All this time, she hadn’t been able to take a single breath. She’d forgotten to try, but now she was breathing too much, too fast.
The cab of the car seemed to squeeze inward, the roof threatening to collapse.
Isobel pulled on the sweat-slicked handle still in her fist and the door swung open. She unlatched her seat belt and stumbled out into the winter air.
Her feet found the lawn, but her cold surroundings continued to orbit her. Names and dates swirled in her vision. Bile rose in the back of her throat and she staggered to one side, afraid she might hurl right there on Eloise McClain’s name plaque.
Instead she started running, bolting headlong through the rows of graves, the wind licking sweat from her skin.
“Isobel!” she heard Gwen shout.
Isobel dodged headstone after headstone. Then the terrain dipped. She felt her ankle twist. Faltering, she cried out before dropping, nearly tumbling into the stump of a stone topped by a tiny, acid-rain-eaten lamb—an infant’s grave.
She gripped the grass beneath her, crawling away from the distorted marker until her back met with the cold side of another.
Unable to look away from the child’s stone, Isobel covered her eyes.
“Isobel!” The sound of feet rushing over grass grew louder, and Isobel heard Gwen fall to her knees at her side, her bracelets clanging. Isobel dared not lower her hands to look, however, too fearful that Gwen would be like the paper people she’d seen in the hall—that her friend’s face would erode right before her, another nightmare she couldn’t escape.
“What,” Gwen huffed, “are you doing? Why . . . did you run . . . like that?”
“I should be dead,” Isobel gasped, her thoughts leaping out of her mouth as the memory of awakening on that hospital table ripped into her with chain-saw teeth. “I was, and I should have stayed that way.”
“No!” Gwen pulled Isobel’s hands from her face, forcing her to look into her frantic brown eyes. “Why would you say that?”
“He—he tried to kill me,” Isobel whispered.
Saying it out loud for the first time felt like pulling a knife out of her soul. She was able to draw breath again, and gradually, the world stopped swirling.
Grabbing Isobel by the shoulders, Gwen pulled her away from the plinth. Isobel swayed, falling to lean against her warm friend.
Gwen’s wiry arms wrapped around her, pulling her in tight, and the scent of lavender caught Isobel off guard, because she’d never noticed it before. The aroma was one detail her brain could latch onto, though, something that testified to the realness of this embrace, which had to be the first she and Gwen had ever shared.
“I’m sorry,” Gwen said. “Isobel, I’m so sorry I brought you here. And I’m sorry I said those things in the car. I—I didn’t know. I just wanted to—I thought he—”
“She won.” Isobel sobbed the words against Gwen’s shoulder, though her eyes remained dry; the storm raging within her took place inside a wasteland, where there could be nothing as cleansing as rain. “Gwen, she won. He hates me. She made him hate me.”
“He hates himself,” Gwen said. “You just got caught in the cross fire.”
She pulled Isobel tighter. But the comfort of arms around her could not shield her from the memory of his eyes. Like a pair of black holes, they threatened to devour her, to incinerate her like they had in the dream, leaving no trace of her former self behind. Not even this shell she now occupied.
“He can find me,” Isobel murmured. “Anywhere I am. He can find me. The ash in the hall . . . That—that happened in a dream. He was there. He . . .”
Gwen hushed her.
“I wanted to come here today,” Isobel went on, “because—because I thought I might see him. Like before. Now, though, I’m afraid that I won’t ever stop seeing him. He scares me so much. I don’t know what he wants anymore.”
Humming, Gwen began to rock her gently back and forth. Then, out of nowhere, she began to sing.
The sound of Gwen’s singing voice, smooth and melodic—so different from the brash, cut-and-dried voice Isobel thought she knew so well—shocked her into stillness. Isobel blinked, her focus shifting at once to the strange syllables climbing and falling through their haunting phrase.
“Lyulinke, mayn feygele
lyulinke, mayn kind
kh’hob ongevoyrn aza libe
vey iz mir un vind.”
As Gwen’s song unwound with a slow, sad melody, Varen’s face—angry, vengeful, hollow—dissolved from her imagination, dissipating like smoke cleared by a gentle breeze.