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“I—I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Isobel stammered. “I wanted to, but . . . Varen, I’m so sorry.”

“How long?”Advertisement

Isobel fidgeted with the ribbon, uncertain of what, exactly, he was asking her.

“How long has he been gone?” Varen snapped, louder this time.

“The funeral was today,” Isobel said. “This morning. Gwen and I were both there. I went because I—”

“Goddamn it,” he said, snatching a small lamp from a nearby nightstand and sending a cascade of empty orange medicine bottles to the floor. He slung the lamp at the far wall, where it smashed and fell.

Isobel flinched. She watched the lamp’s fractured bulb sputter before dying out.

Suddenly the objects in the room—books and boxes, a trash can, the medicine bottles—shifted. They rose together and hovered in place.

Tensing, Isobel checked the grandfather clock, the hands of which had started to spin.

“Varen,” she began, but she stopped, her words catching at the sound of a woman’s humming.

It was the melody from Varen’s lullaby, the heartrending song Madeline had written for him when he was a child. When he’d still been her child.

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Then the humming dissolved, becoming laughter, low and insidious.

An electric charge filled the air, causing the hairs on the nape of Isobel’s neck to stand at attention. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to look back in the direction she’d come from—toward the end of the hall where the building laughter rebounded.

Instead she kept her gaze fixed on Varen as he slowly turned to face the door.

Black once more, his eyes stared straight through her.

44

White-Robed Forms

Radiating fury, Varen stalked toward Isobel.

As he moved, the doorway that stood between them expanded, its rectangular arch rounding as it transformed to stone. Then Varen walked right past her, across the wide threshold and into the hall, where his continuing steps triggered more change.

Like a crawling frost, cracked stone spread out from beneath his boots. Plaster and drywall faded into rough gray brick. While the emerging walls of Varen’s palace absorbed the doorways on Isobel’s right, the entries on her left morphed into more Gothic arches, and the passageway before her took the form of a cloister.

Through the open arcade, Isobel saw that Varen had returned them to the courtyard of statues.

Or was it that he’d brought the courtyard of statues to them?

But then, this was not the same courtyard she’d encountered before. Not only were there no angels among the gathering of fog-enveloped white forms—no sets of wings, neither tucked nor unfurled—she saw no faces, either.

None fully decipherable . . .

Draping stone shrouds covered the statues’ heads, spilling long down their feminine bodies in clinging sculpted folds.

Lilith’s laughter echoed all around, trailing off into the eerie garden.

Another trap, Isobel thought. The demon’s final play.

And Varen, with his mind now firmly set on revenge, was about to walk straight into it.

“Varen, wait,” Isobel called after him.

To her surprise—and perhaps to his as well—Varen halted at the corner of the cloister.

“She’s right,” Isobel said.

Varen turned his head slightly toward her. The gesture, though small, suggested that at least he was listening.

Fixing her eyes on that white raven, Isobel held her ribbon—their ribbon—closer.

“Darkness will win,” she said. “It has to. So long as you try to fight fire with fire.”

Half-shielded by his tousled, ashen hair, his eyes flicked in her direction.

“Sometimes,” he said, speaking in that quiet and contained way that always frightened her, “fire is the only way to fight. But then . . . you knew that already.”

With that, Varen rounded the corner, passing out of her sight.

Isobel’s chest contracted with fear.

Fire. Isobel had been referring to Varen’s obvious plan to fight Lilith with anger, to pit his own capacity for darkness against the demon’s.

But the fire he meant was Isobel’s chosen tool to banish him from the strip mall parking lot earlier that day. And to sever the original link—to destroy Varen’s sketchbook.

Now that Varen knew he was the link, would he try something similar?

Immediately Isobel’s thoughts circled back to Varen’s duel with the doppelgänger Noc. To what had been said between the two. They had reached some sort of agreement—or rather, Varen had come to an understanding with himself. pqdm.com