He laughed, a low, deep sound that sent a cold shiver running through her.

“Still so convinced that everything revolves around you,” he said, at last drawing himself to a standing position, his spindly frame towering over a foot above her own.

Despite the sudden rush of adrenaline that gushed through her veins, Isobel refused to allow her body the backward step it so desperately wanted to take. Instead she remained rooted, determined not to do or say anything else that would betray her escalating fear. Even though she knew Pinfeathers held no power to harm her physically, everything about him, from his caustic voice to the twitchy birdlike way he sometimes moved, terrified her.

“Dreaming aside,” he went on, “how can you be so sure your world is the real one?”

Without waiting for an answer, he began to take slow and cautious steps toward her, as though she were the cornered animal poised to either strike or bolt.

It was certainly how she felt.

Widening her stance, Isobel clutched the trophy close to her, wishing it were an ax instead of a flimsy piece of plastic affixed to a tiny block of granite.

“I swear, if you so much as try to touch me . . . ,” she warned him, the threat trailing off as she began to consider her options.

Now that she was face-to-face again with the nightmare creature in all his gruesome glory, he appeared less vulnerable than she remembered. Not only that, but Isobel couldn’t seem to recall why she had thought the trophy would have done her any good as a weapon. Why did she seem to have a knack for trying to defend herself with stupid objects anyway? Why hadn’t she done herself a favor, feigned an interest in baseball, and asked her parents for a Louisville Slugger for Christmas?

Unable to hide her fear any longer, she began quivering all over, her stomach clutching at the memory of the monster’s thin, pale lips fastened to hers. She couldn’t take that kind of torment anymore. Worse, she didn’t know what she would do if he dared assume Varen’s form in front of her even one more time.

As her courage began to collapse in on itself, Isobel started to realize how wrong she’d been to think the Noc couldn’t harm her. Obviously, he could. In more ways than she knew.

As though sensing her heightening alarm, Pinfeathers halted his advance.

“I can’t help it that I’m susceptible to you,” he whispered. “You know that. It’s just that you’re so . . . unreal . . . and so I have to touch you. If only to be certain that I’m not the one who’s dreaming. You see, I hear that sort of thing is going around.”

“This isn’t a dream,” she snapped. “I know I’m awake. I know what’s real and what’s not. I know you can’t hurt me, and now what I want to know is how you’re getting here. I’m not asking again, and if you won’t tell me, I will smash in your foul, ugly—”

“We are here,” he growled, edging closer again, crimson teeth bared in a grimace, “because of what we know. And that is how. She taught us. And what one can do, so can the other.”

Isobel watched him closely, too distracted by his continued approach to absorb his meaning. “What—what are you saying?” she stammered. “That the other Nocs can—?”

In an instant, he dispersed into smoke, rushing her like a gust of wind.

She had no time to scream before the tendrils of vapor wrapped around her throat.

Isobel dropped the trophy. She heard it thud against the carpet in the second before she lifted her hands to claw at the looping threads of swirling mist.

Her nails scraped her own skin, but the tightness remained.

“We didn’t want to be right about you,” his voice seethed in her ear.

Isobel twisted. Stumbling backward to escape, her heel caught on the brick ledge of the fireplace. She fell, almost landing in the hearth.

The inky swirls whisked around her and Isobel held her breath, afraid of what would happen if she dared breathe in any part of it.

“But we were,” he whispered as he re-formed and crouched over her, hands braced on his knees.

Turning his head to the side, he glared at her through one black eye the same greedy way a bird inspects a shining beetle.

She watched his teeth, serrated and gleaming, part and come together through the cavity in his cheek as he spoke. “All along. We were right.”

Isobel fought the urge to shut her eyes, to shut him out. “You know you can’t hurt me,” she said, more in an effort to affirm that to herself than to him. “You can’t do anything. So why do you keep coming back? What do you want?”