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Radiating fury, Varen stalked toward Isobel.
As he moved, the doorway that stood between them expanded, its rectangular arch rounding as it transformed to stone. Then Varen walked right past her, across the wide threshold and into the hall, where his continuing steps triggered more change.
Like a crawling frost, cracked stone spread out from beneath his boots. Plaster and drywall faded into rough gray brick. While the emerging walls of Varen’s palace absorbed the doorways on Isobel’s right, the entries on her left morphed into more Gothic arches, and the passageway before her took the form of a cloister.
Through the open arcade, Isobel saw that Varen had returned them to the courtyard of statues.
Or was it that he’d brought the courtyard of statues to them?
But then, this was not the same courtyard she’d encountered before. Not only were there no angels among the gathering of fog-enveloped white forms—no sets of wings, neither tucked nor unfurled—she saw no faces, either.
None fully decipherable . . .
Draping stone shrouds covered the statues’ heads, spilling long down their feminine bodies in clinging sculpted folds.
Lilith’s laughter echoed all around, trailing off into the eerie garden.
Another trap, Isobel thought. The demon’s final play.
And Varen, with his mind now firmly set on revenge, was about to walk straight into it.
“Varen, wait,” Isobel called after him.
To her surprise—and perhaps to his as well—Varen halted at the corner of the cloister.
“She’s right,” Isobel said.
Varen turned his head slightly toward her. The gesture, though small, suggested that at least he was listening.
Fixing her eyes on that white raven, Isobel held her ribbon—their ribbon—closer.
“Darkness will win,” she said. “It has to. So long as you try to fight fire with fire.”
Half-shielded by his tousled, ashen hair, his eyes flicked in her direction.
“Sometimes,” he said, speaking in that quiet and contained way that always frightened her, “fire is the only way to fight. But then . . . you knew that already.”
With that, Varen rounded the corner, passing out of her sight.
Isobel’s chest contracted with fear.
Fire. Isobel had been referring to Varen’s obvious plan to fight Lilith with anger, to pit his own capacity for darkness against the demon’s.
But the fire he meant was Isobel’s chosen tool to banish him from the strip mall parking lot earlier that day. And to sever the original link—to destroy Varen’s sketchbook.
Now that Varen knew he was the link, would he try something similar?
Immediately Isobel’s thoughts circled back to Varen’s duel with the doppelgänger Noc. To what had been said between the two. They had reached some sort of agreement—or rather, Varen had come to an understanding with himself.
He’d devised a deadly contract.
Then he had tried to soothe Isobel’s fears with a distracting explanation, with a kiss.
Had that kiss been meant as a good-bye?
Panic seized her at that thought, spurring Isobel to charge around the bend after him. But she halted suddenly when she found herself back in Bruce’s house, in that dimly lit hall sandwiched between the stairs and the wall.
All the photos now hung askew, their glass panes cracked and splintered.
