Something stirred in the darkness to her right. Her head jerked in that direction, and out from between a pair of pillars stepped a black-cloaked figure.
“There she is again,” the figure said, his face hidden in the shadows of his hood.
“The boy,” answered another rasping voice from the gloom, and Isobel’s gaze flitted to a second hooded form as it emerged. “He must be near.”
“This one sees us,” the first figure said.
“So it would seem,” answered the second as he removed his hood, the dim light casting his hollow face in sharp lines of lavender and black. His eyes, deep-set and onyx, like Reynolds’s—like Varen’s—watched Isobel with guarded interest.
Too late, Isobel recalled Reynolds’s warning not to interact. Figuring that staring probably counted as “interacting,” she turned her head slowly back toward the altar.
“That scar,” whispered the first figure. “There on her face. Did she have that before?”
Resisting the urge to touch her cheek—or to start running—Isobel began to move again. Keeping her stride even, as unhurried as she could, she pretended not to see the pair anymore.
“Only ever in the black dress,” the second figure whispered, “and always bleeding. This one . . . she’s new.”
An involuntary wince touched Isobel’s face. She smoothed her expression again, hoping the men had not noticed. Though she didn’t know who the two were, she suspected they could be figments of a dream. From whose mind they might have sprung, though, she had no way of knowing.
Perhaps they were characters from one of Poe’s stories. More residue left by the poet’s time here.
Then again, maybe not, if they had the cognizance to assume she was a dream.
As the altar with its angelic sentries loomed nearer, Isobel wondered if, like Reynolds, the cloaked duo could be Lost Souls. Lilith had mentioned that there were others. . . .
“Where is she going?” one of the men whispered.
“Where she always goes,” the other hissed. “To him.”
Though Isobel softened her steps to better hear them, she didn’t dare slow down and risk revealing that she wasn’t the mirage they believed her to be. Instead she walked on, straining to make sense of the susurrant sibilants that, like the smoke rising from the altar, dissipated into the cavernous ceiling.
Then the voices stopped. Pausing when she reached the steps that led to the altar, Isobel waited for the conversation to restart. When she heard nothing, though, she had to fight the urge to turn and make sure the two men were still where she’d left them, tucked in the recess of shadows—and not standing in the aisle just behind her. Or worse, gone altogether. Off to report what they had seen.
She cast a flickering glance between the two stone angels to see if they might open their eyes, raise their swords against her. As she stared into their serene faces, though, something about their appearance struck her as strange. How each held an uncanny resemblance . . . to her.
Disquietude swept over Isobel, causing her skin to buzz, and she wondered if the statues’ echoing features might support Reynolds’s claim that Varen saw her everywhere—in everything.
She mounted the steps, and as she passed between the stone guardians, the sensation of being watched intensified. As if the number of eyes upon her had grown by two more pairs.
Though she could no longer see the angels, Isobel could sense them awakening—feel them turning their heads in unison to chisel stony glares into her back. If she dared to turn and look, then the two dreamworld figures would know instantly that she wasn’t like them. Their mouths would fall open, they’d start screaming, and their siren cries would shatter the windows. The Nocs would come pouring through from the woodlands. Then they’d have her. They’d have her. They’d never let her go and—
Stumbling up the last step, Isobel stopped herself from slamming into the altar by grasping its cold edge. She clamped down hard and forbade her imagination to progress any further toward chaos.
As real as the stone felt beneath her fingers, as detailed as the world around her appeared, she had to remember that it was all still malleable, changeable. She could take control if she needed. Whisk herself to some other place or even wake up back in the gym, back in her body. But if she started to alter things now, to interfere with this palace facade that had to have come from Varen’s own imagination, she would also give herself away.
Forgetting the angels, Isobel swept her thoughts clean, replacing her fears with her original purpose. Her only purpose. Find Varen.
