Nevermore

The remaining Nocs wailed in terror, and as one, they receded, flitting apart as they took their bird forms. Their dark wings whisked them up and higher, until they reached the banisters of the gallery, where they perched. There they squawked and hopped, their caws ringing in their throats like curses.

Isobel glanced down in time to see Reynolds replace his hat over thick, dark, and smoothed-back hair.

Somewhere in the crowd, a girl screamed. The goth music ground to a slow halt, and the moaning singer’s voice died out. Everyone began to take notice, to shrink back from the visage of the Red Death. At its feet lay one of the dream-revelers, her silver dress spotted with crimson. Beneath her dove’s mask, her face oozed, glistening red from the pores.

“It is happening,” Reynolds said. “You must go to the woodlands now, find the door with the signs. You’ll know it when you see it. The link between our worlds is there inside. You’ll know that, too, when you see it. Godspeed, and beware the white one.”

“What—but I don’t even know how to—”

“Go,” he said. “Only you can change the dream. Only you can sever the link.”

She hesitated. “What about you?”

“I will fight here.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

His eyes locked with hers. Surprise lit their darkness from within. And then he laughed, a bitter sound. “For me, the worst has long since been done. Now go.”

“But—!”

“I cannot vanquish the Red Death. Not without killing the boy whose soul it imprisons. I can only hold it at bay, and only for so long. Then know that I will do what I must.”

“What? Brad? No! But—but I don’t even know how to get to the woodlands from here!”

“Make a door, Isobel,” he said. “When there is no way, you must make a way.” His hands disappeared beneath the folds of his cloak. There was a scrape of metal, and in the next moment, his gloved hands emerged. In each, he now brandished a short curved blade. A pair of silver cutlasses. They glinted in a pass of strobe lights. Without a further word, he turned from her. His gait measured and assured, he walked a straight line for the figure of the Red Death.

As though alerted through some extra sense, the glow in the phantasm’s eyes brightened like hell-fire, and Death turned to greet him.

Isobel watched on as, for a single moment, the two figures from the dreamworld stood opposite each other, like knights on a chessboard. One robed in black. One in red.

When the tension between them broke into movement, it was like watching a battle for light between moths. Cloaks whispered and curled. A blade flashed. Like jagged leaves stirred by a storm, they swept round each other, neither landing a blow, yet each of them whirling in a perpetual fury of motion.

One of Reynolds’s blades caught the cloak of the Red Death. The crimson-soaked fabric fell partially back, revealing a head and torso that might as well have belonged to a skeleton.

Ribs strained to break the tight yellow skin that clung to the creature’s body like wet cloth. Blood dripped from its sunken eyes, from its shriveled mouth, and from the tips of its outstretched fingers.

The space cleared for them by the crowd once more widened with a collective retreat. The goths lowered their masks to watch, their stark faces appalled, afraid, confused, and then, finally—excited.

Then someone actually cheered.

Typical, was the only thing Isobel could think. Even given the circumstances, she couldn’t help but roll her eyes. The goths—they thought it wasn’t real. They thought it was all a show.

And why not, when this sort of twisted crap was just their thing?

Above, along the gallery, an audience of Nocs crowed and rasped frenziedly in their bird forms. They hopped the length of the banister and followed the fight with their beady, bloodthirsty eyes, as though anxious to join in yet too afraid to swoop down and add their own blows.

A wboosh sound, a great rushing of air, came from the center of the open space. Like a house of cards, the Red Death collapsed in on itself, swallowed whole by the floor. It left in its wake a dark and ominous stain. In the next instant it emerged from behind Reynolds, rearing over him like an all-consuming shadow.

As though by magnetic force, Reynolds’s blades were swept out from his grip. In midair they turned on him, and Reynolds whirled just in time to accept the thrust of both into his chest.

A collective scream arose from the mass of onlookers, Isobel’s shrill cry among theirs.

She broke forward in a run as the Red Death drove Reynolds forcefully back. He plowed hard into the floorboards and slid, unconscious, to a halt at Isobel’s feet.