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A tingling dread crept over her as the jabber of the television faded once more into background noise. A split second later, she could feel something rising through the shallow pool of her recent memory, a dark and terrible secret, one that held in it the answer to why they were there.
Isobel wheeled on her brother and reached out to jostle him.
“Danny! Wake u—”
Her hands swept cleanly through him, and she jerked back.
Her brother stirred, though he did not wake, his face scrunching before smoothing out again.
Astral, she thought. She was projecting outside her body—which meant that she wasn’t dreaming after all. This was all real, the room and the brightly lit hall and Danny and the TV.
Someone new entered the room. A woman, dressed all in blue, like the man Isobel had seen in the hall.
“Danny?” she called out to Isobel’s brother.
He opened his eyes with a start and focused on the woman, who moved quickly toward them.
The nurse’s young face, already strained with concern, tightened as she opened her mouth to speak again. She drew nearer, passing straight through Isobel without even blinking.
“Danny, you need to come with me right now, okay?”
“Why?” Danny asked, his voice raspy from sleep. “What’s happening? Did the cops find the guy who brought my sister here?”
Isobel glanced back at the nurse, anxious for her answer. It was now clear that the reason they were there revolved around Isobel. Someone had brought her here. Which could only mean . . .
“Listen,” the nurse said, “you need to come with me right now. Your parents need you with them.”
“What is it?” Danny demanded, and stood, letting the headphones and iPod drop out of his lap and onto the floor. “What’s wrong? What’s happening with my sister?”
“They’re taking her to the ICU. Your mom and dad are wait—”
Danny’s face crumpled. “No, they’re not taking her there!” he shouted. “She was fine. I just saw her and she was fine!”
“Danny—”
The nurse reached for him, but he jerked his arm away and skittered around her, running past Isobel and through the open doorway.
Hurrying after, the nurse continued to call out to him.
Isobel began to follow but stopped suddenly when a glimmer of light erupted in the space right in front of her, like the glint of a shining object. It drew her attention downward. There, extending outward from her center, she saw it—the silver cord. It wavered, fluttering in and out of existence, as though struggling to remain intact.
When it glimmered into sight again, visible for longer than an instant, Isobel reached out and touched her fingertips to the ethereal strand. Suddenly, in a whir of movement and a haze of images, she was somewhere else—another room in the hospital. One filled with doctors and harried nurses, all of them wearing clean blue medical masks.
They stood gathered around a long table. Whoever was lying on the cold metal surface, Isobel could see only her bare feet, which poked out from the huddle of medical personnel.
“Clear!” she heard someone shout, followed by a harsh slamming sound.
The light inside the room grew instantly brighter around her. Intense enough to smudge away the walls and the cabinets and the swinging doors that flapped like shutters in the wind as nurses came and went. Clean and white, blindingly bright, it erased everything but those two limp feet, the table, and those who stood closest to it.
Already knowing what she would find—who she would find—in the center of their frenzy, Isobel slowly rounded the table. All the while, the nurses and doctors remained oblivious to her dual presence, taking turns applying instruments, their frantic movements reminding her of swarming ants.
Peering between the shoulders of two of the medical personnel, Isobel did not think the battered and bruised girl on the table looked much like her. And yet she knew by the thin scratch on her cheek that it could be no one else.
Isobel lifted a hand to her face but felt no trace of the scratch. Yet she remembered in an instant how it had gotten there.
Pinfeathers . . .
The Noc’s image was the first to spring forth from behind the previously locked door. Then came the memory of the rose garden and the chaos that had transpired there. From there, her thoughts reeled backward in fast rewind, and she recalled being in the graveyard where Poe was buried, and that that place had been the reason she’d come here, to Baltimore.
