Reynolds’s voice, deep and gruff, came from the empty space directly behind her.
The shadows shifted to her left, and fighting the urge to dart, Isobel forced herself to stand her ground as his hawkish profile entered her periphery.
“I thought for certain you would forget him,” he said, and Isobel knew he was talking about Varen.
“Yeah,” Isobel said, “and I didn’t expect you to be a liar, a murderer, and an evil henchman. I’d say in terms of trumping first impressions, you’ve got me beat.”
“You have mistaken me,” Reynolds said, “and I freely admit that I have mistaken you.”
“You sent me to die,” she said. “The only mistake I might have made was agreeing to listen to anything else you have to say.”
“The fate I lured you to was one I thought would befall you regardless,” he said. “And because of your willingness to do as I instructed, your world, unlike my own, remains intact. Forgive me if I chose to cut your losses for you.”
Isobel folded her arms. “Yeah, you’re good at doing that for other people, aren’t you?”
He stayed silent, and lifting her chin an inch, Isobel awarded herself a secret victory check mark. But her smugness didn’t last.
“You have already proven you would die for the boy by doing it,” Reynolds snapped. “Now, you will listen to what I have come to tell you or you won’t, but decide. Our time wanes.”
Isobel blinked, startled less by this rare outburst than by what his words revealed.
There was only one way for Reynolds to know that she had actually died.
After waking in the hospital in Baltimore, she’d been questioned by the police about the stranger who had brought her to the ER and then disappeared moments after the medical staff took over. The conflicting reports and scrambled security footage had failed to offer any leads, however.
Though Isobel had not lied when she’d told the officers and her parents that she didn’t know who the man had been, she’d kept her suspicions to herself along with everything else. In a practical way, it made sense that Reynolds had been the one to return her to reality. After all, he had displayed the ability to pass from one world to the other at will. But given all that Isobel had discovered about Reynolds’s true moral code—or lack thereof—she couldn’t figure out the deeper reason he’d bothered to rescue her once again.
That reason, she knew, would have everything to do with why he was here now.
Looking down, she focused on Reynolds’s dust-encrusted boots. However he’d gotten here, it hadn’t been without a struggle.
“The blending of the worlds,” Isobel whispered. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
“Do you remember what transpired here, in this room?” Reynolds asked, ignoring the question, his eyes searching the gloom. “The day you fell in front of that crowd.”
“I didn’t fall,” she corrected him. “I was pulled.”
He was referring to the Halloween day pep rally. After she had climbed to the top of her squad’s pyramid, one of the Nocs had yanked her base Nikki’s wrist, causing Isobel to plummet straight to the floor. Just before she’d hit, though, she’d entered a twilight consciousness. The people around her became fuzzy silhouettes, and the world a blur of muddled shapes, muffled noise, and static. While she’d been in that between state, caught halfway in the dreamworld and halfway in reality, the Nocs had attacked her, attempting to draw her spirit out of her body and into the woodlands. Reynolds had appeared from nowhere to come to her defense.
“You fell regardless,” Reynolds replied. “And then you entered the veil. I asked if you remembered.”
“And I asked you what the hell you wanted,” Isobel said, her anger flaring anew. He needed to get it straight right now that she wasn’t interested in being his puppet anymore.
“He thinks you’re dead.” Reynolds locked gazes with her. “The boy. He thinks he killed you.”
Isobel’s lips parted in shock. Of all the things she’d expected Reynolds to say, this was not on the list. Her mouth went dry, and trapped again by those two black, coin-size holes, she found herself unable to look away or reply.
He was lying. He had to be. Varen had sought her out in last night’s dream. He’d zeroed in on her. He’d made his intentions clear.
They were enemies now.
“Your disbelief is a factor I have already accounted for,” Reynolds said, interrupting her thoughts. “That is why I risked crossing you through the veil while you slept. So you could witness the truth for yourself.”