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Her heart rate speeding, Isobel flicked her eyes between the approaching creature and the shifting letters above the tomb.
The name LIGEIA melted away, and bleeding through the stone, new letters emerged to spell ULALUME.
“‘Then my heart it grew ashen and sober,’” hissed the demon, her thin lips blossoming to bloodred fullness, her face and figure regaining their former beauty. “‘As the leaves that were crisped and sere—as the leaves that were withering and sere.’”
Keeping hold of her ribbon, Isobel drew to her feet. She took several retreating steps until her spine collided with one of the statues, leaving her nowhere to go.
The demon drifted nearer still, her radiance blazing to an ultraviolet shine and her skin to an eye-stinging white.
“‘And I cried—“It was surely October on this very night of last year, that I journeyed—I journeyed down here!—that I brought a dread burden down here—on this night of all nights in the year,”’” Lilith continued, reciting lines from one of Poe’s poems. The same poem, Isobel knew, whose title matched the name now written on the demon’s tomb. The poem Scrimshaw had recited to her the first time she’d found herself within the walls of the blue marble crypt.
The same poem Varen had read to Isobel in his room.
It was the one work of Poe’s that mentioned the woodlands by name.
“That poem,” Isobel said. “Poe wrote it trying to seal you back up, didn’t he?”
“And we see how well that worked,” Lilith replied, coming to a stop in front of Isobel. “But while we’re on the subject, and if you don’t mind my asking, would you do me the favor of refreshing my memory?”
Isobel gasped when she felt the statue behind her snatch her wrist, immobilizing the hand that held her pink ribbon. A yelp of shock rose in her throat as bony fingers dug into her flesh, but her cry caught there, dying the moment the effigy swung her around to face it.
In place of another of Lilith’s stone idols, a skeleton leered down at her from within the shadows of a heavy hood.
Behind a sculpted pall of its own, the skull grinned at Isobel and, looping an arm around her waist, jerked her snugly against its robed body. Then, as though they’d been caught in a fervid dance, the statue threw her low into a dip and, holding her there, refroze.
Isobel whimpered in the skeleton’s solidified grip, recognizing all too well where she had seen it before.
This was the Red Death. The same nightmare figure that had collapsed the grave over Isobel when she’d fallen there, trying to rescue Brad.
“I seem to recall you mentioning something earlier about . . . putting me in my place?” Lilith said, her glowing figure sliding into Isobel’s periphery, her serene and lovely face half-obscured by the tails of the ribbon still hanging from Isobel’s clenched fist.
At the rumbling sound of stone grating on stone, Isobel twisted in the skeleton’s hold to peer down over her shoulder.
Beneath her, the long slab bearing her epitaph had slid free, unveiling a pit that reached far into the earth.
Tightly packed walls of red dirt formed a deep grave that terminated in an open pine box.
Isobel ceased her struggle in the skeleton statue’s crushing grip, aware that if it were to let go of her now, she would fall into the tomb’s waiting mouth—straight into that coffin.
But as she forced herself to look into the face of the skull, a new thought hit her, ignited by the changing inscription on the tomb. Lilith had once admitted to having many names.
“Bess,” Isobel hissed between haggard breaths, remembering the name the demon had hidden behind when seeking Varen—when dipping into his dreams and luring him deeper and deeper into this world. Her world. “That’s short for Elizabeth, isn’t it?”
Lilith appeared on Isobel’s other side, where she offered a grin—and a glimpse of razor teeth.
“‘I don’t know what to write,’ scribbled the boy, his thoughts winding around and around, always circling back to the cheerleader who had stolen his heart and replaced the lure of his darkest dreams.” As Lilith spoke, her voice dropped, phasing from a woman’s to that of a beast’s. “‘I can’t think. I can’t think. Isobel. Isobel. Isobel. . . .’”
Isobel winced at hearing the final desperate lines Varen had scrawled into his sketchbook.
He had written those words in place of an ending to the story he’d been crafting at Lilith’s bidding—the story meant to bridge the worlds, to allow Lilith into their reality.
Except now it was Varen himself who had taken on that role. And by choice, no less—even if he didn’t see it that way. Even if he didn’t fully realize what it was he was doing.
What—Isobel was beginning to dread—might have been done already . . .
In targeting Varen, Isobel realized with a gut-wrenching pang of failure, Lilith had indeed found the perfect tool to work through. A gifted yet bent spirit. A cracked soul ready to break and spill forth the poison it had absorbed, the darkness it had learned to survive on for so long.
But, in following Reynolds’s orders to enter the veil, in taking the bait that had led her to incite Varen to destruction, hadn’t she allowed the demon to use her own pain and longing against her, too?
