The group shouted jovially at catching her, and quickly they set her to her feet. Then the figures disbanded, laughing among themselves.
One look around told her that she was back at the masquerade and that she now stood within the center of a deep green chamber.
Enormous tapestries hung over the walls. A heavy black granite Egyptian sarcophagus stood at each corner of the wide, rectangular room as though on guard. Embroidered pillows and carpets lined the floor, while thick clouds of sweet smoke hazed the air. Lethargic courtiers sat, stooped, and stood around hookah pipes and bowls of smoking incense. A heavy perfume pervaded the space, making her dizzy.
Like a mirage, a dark figure emerged in her blurred vision. It surfaced through the crowd and moved toward her like death itself, face blurred and half hidden from view. She shuddered.
It couldn’t be twelve yet—could it? Had she missed the last chiming of the clock?
She had no time to pull away or even move before the figure seized her. A gloved hand clamped over her mouth, stopping a shout before it could emerge. He dragged her to one side of the room despite her struggling, and reaching the wall, he pulled back one corner of a heavy tapestry, one that depicted a horse trampling its rider. Revealing a small secret doorway, he thrust her inside.
Isobel rolled across the cold and damp stone floor.
She looked up to find herself inside a hidden passageway, the kind in old murder mysteries where the killer hides to spy on his victims through the eyeholes of hanging portraits. Inside this narrow passageway, a tripod torch burned yellow-orange. Its flame threw jagged shapes across the masonry and against the emerald stained-glass windows, the courtiers on the other side moving across in a shadow play of silhouettes.
Her masked abductor ducked inside and emerged above her, all towering height and grimness. She scampered backward until she met with the damp wall.
“Do you have any idea how much danger you are in?” asked a muffled voice.
Husky and ever sharp with admonishments, it was a voice she recognized immediately.
Reynolds.
And it was about time.
41
Alone
“What is wrong with you?” she exclaimed, removing one of her flats. She threw it at him with enough force to jar her shoulder in its socket. The shoe hit the wall behind him with a sharp smack. Even with the mask and hat, the surprise in his eyes could not have been missed.
“Where the hell have you been?” she raved. Wasting no time, she wrestled her other shoe free and hurled it at his chest. He blocked the slipper with a raised forearm, and it tapped harmlessly onto the floor. She was sorry she didn’t have anything else to throw.
Blood oozed from the embedded glass in her shoulder, and she reached up to yank the splintered shard out. She hardly felt the pain, only the blood as it trickled warm down her shoulder to stain the neckline of her dress. She was angry enough to throttle him. Yet at the same time, she could have just as easily rushed him, thrown her arms around him, and buried her face in his cloak. Somehow, though, she figured Reynolds probably wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and if you’d asked him beforehand to fill in an option bubble on the questionnaire, she thought he’d probably have opted for the shoes anyway.
“Don’t you look at me like that!” she snarled, her teeth chattering. The quaver in her voice betrayed her emotion.
He continued to stare as Isobel struggled unsteadily to her feet. Her knees wobbled.
“This is all your fault!” she shouted. “None of this started happening until you showed up! I don’t even know who you are! I don’t even know what you are!”
“Lower your voice.”
“No! I’m not going to lower my voice!” Isobel yelled, incensed. What gave him the right to talk to her like she was a child? “You say you’re helping me, but then you just disappear.
You show up just to freak me out, and then, when I need you the most, you aren’t anywhere, while those other things are everywhere!”
“Isobel—”
“So far I’ve been jerked around, thrown through a window, molested by a monster, and now practically abducted! What do you want from me? Why won’t you or anybody else tell me what’s happening? Why can’t I tell what’s real and what’s not anymore? Why am I inside this nightmare story?”
“There is no time for this. You should not even be here.”
“That’s it! The next person who tells me I shouldn’t be where I am gets decked! I know I shouldn’t be here, but I am, and as far as I can tell it’s because you—”
“It is because of the boy and his utter carelessness,” Reynolds corrected, and with such sudden ferocity that it made her swallow against the anger boiling inside her.
“Where is he?” she asked, quieter now.
“With her,” he whispered, as though pronouncing a death sentence.
“Who?” She remembered Varen’s earlier mention of a “she.” And then those hands that had dragged him into the darkness. She thought about the white light from the woodlands and the figure reflected in the clock pendulum with those black-socket eyes.
“I have no time. You must return to your world immediately. You must seal the link that has been made, because I cannot. Otherwise, your entire world will be forfeited to this one.
Come. We must make our way to the woodlands. Hurry.”
He held a gloved hand out to her, just as he had done that first night he’d brought her to the Woodlands of Weir.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
He studied her with those dark eyes, as though trying to gauge the level of her seriousness.
“You refuse?”
“Do you think I would leave him here?”
He stepped toward her, and she had to resist the urge to shrink back. “Isobel, there are countless realities at stake. There are entire existences. You have no idea of the scope. And believe me when I say that whatever in your world does not die from such a merge will surely wish it had. You would sacrifice everything for the sake of one who is already lost? Think of your home. Your family.”
As she weighed his words, doubt crept over her resolve. Was he telling the truth? What reason did he have to lie? Then again, what reason did he have not to? When it came down to it, what did she know about him or any of his reasons except that, as far as she had seen, those reasons had always been his own?
Well, two could play at that game. “Tell me how to find him first. Help me and I’ll do what you want.”
He spoke fast, his words heated. “Do you not see what has become of him? He is no longer part of your world.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It is true enough,” he said. His coldness cut her like a blade of jagged ice. “And if you do not follow me now, it will be too late for you, and all for whom you care.”
“Are you Poe?” She surprised herself with the question.
“Edgar is dead. He is the fortunate one.”
“Then you knew him,” Isobel said with authority, sure of the truth behind that statement as soon as she spoke it aloud. There had already been too much evidence. Too much proof.
“That’s why you’re here now, isn’t it? This all happened before, didn’t it? To him? To Edgar.”
“The past, too, is dead.”
Isobel stared at him in disbelief. They continued to stand opposite each other, neither of them moving while an invisible force seemed to pulse between them—an intangible sensation like the push of opposing magnets.