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Now her brain scrambled to backtrack, to recall what it was he’d been saying.

“Try to tell me, anyway,” he added, his tone going glacial, sending sharp spikes of cold fear through her.Advertisement

A soft click drew her attention to his open palm, and she almost gasped to see her small butterfly key-chain watch perched on the tips of his fingers. Its wings were open, exposing the face of the clock inside.

Behind the small circle of glass, its three hands spun around and around, winding wildly opposite one another, a sure indication that this was a dream after all.

Checking the window again, though, and seeing her reflection there proved just the opposite.

“I came to show them they were wrong,” Varen said, clicking the watch closed, folding his fist tight around it. “And remind myself while I’m at it.”

An invisible pressure settled on Isobel’s shoulders, pressing down.

Condensing, the air grew suddenly thick and heavy.

Yet in defiance of the sudden shift in gravity, pebbles and rocks, stray leaves and bits of litter quivered, then rose to hover an inch above the pavement and patches of grass.

The asphalt beneath them buzzed, sending a shiver of electricity into the soles of Isobel’s shoes, causing the hairs on her arms to lift.

Varen, it was clear, hadn’t come to talk. He certainly had not come to listen.

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And wherever they were—whether within a dream, reality, or both—Isobel began to sense that something horrible and irreversible was about to happen.

She had only a moment. A breath’s worth of time at most. She felt it.

“I love you,” Isobel said. Because even if the words could not stop what was coming, they were still her first and sole defense.

“I know,” Varen surprised her by saying as he turned away. “That’s why you’re gone.”

Thunder cracked from above, calling her attention heavenward.

Spun from nothing, billows of violet-black clouds began to roll in from every direction. Fast as a time-lapse video, they converged to swallow all traces of blue. A sheet of solid shadow blanketed the parking lot and strip mall and, as darkness fell, the people gathered at the bus stop lifted baffled gazes from the floating debris to the sky.

On the street, cars halted, brakes squealing, horns blaring.

Isobel looked back to the coffee shop window, but her reflection had vanished, wiped out along with the sun’s glare.

Inside, customers rose one after the other. Abandoning their floating cups, their lazily drifting pens, notepads, and other belongings, they gathered at the windows, frightened faces tilted skyward.

Colliding, the clouds began to mesh and meld, mixing in a swirl over Varen, its center following him as he strode toward the street.

The wind blasted stronger, coursing through the lot with a sudden upsurge, carrying with it dead leaves and bits of flittering trash.

Thunder boomed a second time, and as its clap echoed, the eye of the maelstrom ripped wide, opening like the maw of some enormous, toothless beast.

Blackness occupied the void within, the gaping pit marbled with white static.

“Varen, stop this!” Isobel called out to him, her voice sounding so small amid the roar of wind and thunder that she couldn’t be sure if he’d heard her.

But when he halted, glancing back at her over one shoulder, she knew he had.

“You stop it,” he said. “If you can.”

Turning forward again, he continued toward the street while ash began to filter down around him, falling from the crevice in the sky.

Isobel latched on to his words, trying to visualize the wound in the clouds closing, but the crater only grew. With Varen’s every step, the ash poured thicker.

She started forward, about to go after him, but was halted by the deafening smash of glass at her back.

Shards flew, bursting from the strip mall.

Screams rang out, and Isobel swung away, her own shriek mixing with the noise of sudden chaos while glinting slivers rained over her, tinkling as they showered the cars and the pavement.

A cacophony of alarms blared.

Lowering her arms, Isobel looked around her. Panic-stricken people darted this way and that, flying past her as they streamed out of the strip mall.

Ahead, farther than his slow steps should have carried him, Varen stood among a group of stalled vehicles in the middle of the street. The wind raged through his hair. It pulled at the hem of his long coat, causing the fabric to flutter and snap.

From the chasm came a torrent of crows. Screeching and flapping, they shot into the storm-torn sky.

The pavement crackled and shifted beneath Isobel. She skittered back, but the fissures spread quickly past her, fanning out in all directions. pqdm.com