Nevermore

She’d meant it as a joke, but he didn’t laugh. Instead, he pivoted on his heel and took his first step down from her porch, the hem of his cloak brushing the weathered wood.

“Wait!” she called after him, rising. For a moment, she wobbled on her feet and her vision swam. She staggered forward and, not trusting her knees to support her, gripped the beam he’d held only a few moments before. “There’s one last thing, please. It’s about Varen.”

She had expected him to keep moving, maybe even to vanish into thin air before her very eyes. But he stopped. Maybe he had heard her stumble? Whatever the reason, he still did not look back at her, only turned his head ever so slightly in her direction, a gesture that seemed to say that even though he was willing to listen, willing to humor her one last time, he still, as always, retained that infuriating right to answer her with silence.

“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.