The ground shook. The fractured glass rattled and slipped into the widening rifts.
The quake sent Isobel to her knees. She caught herself with her hands, bits of glass biting her palms.
Above, the crows squawked louder, their unending buzz like a swarm of locusts.
Isobel did her best to tune out their cries, the people screaming and running, the rumbling of the earth, and the ash that had begun to catch on her clothing and cling to her hair.
Focus, she told herself as she tried to conceive of some way to halt the rupturing of her surroundings, but she couldn’t concentrate. Not while the trees dotting the patches of strip mall landscaping began to twist and shrivel. Not while more trees burst through the fractured blacktop, jutting upward like spikes.
Isobel pictured the lot as it had been moments before, restored, whole, holding the visual for what felt like an eternity.
When this attempt failed too, she tried picturing her and Varen somewhere else entirely, in a desert far away.
Instead of sand, the pavement beneath her dissolved into the gray dust of the dreamworld. Isobel closed her fists around the powder, crying out in frustration as the scrapes in her hands burned with pain.
Nothing was working.
She was too late. He’d become too strong. She couldn’t fight against him like she had before.
Whatever this was—wherever this was—it felt like the end Reynolds had warned her about.
Opening his arms, Varen threw his head back.
Spears of violet lightning shot up from the ground around him, connecting with the darkness above and forming a cage.
Isobel zeroed in on Varen’s illuminated form, his arms spread like the wings of the white bird on his black coat.
As the lightning fluttered in and out of view . . . so did he.
In that instant, Isobel realized that no matter what dimension they occupied, Varen was not there in physical form. He was projecting. Like he had the day of the Poe project. Like she had when she’d crossed through the veil.
If that was true, then this—the parking lot, the coffee shop, and the street—must be reality. Because Varen wouldn’t need to project in the dreamworld. And if he was projecting here, then that meant the veil hadn’t completely eroded. At least, not enough to allow Varen to physically rejoin his own world.
But that would also mean that she could not overpower Varen, and she would have no way of stopping this. No way of stopping him.
Everything would merge. Reality and dreams. Eternity—it was all headed for oblivion.
Time itself would end.
Unless . . .
Isobel pushed up onto her feet.
Even with her thoughts still spinning, slowly formulating an answer she dreaded, she started moving toward him.
Before, when the two worlds had overlapped like this, the blending had happened through a link—a role previously served by Varen’s sketchbook.
According to Reynolds, that role had since been transferred to something else.
Someone.
Isobel sped her pace to a run, closing in.
Even as she neared him, dodging cars and entering the forest of lightning, she didn’t know if her plan would work. If it could.
Over the din of the whipping winds, the cawing of the Nocs, and the crashing thunder, she screamed his name.
Like before, she hadn’t expected him to hear her, to turn. But, just as he had then, he did now.
Launching herself at him, Isobel wrapped her arms around him. They fell backward together, and for one blissful instant, she held him tight.
And even as the flames conjured by her mind engulfed him, Isobel could not bring herself to let him go.
White-hot and blinding, the blaze enveloped them both.
Colliding with the pavement, Varen’s figure disintegrated on impact, his form dissipating against the dusty ground that caught her fall alone.
18
Ashes, Ashes
Blood. Pain. Grit.
Opening her blackened hands, Isobel found only those three things in her grasp.
Varen was gone.
Her plan to banish him had worked.
The fire had vanished with him, snuffing out the moment he had ceased to exist in this world, and as they had before when she’d summoned them in the bookshop, the flames had left her unscathed.
Breathing out in a rush that caused the cinders beneath her to disperse, Isobel found herself wondering how it could have happened again.
Before, when she’d asked Reynolds why she had survived the summoned flames, he had told her that since the fire she’d created had been a dream, it had ceased to exist when the realms parted. He’d also told her that the underlying strength of Varen’s feelings for her had provided protection.
But that protection, which once shielded her from the Nocs, had been lifted. That was why Pinfeathers had been able to scar her. And why he had. So she would know.
