Nevermore

“Tell me what’s happening,” she pleaded.

He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“Stop saying that.” She gripped his jacket, her fingers clutching. “You asked me to come, remember?”

“That was a mistake.”

She wanted to shake him, to wake him up, to make him answer her.

“Varen, none of this makes any sense, and then you say something like that! Your letter—why did . . . I don’t understand anything that’s happening, and it’s happening to me, too! Tell me right now what happened to your face. Brad said—but then I saw you . . .” She shook her head, trying to sort out her thoughts, her memory. Did anything fit together? Which confusion should she start with first? “One minute you were there, the next you were gone. I looked for you but you’d disappeared, just like a ghost! And now you’re here and you won’t tell me. Why? What are those things? Why are they following me? Why did they attack Nikki and Brad? Where did they come from? What do they want?”

“They want the same thing I want!” he shouted suddenly, yanking away from her. He grabbed the mask off the desk and threw it against one wall. It shattered, shards of porcelain spraying the floor.

Hands quivering, she reached toward him.

“Don’t.” He turned his back to her, facing the door.

That word had stopped her once before. But not now. Not now that she had glimpsed through the funeral front of Varen’s own eternal Grim Facade. Despite all the dark armor, the kohl liner, the black boots and chains, she saw him clearly now. She’d peered through the curtain of that cruel calmness, through the death stare and the vampire sentiments and angst and, behind it all, had found true beauty. She looped her arms around his waist, burying her face against his jacket, against the silhouette of the dead bird. “Please tell me!”

He spun in her grip and pressed his lips to her ear, whispering. “I didn’t know it would happen like this,” he said. “I only wanted to escape. I don’t know if you can understand that.

That I only wanted to find a way to somewhere else. Even if it only lasted a little while—even if it wasn’t real. But then it was real. It was real and I couldn’t stop it.”

“What? Stop what?”

“Then I met you,” he said, his lips hovering close to hers once again. “And the dreams changed.”

His breath washed warm against her, and it made her want to surrender to him again, to feel his touch, to hold his kiss, at once petal soft and incinerating. She’d never been kissed like that before—like the shell of her soul had evaporated.

He inched closer, but paused. Outside, the music, the screaming, the voices, the sounds of the frenzied crowd—it all stopped. Silence pulsed. He pulled back, turned to look toward the door.

The room grew cold. Isobel drew in a breath. She hugged herself, shivering as she recalled the night at the ice cream shop, the time they’d spent in the freezer. It felt so long ago.

Seconds passed.

Against the walls, the dull yellow light began to move and sway. The motion threw their twin shadows this way and that against the walls and floor, making the room seem suddenly more crowded. Varen looked up, and her own gaze followed. They watched the naked bulb swing on its frayed cord, as though caught by the gust of a nonexistent breeze. Back and forth it swung, like the pendulum of a clock.

The light blinked, flickered. Darkness teased, threatening to strike.

Hoarse whispers rose up from just outside the door, a sound like dry leaves crackling over a fire.

At first they started low. So low that Isobel couldn’t be certain of what the sound was or that she was even hearing it at all. But then the voices became clearer, hissing through the crack at the bottom of the door. Something laughed. A fast shadow moved, darting like an animal.

Isobel gripped his sleeve. “What is it?”

He moved cautiously forward, positioning himself in front of her. “They’ve found us.”

39

Much of Madness

The doorknob rattled.

Isobel watched as the chair holding the door shivered and shook. Something banged into it hard, jarring the door in its frame, and she jumped, letting out a yelp.

All at once the whispers died. The door settled.

A small light, white and crystalline, like the light she had seen in the woodlands, appeared in a wink at the bottom. It traveled along the crack slowly, back and forth, as though probing for a way in. There was a sound on the other side, like the slip of gauze fabric over the wooden exterior of the door, and Isobel found herself fighting the urge to scream. Then the white light blinked out.