The pounding ceased. The knob rattled, the door clattering in its frame.
Quiet buzzed again then, so that the soft scrape of metal on metal—the key rotating in its padlock—filled the room.
Then it, too, stopped.
Isobel heard Varen draw a breath. Felt him tense. A beat passed.
Wham!
Something enormous struck the door—hard enough to cause the wood to crack.
Isobel stood. Positioning herself in front of Varen, she opened her arms to shield him as he had shielded her the night of the Grim Facade, when he’d pulled her into the warehouse’s cramped office. When whispering shadows had danced under the door.
Wham!
“Go away!” she screeched.
A third bang sent the door flinging wide.
But . . . there was nothing. No one.
Isobel glanced back to Varen, who stared past her, his gaze fixed on the empty door frame as if the horror he’d been expecting might still emerge from its dark perimeter.
“There’s nothing,” she whispered, returning to his side. “It’s over. Please. We need to go. I can take us, but we have to—”
“You were never supposed to see,” he muttered in a monotone, his eyes glazing over as they remained on the doorway.
Isobel clamped her mouth shut. Though she assumed he meant the original encounter with his father, the flesh-and-blood version of this incident, a part of her wondered if he could simply mean everything. All his inner terrors that had been exposed to her. All his darkest thoughts revealed. His secret fears brought to life.
His deepest desires personified . . .
“You ruined everything,” Varen said. “You know that, don’t you? I was going to fade out. Disappear. I wanted this. . . .”
Keeping quiet, Isobel glanced down at her hands knotted in her lap.
“Then our names got called together,” Varen continued, “and from that point on, we were both doomed. Because being with you made me start to want something else—to buy into the hope that I could actually have it. You. I couldn’t seem to get you out of my head. And by then, that was a dangerous place to be.”
Isobel shifted toward him. “Here I am,” she said. “I’m here. Aren’t I? Aren’t you?”
Rolling his head against the wall to look at her, he sent her the barest of smiles. But it did not reach his eyes.
“Why are you here?” he said. “You have to know I can’t go with you.”
Isobel’s heart contracted, pain squeezing her gut. Now that she’d finally found him, now that she’d broken through, he was only confirming her greatest new fear. His voice seemed so certain, too. So resigned. And yet . . .
“You can’t?” she pressed. “Or won’t.”
“Wherever you came from,” he said, his focus returning to that open door, “you should go back. Before she comes.”
Though his words confused her, they angered her even more. Isobel clenched her fists, imagining the door slamming shut. When it fell closed with a slam, she knew Varen would not try to fight her anymore, to block the dreams she imposed over his.
“You know where I came from,” she said. “And I know about the bond. But I also know that there has to be a way to break it. And if you believe I’m me . . . that, despite everything, I came here to find you . . . then you also have to believe that we can break it. We’ll make a way. Together. Do you hear me?”
Isobel’s frown deepened when he said nothing. But she’d come too far to allow him to persuade her this was hopeless. That he was hopeless.
Concentrating, Isobel pictured the room righting itself. She felt the floor seesaw back into place, leveling out beneath them.
Next, she evaporated the layers of dust. The sheets tore themselves free like magicians’ cloths and then vanished, taking the furniture with them. The writing on the walls faded out, and the boxes evaporated.
Taking care to restore Varen’s bedroom to the way she remembered it, she filled in as many details as she could recall.
Varen’s black-and-white Vincent Price poster unrolled on one wall. His narrow single bed emerged from another, sliding them both forward on the small throw rug that materialized beneath them.
Books flipped from the floor onto his shelves, while the collection of toppled bottles righted themselves in the fireplace. Isobel imagined their study materials laid out around them.
Last of all, as she unfolded her legs in front of her, she conjured Varen’s copy of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. The book appeared between her hands—open—its pages blank as she tried to recall the poem Varen had been reading to her before his father had torn into the room, interrupting the one moment that might have changed everything.