders and behind her knees. Pain, too, invited itself into her brain like a bad memory, pervading her entire body.

The next sensation that occurred to her was that of movement. She was moving. Cold air prickled the tiny hairs on her arms. She wanted to open her eyes to see where she was, what it was that transported her, and where she was going, but at the same time, she didn’t. Why, when it would be so much easier to drift away again, to settle back into the cocoon of sleep, that blank place between dreams and reality, where the word “nothing” found its true definition?

She felt the press of something like fabric against her cheek and gathered beneath her curled fingers. Her hair tickled her brow in the wake of another breeze, and through her eyelids, she sensed light.

By now she had surfaced to consciousness enough that it was too late to fall back into the deathlike chasm of rest. Against her will, she became more and more aware of herself, of the seemingly limitless aches in her body, and finally of that steady one-two rhythm of movement beneath her. Her thoughts broke through the muck of oblivion, and she stirred.

She opened her eyes to the sight of a black cloth vest, so close she could count the stitches. A silver chain leading out of a small waistcoat pocket glinted in the light, and Isobel saw that she grasped the loose cloth of what she thought must be someone’s black cloak. That was when she realized that the pressure at her back and behind her knees was the pressure of arms, arms she currently occupied, arms that carried her.

His body felt neither cold nor warm next to hers, solid, but somehow not alive. She listened, but he never breathed. Her gaze trailed up to the chin and nose covered by a blood-marred scarf. She squinted, trying unsuccessfully to peer through the shadow cast over his face by a wide-brimmed hat.

Stars dotted the sky around the edges of him, visible through tangles of knotted limbs that could not have belonged to the same trees as the woodlands. Their leaf-dotted boughs were too peaceful, too normal.

Could it be possible she was back in her own world?

At first she didn’t say anything, because she was too afraid to hope. She wanted to suspend time and just be still for another moment, to let her tired mind and sore muscles rest. The stale, moldering odor that clung to him didn’t bother her as it had before, and against him, she felt almost comfortable. Safe.