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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.
Varen hurried forward to a descending set of steps flanked by two gilt candelabra, their pronged torches held aloft by the arms of two angels bearing Isobel’s features, their sightless eyes wide open.
Rushing past the statues, Varen took the stairs fast, rattling down them with Isobel in tow.
Glancing back at the angels, Isobel saw them turn their heads to watch them go as bleeding slits opened in unison on their cheeks.
Varen swung around the curve of the staircase, then halted, causing Isobel to collide with him.
Below, she saw what had made him stop.
A plain flight of steps descended to a cramped and familiar landing, one encased by tightly set walls.
Dead ahead, dark-paned windows showed Isobel and Varen’s reflections, their images pale and filthy, only just recognizable.
They were at school, at Trenton, in the exact stairwell where Reynolds had first appeared to Isobel that morning. In fact, they stood in the precise spot where he had stood, their forms now as disheveled and ash-dusted as his had been.
Isobel checked over her shoulder and saw only the door leading into the deserted third-floor hallway.
And yet, though the darkened windows reflected her and Varen, the stairway they showed was the grand and Gothic one they’d just left.
Then, through the dim glass, Isobel saw Lilith’s streaked form turn the corner to loom at their backs.
But she knew Lilith couldn’t have a reflection. And suddenly the truth hit her.
The windows, like the mirrors in the hall, were showing what lay on the other side, on the plane parallel to whichever world they currently occupied.
That meant that they really were in school, just as they’d really been in Isobel’s room moments ago. Somehow she and Varen had re-entered reality.
The worlds were blending. The merging that had nearly taken place on Halloween night, the collision Reynolds had warned her about from the beginning—it was happening now.
