Oblivion

A peal of warning bells sounded in Isobel’s head as Varen straightened into a standing position on the ledge, opening his arms wide as though he, too, could fly.

She spurred herself forward, running, knocking aside desks, causing the skeletons to slump and topple.

She caught herself on the windowsill just as Varen tilted forward.

“No!” She grabbed for him, but the hem of his long coat only grazed her fingertips, fluttering in the breeze as again, he slipped out of her reach.

29

Time Out of Time

Below, the brambly treetops resembled legions of bony hands, outstretched and waiting.

Varen had not fallen into their grips, though. He hadn’t fallen at all.

Boots firmly planted on the side of Trenton’s brick facade, he stood perpendicular to the building, staring toward the garden of black arms.

Strong winds lashed at him, whistling as they assailed his impervious form.

Afraid he might disappear again, Isobel hoisted herself into the window frame. Broken glass crunched under her feet as she ducked through to crouch on the sill.

Battling gales slammed into her from every direction, as if conspiring to shove her from her perch. She hung on, but when her hair fluttered in her face, she lost sight of both Varen and the drop.

Maybe that was for the best, she thought, as she straightened.

Stiffening her body, locking her muscles, she thought back to all the calculated falls she’d taken in the past, the cheerleading aerials that had, more often than not, landed her squarely on her feet.

Isobel let go of the frame. She tipped into the open air.

The wind shrieked in her ears. The world blurred in her periphery. For an instant, she careened down, straight for those grabbing branches.

Then the school’s brick siding rushed up to accept the step she’d gambled, and Isobel staggered forward. Landing on one knee, she caught herself, palms splaying flat to the rough brick surface of the building’s exterior. She released the breath she’d held in reserve, along with her hope that this latest gravity-bending stunt wouldn’t be her last.

On either side of her, like still pools of water, the school’s windows gave off a mercury sheen. Detecting movement in the pane closest to her, Isobel turned her head and caught sight of Varen’s pale reflection.

She pushed to her feet, turning in time to see him stride past her, moving in the direction that, seconds before, had led up.

As though in a trance, he trained his gaze on Trenton’s four-spired bell tower, his gait even and graceful in that way that had always distinguished him in the hallways of Trenton.

Opening his arms out low at his sides, he ignored the winds that battered him, initiating with that single gesture the metamorphosis that came next.

The school’s red clay bricks faded to alabaster, widening into stone slabs beneath their feet.

The windows elongated, narrowing like the slit pupils of serpents’ eyes. Nets of black spread across glass panes that, as though lit by fire from within, burned with the same crimson glow as the horizon.

Varen walked on. A tremor shook the building, and with the low, rumbling groan of stone on stone, a pointed steeple emerged from between the bell tower’s spires. Shaped like the head of a spear, the spire’s spiked point telescoped far into the sky, piercing through the screen of clouds that rushed by.

Gargoyles, their grotesque faces fixed in toothy grimaces and open-jawed snarls, slithered out from every corner. Fastening lizardlike bodies to the wall, they swung their heads in Isobel’s direction, glowering at her with glowing red eyes.

At once awed and paralyzed by the quaking beneath her, the transformation happening all around them, Isobel could not bring herself to move. She only stared as Varen drew to a stop in the middle of the tower’s center window.

As he halted, the pane under him widened into an enormous circle. A round pedestal rose beneath Varen’s boots, elevating him by a foot, and two ebony vanes sprouted sideways from the base. While one vane remained short, the other grew long enough to reach the sets of roman numerals that emerged along the disk’s perimeter.

Like helicopter blades, the vanes wound around and around, passing one another in chaotic loops. A deep, steady grinding noise accompanied their race and joined with the rumbling just before it all died out, signaling the end of the tower’s transmogrification.

A clock, Isobel thought. Varen had converted Trenton’s bell tower into a clock tower. Simultaneously, he’d transported them to his Gothic palace—onto the exterior of this grand castle sanctuary he’d conjured into being.

The next time the colossal minute hand swung in front of Varen, he stepped forward to board it. With balanced, even steps, he made his way down the length of the appendage as it swept the circumference of the clock’s face.