Oblivion

“Witness what exactly?” She shook her head. “That he—”

“—sees you everywhere,” Reynolds finished for her. “You haunt him at every step. The guilt for what he believes he has done has all but devoured his sanity. His subconscious conjures your image without end. In short, your memory has become his everlasting nightmare.”

Isobel swallowed hard. Reynolds’s words sent a seismic tremor through her, shaking the dirt from all she’d attempted to bury that day.

Taking a leaf from Reynolds’s own book, though, Isobel did her best to keep her face smooth, impassive. She’d learned through experience that she couldn’t afford to let him see he’d struck a chord, to allow him to believe he still had the power to manipulate her. Not when he held so much power already. Power he should not possess, Pinfeathers had once told her.

“You’re telling me that he didn’t think I was real,” Isobel replied in a monotone.

“No more, I suspect, than he did that night you approached him on the cliff.”

Reynolds stepped away from her, making his way toward the double doors that lead to the world outside.

More dust fell from his frame as he moved, tumbling from his boots and shoulders.

The room seemed to tilt as Isobel watched him. Her arms fell limp to her sides, and her mind, trying to grasp the full weight of that statement, threatened to collapse. She took an involuntary step after him.

“Wh-what did you just say?”

“Tell me, Isobel,” he said, glancing at her over one shoulder, the crimson glow from the exit sign casting his pale face in a wash of warning red. His ash-caked, gloved hand delved into his waistcoat pocket and retrieved his watch. “Did the boy assume you were real when you first gave him your word that you would return for him?”

He clicked the watch’s little door open, but Isobel knew he wasn’t checking the time.

No, Isobel thought, her heart hammering. In fact, when Isobel had found Varen in the dreamworld the first time and had spoken to him through the narrow stained-glass window in the purple chamber of Poe’s masquerade story, she’d done her best to convince him that she wasn’t an illusion. Varen hadn’t believed she was real at all. Not until she handed him the ribbon from her dress, proving it with something tangible. Something from reality.

Something he couldn’t bend or dispel or change . . .

“Did you yourself not carry a timepiece with you into the rose garden?” Reynolds pressed, snapping the watch closed. Tucking it away again, he turned to face the doors once more. “Do you suppose I have not learned the same trick? That I, who have dwelled on the other side so long, do not still require an instrument to tell me in which realm I stand?”

On that morning after Halloween, Isobel had pulled the very watch Reynolds had just checked from his waistcoat pocket as he’d carried her home. There was a name engraved on the inside. When she’d asked Reynolds who “Augustus” was, though, he’d simply told her that he was dead, long since.

“Last night,” Reynolds continued. “The hallway of mirrors—he transported you to that corridor for a reason. Why else except to ensure that you were just another torturous figment? Another eidolon with no reflection?”

Scowling at his back, Isobel tried to keep up with his words, wondering, at the same time, how Reynolds knew about the pink butterfly watch Danny had given her. And why was he staring at the doors like that, as if he expected them to fling wide at any moment?

“What about before?” Isobel asked. “When he used the mirrors to find me. You did too. He would know. He’d be able to see—”

“He isn’t looking, Isobel. Because she isn’t. They both think you’re dead. And that is the best chance we now have.”

“Chance for what?” Isobel demanded. “Who are you really?”

“If you still hold any love for the boy,” he said, glancing at her over his shoulder again, “then you need only rely on the fact that I am not, nor have I ever been, your enemy. On some level, you must already know that. Otherwise, would you have followed me here?”

The halo of light surrounding the door flickered. Flitting shadows slid to and fro along the base, gathering there.

“What’s happening?” Isobel asked, but she didn’t have to guess to know who—what—lurked on the other side.

“I am being hunted,” Reynolds replied, drawing both of his swords with a single, spine-freezing scrape. “Although I cannot return to the woodlands without facing certain capture, I can still travel within the veil. What yet remains of it. You, however, could pass through, undetected, to the other side. Provided you were so willing.”