“Yesterday,” she began, speaking to his back, hurrying as though there was some element of him that was part hourglass. “Before this all started, I saw him. I hadn’t seen him all morning. I don’t think anyone had. But he came to Mr. Swanson’s class to do the project. Then, after class, he disappeared. Later, I found out he’d been at the bookstore the whole time, asleep. Then, when I saw him late last night, his face . . . He looked different, but . . . I don’t understand.” She shook her head. There were too many details to fit them all into a single coherent question. She tried anyway. “How . . . how could he have been in two places at once?”
To her great shock, Reynolds swiveled abruptly to regard her, something about her words having piqued his interest. “You say he’d been asleep?”
“Yeah. That’s . . . what Bruce said.” She looked at him curiously.
“You’re sure you saw him?”
“Yeah,” she said, confused by the question. “Everyone did.”
He drew rigid at this response, his black eyes actually widening. Until that moment, Isobel would not have thought “surprise” belonged to Reynolds’s limited gray-scale palate of conveyable emotions.
“What?” she said.
He stood and watched her very closely now, so closely that she would have given anything at that moment to have been able to read the thoughts streaming through his head.
“Perhaps this is a question better suited for its subject,” he answered.
Bam. She could almost hear the door of conversation slamming shut in her face.
“But . . .”
“I must leave you now,” he said.
Of course you must, she thought bitterly. She crossed her arms, her gaze dropping to her ragged shoes, the same ones she had flung at him earlier that night. In that moment, she was half tempted to find something else to throw at him. Preferably something heavier and more solid, like one of her mother’s garden gnomes. Fine, then, she thought. She would ask Varen when she saw him.
“Isobel?”
“What?” she snapped, not bothering to look at him. He could make her so mad sometimes. Even now, after everything, after he’d saved her, after he’d brought her home, after he’d rescued Varen.
“It is best for all if you remember what I’ve said tonight,” he told her. She just shrugged at this, glancing down at one hand, turning it over in the dim light to frown at the dirt caked beneath her fingernails. “And know that if for any reason it should occur to you to seek me again, I will not be found.”
At this, she scowled and kicked at the support beam with one foot. Eyes rolling, she said, “Like I would even think about calling you to hang out, Ren. You have the social grace of an undertaker.”
The porch light flipped on, and, squinting, she looked up.
Danny stuck his head out the back door. “Who are you talking to?”
Isobel glanced at the place where Reynolds had stood. He was gone. She looked toward the corner of the house, almost expecting to see the furl of his cloak disappear around the edge.
There was no sign of him, though, and it was hard to say how she felt about him being gone from her life for good. Annoyed mostly, she thought.
“What the hell happened to you?” Danny asked. “You lose a fight with a Weedwacker?” Her little brother stared at her with eyes round as manholes. “Mom and Dad are out looking for you, you know,” he said.
Her stomach dropped at these words, and she turned to gape at her brother as he said, “You’re in a crap load of trouble.”
48
Invisible Woe
It was Gwen who had called Isobel’s house. When neither she nor Mikey had been able to find her, they’d used Isobel’s cell, which Gwen had found in her gym bag.
At the mention of the fight that had broken out, her dad had phoned the police. Then he and her mom had gotten into the car and started for Henry County. They’d left Danny behind to wait in case Isobel showed up at home. When she did, Danny recounted the drama, and Isobel reluctantly forced herself to dial her father’s cell.
There had been lots of yelling, and in the background, Isobel could hear her mother sobbing with relief.
When she hung up, Isobel felt exhausted to the point of passing out. Still, she managed to fumble through a shower and change her clothes before her parents got back. She put on jeans and long sleeves to hide the bruises and cuts, and stuffed what was left of the pink dress into the bottom drawer of her dresser. Then she folded Varen’s jacket and hid it away within the deepest recesses of her closet, where it would wait until she could return it to him.
The lecture she’d received that night had been long despite how late it was and filled with scathing questions of the rhetorical kind as well as threats both empty and loaded. That she would not be allowed to go to Nationals was among the emptiest. That there would be no car for her birthday, however, would most likely turn out to be true. That she was grounded until further notice was a given. Number one on her father’s list of restrictive punishments, though, was that she was not allowed to speak or communicate in any way ever again with Varen outside of school, or in school if it could be helped.
She was given no room to argue, and this time her mother did not intercede.
Finally she was exiled to her room, and she had only reached the stairs when she was stopped again by her mother’s voice. She told Isobel how Brad had undergone emergency surgery on his knee that night. That he’d had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia, that he’d suffered delirium and had almost gone into a coma.
Isobel thought back to the coffin, the graveyard. The screaming.
“Is—is he okay?” she asked. She turned back, taking in the sight of her mother’s wan face and drawn features.
“Okay considering,” she answered. “He’ll be out of school for a while.”
Isobel nodded once. She started up the stairs again.
“Izzy.”
She stopped.
“His mom called to tell me tonight because . . . because while he . . . she said he called out for you.”
Her hand tightened on the banister. She felt her shoulders go rigid.
“I think you should go see him when he’s up for visitors,” her mom said. “I’ll take you if you want.”
Again, Isobel only nodded. She couldn’t tell her mother that she doubted that Brad would ever want to see her again, and she had to wonder how much he remembered. Would he recall being in the dreamworld at all? Or becoming the Red Death? At the very least, Isobel thought he would not forget what had happened on the football field.
Eager to escape, she hurried up the stairs. In her room at last, she collapsed under the overwhelming weight of her exhaustion. Her body gave her no choice. She slept.
Isobel awoke late the next morning to the sound of knocking. The noise echoed in her head, starting her from sleep, causing her to rocket upward. She felt her chest tighten as her heart leaped into triple speed.
She gasped and scrambled out of bed, gripping her comforter beneath her with clawed hands, surprised when she did not feel the coarse dryness of dirt or the brittle bite of grit. She grew still and listened, her gaze darting.
There were no tombstones. No dead trees or black birds. No phantom figures or looming shadows. Only cold, white daylight. Lurid but still midmorning hazy, the light streamed through her window, bathing her powder pink walls in a translucent glow, giving each object in the room its own thin halo.
Isobel squeezed her eyes shut before letting them flutter open again.
To her relief, her surroundings remained. Her breathing slowed, and she allowed herself to believe that she was really home. Safe.