Келли Криг - Nevermore

He watched her, and in return, Isobel studied the portion of his face she could see, just that strip of skin around the eyes. They were young eyes. Misleadingly young, she thought. Who knew how old this guy really was? Older than Christmas, probably, especially since he seemed to have the moral code of an Aztec priest on sacrifice duty. She looked down at her hands in her lap again. She shrugged, doing her best to pretend that it didn’t bother her. “You could have told me, you know,” she said. “I—I still would have . . . If—if that was the only way to—to save him.”

She waited for him to say something. To tell her that he hadn’t really believed she’d die. Instead he said, “I . . . am not sorry that you survived.”

She laughed, but the sound came out hollow. It was funny, because she could tell he’d meant it. And saying so was probably a lot coming from him. She swallowed with difficulty. In truth, the realization that he’d sent her off to become barbecue without so much as a heads-up was not something that sat well with her. Still, he’d come for her after it was all over. He’d helped Varen return. And he’d brought her home, too. He’d cared that much at least, right? “What are you, anyway?” she asked. She thought she might as well, as long as they were being blunt.

“It makes no difference.”

“Lilith said you were a Lost Soul.”

“I suppose that is one way to view my existence,” he replied.

“Is that what would have happened to Varen? If I hadn’t . . . ?”

“Possibly,” he said. Then he glanced away, amending his answer by adding softly, “Yes. At least . . . eventually.”

She tilted her head toward him. In that moment, he had sounded so terribly sad that she couldn’t help herself from asking her next question. “What does it mean to be a Lost Soul?”

Perhaps it had been the note of sympathy in her voice that he’d found so deplorable, or maybe it had simply been the underlying shift in focus from Varen to him. Whatever the case, she had apparently overstepped her bounds by asking. He turned toward her suddenly, his tone sharpening once more. “Isobel, after tonight, you will not see me again.”

Her mouth clamped shut. She knew that this was his way of snapping the shutters closed on that particular topic and all others. But she had too many questions left to stop now. She blinked up at him. “Where will you go?”

“I will return and continue my vigil, as promised.”

She smiled at him sadly. “The party never stops for you, does it?”

She’d meant it as a joke, but he didn’t laugh. Instead, he pivoted on his heel and took his first step down from her porch, the hem of his cloak brushing the weathered wood.

“Wait!” she called after him, rising. For a moment, she wobbled on her feet and her vision swam. She staggered forward and, not trusting her knees to support her, gripped the beam he’d held only a few moments before. “There’s one last thing, please. It’s about Varen.”

She had expected him to keep moving, maybe even to vanish into thin air before her very eyes. But he stopped. Maybe he had heard her stumble? Whatever the reason, he still did not look back at her, only turned his head ever so slightly in her direction, a gesture that seemed to say that even though he was willing to listen, willing to humor her one last time, he still, as always, retained that infuriating right to answer her with silence.

“Yesterday,” she began, speaking to his back, hurrying as though there was some element of him that was part hourglass. “Before this all started, I saw him. I hadn’t seen him all morning. I don’t think anyone had. But he came to Mr. Swanson’s class to do the project. Then, after class, he disappeared. Later, I found out he’d been at the bookstore the whole time, asleep. Then, when I saw him late last night, his face . . . He looked different, but . . . I don’t understand.” She shook her head. There were too many details to fit them all into a single coherent question. She tried anyway. “How . . . how could he have been in two places at once?”

To her great shock, Reynolds swiveled abruptly to regard her, something about her words having piqued his interest. “You say he’d been asleep?”

“Yeah. That’s . . . what Bruce said.” She looked at him curiously.

“You’re sure you saw him?”

“Yeah,” she said, confused by the question. “Everyone did.”

He drew rigid at this response, his black eyes actually widening. Until that moment, Isobel would not have thought “surprise” belonged to Reynolds’s limited gray-scale palate of conveyable emotions.

“What?” she said.

He stood and watched her very closely now, so closely that she would have given anything at that moment to have been able to read the thoughts streaming through his head.

“Perhaps this is a question better suited for its subject,” he answered.

Bam. She could almost hear the door of conversation slamming shut in her face.

“But . . .”

“I must leave you now,” he said.

Of course you must , she thought bitterly. She crossed her arms, her gaze dropping to her ragged shoes, the same ones she had flung at him earlier that night. In that moment, she was half tempted to find something else to throw at him. Preferably something heavier and more solid, like one of her mother’s garden gnomes. Fine, then , she thought. She would ask Varen when she saw him.

“Isobel?”

“What?” she snapped, not bothering to look at him. He could make her so mad sometimes. Even now, after everything, after he’d saved her, after he’d brought her home, after he’d rescued Varen.

“It is best for all if you remember what I’ve said tonight,” he told her. She just shrugged at this, glancing down at one hand, turning it over in the dim light to frown at the dirt caked beneath her fingernails. “And know that if for any reason it should occur to you to seek me again, I will not be found.”

At this, she scowled and kicked at the support beam with one foot. Eyes rolling, she said, “Like I would even think about calling you to hang out, Ren. You have the social grace of an undertaker.”

The porch light flipped on, and, squinting, she looked up.

Danny stuck his head out the back door. “Who are you talking to?”

Isobel glanced at the place where Reynolds had stood. He was gone. She looked toward the corner of the house, almost expecting to see the furl of his cloak disappear around the edge.

There was no sign of him, though, and it was hard to say how she felt about him being gone from her life for good. Annoyed mostly, she thought.

“What the hell happened to you?” Danny asked. “You lose a fight with a Weedwacker?” Her little brother stared at her with eyes round as manholes. “Mom and Dad are out looking for you, you know,” he said.

Her stomach dropped at these words, and she turned to gape at her brother as he said, “You’re in a crap load of trouble.”

It was Gwen who had called Isobel’s house. When neither she nor Mikey had been able to find her, they’d used Isobel’s cell, which Gwen had found in her gym bag.

At the mention of the fight that had broken out, her dad had phoned the police. Then he and her mom had gotten into the car and started for Henry County. They’d left Danny behind to wait in case Isobel showed up at home. When she did, Danny recounted the drama, and Isobel reluctantly forced herself to dial her father’s cell.

There had been lots of yelling, and in the background, Isobel could hear her mother sobbing with relief.

When she hung up, Isobel felt exhausted to the point of passing out. Still, she managed to fumble through a shower and change her clothes before her parents got back. She put on jeans and long sleeves to hide the bruises and cuts, and stuffed what was left of the pink dress into the bottom drawer of her dresser. Then she folded Varen’s jacket and hid it away within the deepest recesses of her closet, where it would wait until she could return it to him.