“You know I cannot be destroyed,” Lilith called to him. “I am destruction. And as I am, so now are you. You will be the cause of her death.”
“If the bond can’t be broken,” Isobel countered, her words fast and low, “then why try to barter with my life? Varen, if she could kill me herself, she’d do it. She’s been trying this whole time. From that day we met for the project at the library, when I first read about her in your sketchbook. Ever since you started seeing me in your dreams. But she can’t. Not on her own. For some reason, she can’t. That’s why she sent the Nocs after me. That’s why she—”
“The tie that binds us is indissoluble,” Lilith said, louder now. “You belong to me. At least”—she paused, her smile growing wide—“until death do us part.”
Varen glanced over his shoulder at Isobel, and in that jade eye, she could read what he was thinking, what he was considering, and she knew it was exactly what the demon wanted.
“It isn’t true,” Isobel blurted, speaking faster, her own voice rising in volume. “Nothing she says is true. Varen, you know that.”
“How else can it end?” he asked her, sorrow sweeping his grime-smeared face.
“Not like this,” Isobel said, taking his hand in hers. “Not here.”
With that, she whirled and began to run, hurrying toward the gilded archway through which she could see another chamber of Varen’s palace—a grand foyer filled with standing candelabras, their milky tapers lit with violet flames. More candles lined the steps of the curving marble staircase within, one that wound up to an unseen floor.
“Ask yourself,” Isobel heard Lilith bellow after them, her voice echoing down the corridor, “where can you go that you will not bring me?”
Isobel felt Varen’s hand twitch in hers, his hold loosening. She tightened her grip as, together, the two of them shot through the doorway and into the foyer, which presented them with not just one route, but many. Too many.
Multitudes of elaborate, sprawling staircases split off in every direction. They led up and down, overlapping, endless flights of steps crisscrossing and intertwining up and away into infinity.
But stairs weren’t what they needed. What they needed was a way out. A link back to reality.
A door.
What had Reynolds once told her?
Make a door, he’d said. When there is no way, you must make a way.
Isobel conjured an image of her bedroom door in her mind—an entry point she knew would work because it had before in the woodlands with Reynolds, and again earlier with Scrimshaw.
At her beckoning, Isobel’s doorknob materialized in her grip.
Twisting the knob, she shoved, rushing through the opening and pulling Varen after her.
Her feet met with carpet. She saw her bed with its cubbyhole headboard, her ransacked dresser and messy closet.
Once inside with Varen, she released his hand and sent the door slamming shut with a bang, blocking out the grand stairwell, the armies of flickering candles, and that horrid image of Lilith standing in the gold-framed archway.
Backpedaling into the foot of her bed, Isobel frowned at the quiet that seemed somehow too intense.
Something was wrong. She felt it as a buzz—an electric charge infusing the air.
Turning, Isobel scanned the pink walls, eyes flying around her room.
Everything appeared just as she’d left it. Normal. Unreversed.
And yet, when she’d made the door just now, when she’d opened it, she had not found her things floating in midair. Instead her belongings lay strewn about, scattered across the floor where they must have fallen before, when she’d left Danny in the hallway of the real world. When she’d entered the castle turret with its spiral staircase.
It didn’t make sense. Before, when a portal opened between the worlds, objects always rose.
Isobel glanced at Varen to see him staring, transfixed, into her mirror. Reflected in the glass, through the dark square of her bedroom window, beyond her white curtains and the fizzing screen of silent static were . . . the Woodlands of Weir.
Impossible. They’d crossed into reality. Hadn’t they?
Isobel swung to face her bedroom clock. It read 6:17 in brilliant blue numbers that scrambled, then steadied.
No, she thought.
Returning to the door, she ripped it open to see the gold-framed archway, the foyer, and the candles all still there, the scene missing only the veil-draped, ink-smeared figure of Lilith.
Suddenly Varen was at Isobel’s side. Again he took her hand.
“This way,” he said, pulling her back into the foyer. Isobel followed, grateful to know that he, at least, had an idea of somewhere they could go.