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“Where are you?” Isobel yelled. She twirled in place, and in a kaleidoscope of muted faces, statues wheeled around her. “If you think you can end this, if you want to kill me, then come out! Stop hiding like a coward.”

“You seem upset,” Lilith said. “Don’t care much for having your own tricks turned against you, do you?”Advertisement

Isobel rotated again and again. She began to slow, though, when she noticed that none of the statues appeared to hold the same position as before. But when she stopped, the courtyard only spun faster, continuing its rotation without her.

Isobel teetered. Her feet tangling in her ribbon, she fell onto the cold slab bearing her name.

Her surroundings whizzed by in a blur—a merry-go-round of phantoms that halted only when a familiar mausoleum slid into view directly across from Isobel.

Mist, thick and rolling, enshrouded the tomb she recognized as Lilith’s.

Its decorative wrought-iron and blue stained-glass door hung wide open, revealing a rectangle of pure black.

Above the void, etched over the archway, Isobel saw a name she knew but had not noticed there before. Not until now.

LIGEIA

“Enough with games, though,” Lilith said, her sultry voice resounding now from within the tomb. “You called. And now, here I am.”

For an instant, the cavity of pitch darkness remained undisturbed. Then, like a dead thing floating up from black waters, the demon’s hollowed white face and emaciated form emerged to stand in the door frame.

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Lilith’s sheer shroud, tattered and stained, hung from her in strips and shreds. Her tangled, dripping hair fell long over her shoulders, its ends still soaked in inky muck.

A pit oozed in the center of the demon’s ivory chest, where Reynolds’s hamsa-strung blade had impaled her. Only lightly smeared now with the violet-black substance she’d nearly dissolved into, Lilith’s pale, papery lips entertained a renewed smile.

“Lilith,” Isobel said, spitting the name from between her teeth as she scooped up her ribbon again. “Ligeia. Lenore. Emily. Lilo and Stitch. Which is it?”

“‘Ulalume—Ulalume,’” Lilith replied, her voice going sweet and soft, making the syllables sound like a song. “’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume.’”

As the demon crossed out of the barrier of darkness, her aura of cold ethereal light burned suddenly bright, its glow evaporating the stains from her figure.

Black veins faded from hands that became delicate again as they took up the veils that still clung to her shoulders. Lilith drew the gauzy fabric over her face, and like a bride approaching the altar, she strode toward Isobel.

Her heart rate speeding, Isobel flicked her eyes between the approaching creature and the shifting letters above the tomb.

The name LIGEIA melted away, and bleeding through the stone, new letters emerged to spell ULALUME.

“‘Then my heart it grew ashen and sober,’” hissed the demon, her thin lips blossoming to bloodred fullness, her face and figure regaining their former beauty. “‘As the leaves that were crisped and sere—as the leaves that were withering and sere.’”

Keeping hold of her ribbon, Isobel drew to her feet. She took several retreating steps until her spine collided with one of the statues, leaving her nowhere to go.

The demon drifted nearer still, her radiance blazing to an ultraviolet shine and her skin to an eye-stinging white.

“‘And I cried—“It was surely October on this very night of last year, that I journeyed—I journeyed down here!—that I brought a dread burden down here—on this night of all nights in the year,”’” Lilith continued, reciting lines from one of Poe’s poems. The same poem, Isobel knew, whose title matched the name now written on the demon’s tomb. The poem Scrimshaw had recited to her the first time she’d found herself within the walls of the blue marble crypt.

The same poem Varen had read to Isobel in his room.

It was the one work of Poe’s that mentioned the woodlands by name.

“That poem,” Isobel said. “Poe wrote it trying to seal you back up, didn’t he?”

“And we see how well that worked,” Lilith replied, coming to a stop in front of Isobel. “But while we’re on the subject, and if you don’t mind my asking, would you do me the favor of refreshing my memory?”

Isobel gasped when she felt the statue behind her snatch her wrist, immobilizing the hand that held her pink ribbon. A yelp of shock rose in her throat as bony fingers dug into her flesh, but her cry caught there, dying the moment the effigy swung her around to face it. pqdm.com