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The only way of closing the link.
Soon, she was sure, Varen would return, stronger and more malevolent than before—bent on wreaking the havoc that would bring his darkest imaginings to life. Because even if there was a small part of him that did suspect she could be real, there was an even stronger part that had lost the capacity to trust in anything other than the nothing he’d come to know so well.
The nightmare. How would it ever end if she could not reach him?
How, when she had already gone to every length, faced each monster, risking all in the process?
His darkness remained—impenetrable. And it would stay that way as long as he refused to believe her.
To believe in her.
In himself.
The thought floated up through the mire of her anguish in a whisper. As her eyes traced the open sky, she knew it was true. Reynolds had been wrong to suggest that Isobel could dispel the darkness, could stop the worst from happening, by proving herself to Varen.
That power, in the end, lay with Varen alone.
Then again, at this point, maybe Reynolds—wherever he was—would see his mistake.
She doubted she would ever find out. He wasn’t coming for her. That much was obvious. If her name had still been penciled in his murky agenda, he would have found her by now, before Varen had.
Soon, though, it wouldn’t matter even if Reynolds did appear. The two worlds were already blending, merging as they had Halloween night. It was the reason Varen could no longer tell the difference. And why the hands of her butterfly watch had spun out of control. They would do so wherever he went. So long as he remained the link.
Varen must have discovered the trinket in the rose garden. After the cliff.
And he’d kept it with him. She’d seen him fiddling with it in the courtyard of statues, she realized. What had he been thinking as he held it?
Tasting ash, smelling the sharp scent of ozone, Isobel clutched at her collar. She wrapped the hamsa in one fist. The pendant could not instill her with the same strength it had that morning, though.
Muscles aching, she managed to climb onto unsteady feet and survey the damage.
Dust covered all.
Though the charcoal trees had disappeared with the storm, the buckles, rents, and pockmarks they’d made in the pavement remained.
Looking down, Isobel found herself standing in the center of a scorch mark not dissimilar to the one in the attic of the bookshop, where she’d burned Varen’s sketchbook.
The shrieking sirens grew louder.
Backpedaling from the charred starburst, Isobel began to weave her way through the maze of stalled and abandoned cars.
Then she paused, turning slowly in place—because no matter which way she faced, she could not see where the blanket of ash ended, or where the preexisting trees had not twisted and gone black.
Whirling, she started running in the direction of Cherokee Park, toward the path that would take her to the home she hoped she still had.
19
Double Exposure
Only when Isobel arrived at the next bus stop, her stop, did the field of damage caused by Varen’s storm reach its end.
Car horns honked as drivers steered slowly past the cop-car barricade blocking the intersection. A police officer directed traffic while pedestrians stopped to gawk at the mess and confusion, holding up camera phones and pointing.
Isobel, trying not to draw attention to herself, slowed to a jog as she hurried over the place where the layer of dust terminated, its blanketing white giving way to the curb and the painted lines of the crosswalk.
Someone shouted at her as her feet found the sidewalk, but she didn’t stop, not until she arrived at the side entrance to the park—the same she’d taken that night after meeting with Varen at Nobit’s Nook.
Until this moment, her plan had been to use the shortcut to get to her house. Now, though, even with the midafternoon sun blazing and the sight of people strolling within, bundled in their coats and scarves and still unaware of the chaos that had rocked the world mere blocks away, something held her at bay. An inkling that warned her against entering.
