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Isobel turned her head to look back at the shattered form of Scrimshaw, knowing at once whose portrait she had seen carved into his chest. It had been Virginia, Poe’s young bride. His Lenore.
Like Scrimshaw with the tiny etching just over his heart, Pinfeathers had carried her close too. Hidden within.
And just as Pinfeathers had changed, so had Varen.
It was the only thing that made sense. It was the only explanation for why Varen wasn’t here now. Why Pinfeathers had been waiting in his stead.
The shift she had feared had happened. Her dream of Varen in the bookstore attic had been no dream.
She felt something warm slide down her cheek.
Frowning, Isobel lifted one dust-caked hand and pressed her fingers to the place where Pinfeathers had touched her a moment before.
She lowered her hand and saw a smear of crimson.
Blood.
32
Melancholy House
With a careful hand, Isobel wound the satin ribbon slowly around one trembling wrist.
Its softness helped to calm her, if only for a moment.
She avoided looking down as she moved forward through the wreckage, the bits and pieces, the empty limbs strewn across the floor. Making her way to the wall of flowers, she did her best to block out the sound of shards popping and crunching beneath the soles of her boots.
She stopped at a section of interlacing iron and vines uninterrupted by any archway. Reaching out, she clasped the empty air next to one of the iron bars, and as she did so, a matching ornate door handle materialized in her fist.
Isobel twisted the handle and the door swung outward.
As she’d suspected, the world outside the rose garden held the muted and gray landscape of the woodlands.
Trees, black and dead, stood innumerable before a glowing violet horizon. Leaden and tattered, the clouds hung low in the slate-colored sky, while the interlocking boughs of the trees created a webwork of shadow patterns over the ash-coated ground.
Within the dense forest, Isobel could discern two rows of old-fashioned lampposts, their glass holders lit with violet flames.
She stepped out of the garden, drawn by the flickering of their otherworldly light, her boots sinking into the spongy ash.
On either side of her, through the network of trees, she could also see a line of familiar houses, though their structures were far less recognizable now.
The foundations beneath supported mere frames, the facades themselves in crumbling ruin. Doors and windows lacked panes and wood, giving the homes the appearance of blackened skulls, their vacant entrances like slack-jawed mouths gaping in shock.
With the fountain at her back, Isobel did not have to guess to know where she was.
It made sense.
Like the bookshop, Varen’s neighborhood had a mirror-image dreamworld counterpart.
A twilight version of reality, she thought, remembering the words Gwen had read aloud from the book describing Lilith’s domain.
That was why she had found Pinfeathers at the fountain on the morning she’d ridden Danny’s bike here—to the real here. Like the Noc had said, he’d been waiting for her all along.
And Pinfeathers . . . in the moment before he’d shattered apart, hadn’t he told her that Varen was “home”?
Isobel glanced in the direction of Varen’s house. Through the thick cluster of trees, she could determine only the vague outlines of the homes farther down the street.
She moved onward, trying to ignore the sharp sting of the scratch that marred her cheek.
