Nevermore

“And—and Varen?”

“He is . . . home now, as well.”

Home, she thought with a sudden pang of yearning. She pressed her lips together and felt her face pinch with sudden emotion. She fought the sting that threatened her eyes and instead forced herself to laugh. The sound that came out of her was more like a choking bark than anything else, and it rocked her body with a tight tremor. How? How had they managed to survive when their demise had been so certain?

Isobel shut her eyes again and released a long breath. Her sore muscles relaxed. Safe. He was safe.

“I had a home once. A family, too,” said Reynolds, interrupting her thoughts. Isobel looked up at him, surprised by this uncharacteristic sharing of information. “Never one of my own, mind you. I never married,” he said, as though reading the question in her silence.

“Like you, I had a mother and father,” he said, “and a grandfather, with whom I was particularly close. It has been so long, and yet I remember them just as they were.”

The light around them grew brighter, and Isobel became aware of the heads of streetlamps, their glow warm and promising, and she knew that they must have just entered the rear of her neighborhood.

“You must miss them,” she heard herself say.

He sighed. “Sometimes I fear I shall never forget them.”

“Why would you want to forget them?”

At first he didn’t answer. The moon drifted out of sight again behind the brim of his hat, and the glow of the stars lessened as the streetlights and houselights around them grew brighter.

Isobel turned her head enough to see the approaching outline of her house, the dark windows and drawn shades. Everyone inside must be asleep, she thought.

Candy wrappers littered the street along with scattered leaves. A white ghost’s mask lay far off in the grass, like the broken face of a Noc, left behind and forgotten. Reynolds’s footsteps made no sound on the gravel walkway that led to her back porch. He carried her to the door, but instead of setting her to her feet, he laid her gently on the cushion of her mother’s long wicker bench. As he stepped back from her, Isobel sat up, worried that he might leave her without another word.

He paused, though, and crouched down next to her. “Isobel,” he began, “it is naught but pain and regret when we think of the things and people we will never have, the opportunities we may never get. Would you not agree?”

She frowned, not sure where the question had come from and even more unsure of how to answer it.

“But to pine for those we have had and loved and once held but will never clasp again,” he continued, “it is a torture of an unbearable degree. It is the worst pain possible. Enough to drive you away from yourself . . . as it did with Edgar.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “Am I dead after all?”

He chuckled, and Isobel realized that it was the first time she’d ever heard his laugh. It was a soft and husky sound, like the opening of a rusted gate. Slowly he rose, sending her another waft of fermented roses. He drifted away to the edge of the porch, where he stood with his back to her. He raised an arm and curled one gloved hand around a wooden support beam. A breeze blew past, rustling his cloak.

“Edgar.” He looked down, speaking the name as though it were one he did not often allow himself to say. “You are right that I knew him well. Despite our list of differences, we were two sides of a single coin. Different, yet inherently one and the same. He was my friend.”

Isobel listened. It was strange to hear Reynolds talk this much. And he was always so vague. Usually you could turn around everything he said and it would make just as much sense.

“What really happened to him?” she asked.

“He died,” Reynolds said. “He perished partly by his own means and partly by the means of others. It is best left at that.”

“You mean Lilith killed him?”

“She was . . . responsible,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” Isobel said breathlessly. “I burned the book. Why am I still here? Why didn’t I die?” It was the question she had been waiting to ask, one that now fought its way through a crowd of others.

“Ah,” said Reynolds, “that is something I do not fully comprehend myself, though I suspect that it was somehow your friend’s doing.”

“Varen? But how could he—?”

He turned toward her. “Allow me to attempt to explain with an example I do understand. The Nocs. They are part of his imagination, part of Varen’s story, and so, part of him. If he would not hurt you, then it only makes sense that they would not be able to do so either. They are the deepest parts of his subconscious. Shrapnel of his inner self. As you might have learned, they have the same desires and conflicts as their maker. As separate pieces, freed from the soul and from the confines of a human conscious, however, they develop minds of their own. And, as demons created in the dreamworld, they are compelled by law to answer to its queen. That is why they attempted to harm you but in the end could not.”