Isobel pushed that worry aside for later—if there was ever going to be a later—and commanded herself to keep walking.
She dared not look behind her as she continued down the sidewalk, but forced herself to concentrate on her next move, coming up with some sort of plan to elude the creatures that might be—at that very moment—less than two steps away from snatching her up. Body and soul.
Isobel fixed her sights on the nearest building—a coffee shop that stood on the other side of a narrow parking lot, kitty-corner to the bus stop.
If she went in, she might be able to create a distraction, then slip through a rear exit. Or maybe as long as she surrounded herself with people, the Nocs would hold off on their attack.
Both hopes were long shots. She knew that as well as she knew that she’d run out of options.
As Isobel drew closer to the entrance, though, what she saw reflected in the shop’s glass front windows made her stop.
Dead trees filled the tinted panes, their trunks overlapping the blazing red letters of the neon NOW BREWING sign.
Beyond the glass, customers conversed at small tables. They sipped from mugs, scribbled on notepads, and typed away at laptops. At her back, Isobel heard the swish of cars, the chirping of birds, and the high drone of a passing airplane—noises that didn’t match the soundless landscape of prison-bar trees.
Black crows filled the inklike splatter of interwoven branches, watching her.
In addition to the legion of Nocs, Isobel saw herself reflected in the glass.
And standing a few yards behind, just within the boundaries of the trees—Varen.
Her heart began to slam in her chest.
Slowly she turned to face him.
But instead of the woodlands, she found pavement. Parked cars. White houses and grassy yards. A steady stream of traffic.
New people began to gather at the bus stop. One of them, a man wearing a backpack, kept staring at his wristwatch. Frowning, he crooked his arm, bringing the timepiece to one ear.
Isobel swung toward the coffee shop again. But the woodlands had vanished, replaced by the same quiet scene she had just witnessed—cars, people, concrete, sky.
As she scanned the surface of the glass, Isobel’s mind raced backward through the day in an attempt to pinpoint the last moment she could say without a doubt was real.
But her speeding thoughts found no stopping point.
There had been the light in her bedroom, the ash in the hall, and the ride through the cemetery. The funeral. Reynolds and then the veil. Officially, that was when she’d re-entered the dreamworld. But . . . had it all been part of the same unending dream?
A dark shape entered her periphery—someone standing at her shoulder. Yet her own reflection was the only one in the glass.
A reflection meant for certain that she was in reality. Or at the very least, that she was real, present in her body and not in astral form.
But then, hadn’t the mirror image she’d encountered in the winding hallways of Varen’s Gothic palace proven to have possessed a mind of its own? Could she merely be facing another double?
“They tell me this is real,” Isobel heard him say, his voice achingly familiar—torturous and quieting all at once. “They tell me you are real.”
She sensed him looking down on her. In response, Isobel began to angle into him, unable to help herself despite the string of warning commands that screamed inside her head.
Don’t. Stop. Run.
But she couldn’t.
The two of them were like magnets that way. As equally drawn to each other by invisible forces as they had been repelled.
She focused first on where his hair brushed his black collar, then on the hollow of his throat. His Adam’s apple . . .
Triggered by the sight of him, by their sheer proximity, memories began to surface in her mind as if from another lifetime.
Her very own cobwebs . . .
She recalled that day her dad had come home from work and freaked at finding Varen in the house. Varen had left in a hurry, and helpless to stop him from leaving, Isobel had followed him out to his car. Together, the two of them had stood on her street just like this. And just like now, Isobel had wanted nothing more than for him to lean down and kiss her.
She tilted her chin up, forcing her eyes to his.
Sunglasses hid his black gaze from her view, and, in their lenses, she was again confronted with her own image, the slanted scar on her cheek more prominent than ever.
“I’m sure you would tell me the same thing,” Varen went on, his silver lip ring catching a white spark from the sun as he spoke. “You always do.”
Isobel blinked, frowning. So stunned by his sudden presence at her side—so mesmerized by the sound of that low, calm voice that she hadn’t been able to register the meaning of his words.