Low whispers erupted from the Nocs, the sound of suspicion and fear. They released her and shrank back at once, unanimous in their recoil.

Isobel had to raise her head from the floor to look, to make sure that her mind hadn’t simply blocked the pain. It was the cutlass that lay broken and detached, though, and not any part of her. Her widened gaze shot immediately to Pinfeathers, who, still looming over her, raised the fractured hilt to his scrutiny.

“Hmm,” he said, “I was afraid that might be the case.”

Isobel took her chance. She grabbed the doorknob she’d made in the floor and twisted it. The ground beneath her swung free, and they toppled through.

Taken by surprise, Pinfeathers tumbled past her, while Isobel held tightly to the knob. She opened her mouth in a silent scream as her body jerked to a halt and she dangled above a world of ash, of withered leaves and black charcoal trees. She looked down between her feet in time to see Pinfeathers dispel into thick spirals of ink before he could shatter against the ground that lay no more than ten feet below.

It had worked, she realized, casting a quick glance around her. She was back! She’d made it to the woodlands.

The heads of the other Nocs appeared in a circle around the open door above her. Their whispers continued, and they turned their heads to look at one another, though not a one of them made even the slightest move to grab her.

Isobel’s grip on the doorknob began to slip. She let go and, prepared for the drop, landed squarely on her feet. Pinfeathers gathered himself once more into his humanoid form. He stood at a distance from her while other Nocs, morphing into birds, poured themselves through the open doorway. They lighted on the barren, swaying branches of the skeletal trees, watching, waiting.

Ash rained around them, heavy and thick enough to collect on the shoulders of Varen’s jacket. By now, Isobel’s hair had become completely unraveled, and it whipped about her face in a flurry of cold winds.

The purple sky overhead swirled and roiled like the eye of a hurricane. The door that hung open and suspended in the sky swung shut with the next gust of air. She peered through the trees, and there she saw another door. This one was narrower, familiar to her, and she knew it at once as the one she sought. It was almost, she dared to think, as if the door had been seeking her.

Or lying in wait.

As she approached, her eyes went to the two signs taped to the door’s surface. The words on the signs were written backward, but she didn’t need to read them to know what they said.

She knew that the top one read DO NOT ENTER, while the one below it warned the reader to BEWARE OF BESS.

46

Bedight in Veils

Isobel came to stand just in front of the door. Behind her the Nocs called and rasped wildly. Winds pulled and jerked at her hair, at the jacket and at the hem of her tattered dress. The paper signs taped to the door twitched and stirred in the bluster, threatening to blow away in a wind that was fast becoming violent. She reached for the doorknob, which was on the left side of the door this time, backward from what she remembered from the door in Bruce’s shop, just like the signs. There came a rustle at her side and she stopped, turning her head sharply to catch Pinfeathers’s jerky approach.

“Don’t,” she warned him.

He froze, leaving a distance of several feet between them. The other Nocs silenced and stilled themselves in the trees as Pinfeathers eyed her warily. She glared back coolly. It seemed that they now both understood what she was capable of.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, that static voice taking on a smooth, diplomatic tone. His gaze darted to the door, then back to her. “And so I’ll offer you that same warning.”

She narrowed her eyes on him. There was something very wrong about the way Pinfeathers worked. Hadn’t he tried to skewer her only a moment ago? So now why was he turning all Jiminy Cricket? And why, after fighting with her so fiercely in the graveyard, had he changed at that last second and offered her help?

That he’d wanted to toy with her had been evident right from the start. But it had become more than that. There was something else to him, a deeper secret lurking behind the hollow mask that was his face. Her thoughts went back to the purple chamber, to Pinfeathers and Varen’s strange conversation. What were they to each other?

Isobel knew it would be a dangerous question to ask the creature standing before her, and so she would keep it locked away, along with so many more, for Varen. She had other questions, though, for the apparent ringleader of the Nocs. “What will I find behind this door?” she asked.

“The other side of what you know,” he answered, with a laugh. “Just like me.” His smile faded.