Just as he could create—the gilded door frame, the corridor, this palace, the seashore—Isobel knew that Varen could also abolish. He had to have destroyed the rapids and the falling chandelier.
With his awareness had returned his control. But was it strong enough to pit against Lilith’s?
Isobel pushed back from Varen, blinking cinders from her wet lashes. She scanned his collar, where the dust had already begun to seep into his soaked clothing, turning to muck. Her fingers finding the charm she’d managed to secure there, she tucked it beneath his shirt.
Comforted by the knowledge that he was protected, that as long as the hamsa remained on his person, Lilith could not lay a hand on him, Isobel allowed her aching shoulders to sag.
She glanced up to Varen, meeting his gaze, his green eyes grave and searching.
For one heartbeat, she let herself bask in his complete return to lucidity. To himself.
But the brief flash lasted no longer than the instant it took for Varen to turn his head and look away from her. Toward the far end of the hall, from where the waves had rushed them.
Reluctantly Isobel shifted her gaze in the same direction.
Flecks of ash swirled through the devastated hall, providing the only barrier between Isobel and Varen and the white demon who, like an ivory idol, watched them from less than ten yards away.
Behind Lilith and through the ragged mouth of the wrecked hall lay an endless assemblage of trees, a hazy silver light glowing through their prison-bar trunks.
Lilith’s face, unveiled, stark and whole once more, showed all the emotion of an ancient ceremonial mask. Like the walls around them—like this entire world—her features had become caught in a state between beauty and ruin.
Shadows nested deep within the hollows of her high cheekbones. Dark veins marbled her snowy skin, and the masses of her wild hair clung to her soaked figure in straggly strands.
Sodden veils spilled in weighty folds from her, clinging close to her narrow and gaunt frame.
The demon’s eyes, no longer sunken pits but enlarged inkwells, leaked great streaks of the same violet-black substance that had spilled from her cracked skull in the depths of the ocean.
“You forget,” Lilith said, a slick of glossy liquid sliding from her mouth to drape her chin and drench her pristine shrouds, staining the gossamer bright violet. “You both forget,” she went on, her voice low and throaty, thick with the heavy fluid, “that you cannot evade what lies within your own mind. You cannot run from yourself.”
Varen shifted in front of Isobel, planting himself between her and the demon, who started toward them, the tips of her taloned feet poking out from the hem of her dragging robes.
“When the light at last dies, as it always dies,” she said, “darkness will devour. Be it that darkness which is your own”—pausing, Lilith locked her gaze solely on Varen, lips curling, spreading to display a jagged, stained grin—“or someone else’s.”
Her eyes darting, Isobel checked the cracked and dusted mirrors.
She saw her own and Varen’s reflections—mere shadows beyond the filmy layer of ash.
But just as Isobel had noted once before, in the dreamworld parlor of Varen’s house, the demon’s figure cast no reflection. Now, though, Isobel noticed something else, too.
The mirrors did not reflect the Gothic, ash-strewn hallway where they stood, either. Instead the murky glass showed another hall, one lined with familiar lockers, their cobalt color only just discernable through the clinging grime.
Trenton?
“Darkness devours because it must,” Lilith said, stopping at a distance, and Isobel knew it was because of the hamsa. “And so there is no escape.”
Isobel’s gaze flicked from one wall of mirrors to the other, recalling how Varen, in her dream, had transformed the north hall into this corridor. Did that then mean that all three of them currently occupied a space that ran parallel to that portion of school?
Raising an arm, the demon pointed one black-nailed finger at Varen. “A talisman may guard you for a time, but it can no more liberate you than can this foolish girl, who is as doomed as you.”
“Don’t listen,” Isobel whispered against Varen’s shoulder, huddling closer, her thoughts racing to formulate a plan before the demon could inflict them with her own.
“Relent now,” Lilith ordered, “cast off the amulet, and I will allow her to live, to return to her world. Refuse, and her soul is as forfeit as yours.”
“Varen, think,” pleaded Isobel. “There isn’t going to be a world to return to if she gets her way. And if she can’t be stopped, why go to such lengths to keep us apart? To make you believe I wouldn’t come? To let you go on thinking I was dead—that you had killed me?”
