Nevermore

She looked down to see fire course the length of her arms. It danced over the sketchbook held close to her, and she watched the edges of the paper curl and turn from orange to brown to black—taking on all the hues of autumn.

Everything died in the fall.

The book in her arms collapsed, tumbling into ash. The fire snuffed into blackness and with it, the world.

47

Surcease of Sorrow

She had smelled this smell before. It was that too sweet, deep scent of decay. Dead roses. The aroma of it was so much more potent than she remembered. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too strong in such a concentrated dose. Oppressive.

She tried to turn her head from it but for some reason found little room to move.

She wondered if she was dreaming. Or still dreaming . . .

Or was she dead, locked away forever in a flower-filled casket?

Did the dead dream?

She became aware of a pressure across her shoulders and behind her knees. Pain, too, invited itself into her brain like a bad memory, pervading her entire body.

The next sensation that occurred to her was that of movement. She was moving. Cold air prickled the tiny hairs on her arms. She wanted to open her eyes to see where she was, what it was that transported her, and where she was going, but at the same time, she didn’t. Why, when it would be so much easier to drift away again, to settle back into the cocoon of sleep, that blank place between dreams and reality, where the word “nothing” found its true definition?

She felt the press of something like fabric against her cheek and gathered beneath her curled fingers. Her hair tickled her brow in the wake of another breeze, and through her eyelids, she sensed light.

By now she had surfaced to consciousness enough that it was too late to fall back into the deathlike chasm of rest. Against her will, she became more and more aware of herself, of the seemingly limitless aches in her body, and finally of that steady one-two rhythm of movement beneath her. Her thoughts broke through the muck of oblivion, and she stirred.

She opened her eyes to the sight of a black cloth vest, so close she could count the stitches. A silver chain leading out of a small waistcoat pocket glinted in the light, and Isobel saw that she grasped the loose cloth of what she thought must be someone’s black cloak. That was when she realized that the pressure at her back and behind her knees was the pressure of arms, arms she currently occupied, arms that carried her.

His body felt neither cold nor warm next to hers, solid, but somehow not alive. She listened, but he never breathed. Her gaze trailed up to the chin and nose covered by a blood-marred scarf. She squinted, trying unsuccessfully to peer through the shadow cast over his face by a wide-brimmed hat.

Stars dotted the sky around the edges of him, visible through tangles of knotted limbs that could not have belonged to the same trees as the woodlands. Their leaf-dotted boughs were too peaceful, too normal.

Could it be possible she was back in her own world?

At first she didn’t say anything, because she was too afraid to hope. She wanted to suspend time and just be still for another moment, to let her tired mind and sore muscles rest. The stale, moldering odor that clung to him didn’t bother her as it had before, and against him, she felt almost comfortable. Safe.

Isobel released her grip on his cloak and, curious, let her fingers spider-crawl their way to the glinting chain that had caught her eye. She pulled at it, and a small ticking pocket watch came free in her hand. She turned it over, her eyes following the light as it chased across the polished surface. She opened the watch. It had a simple white face encircled by roman numerals and three black hands. There was a name engraved in cursive on the inside of the little circular cover. Isobel traced her thumb over the name. “Augustus,” she read aloud. Her voice came out small and hollow-sounding, as though it had been a long time since she’d last used it. “Is that your real name?” she asked. “Augustus?”

“I dare think,” Reynolds said as, over his shoulder, the pale slice of moon became visible between the knit of branches, “that not half so much trouble would find its way to you if you would only learn to leave things that are not yours alone.”

“Okay, Augustus.”

He sighed. “Augustus is dead, long since.”

“Oh . . .” She closed the watch and slipped it back into his pocket. “And you’re not?”

“Not quite.”

“Am—am I dead?”

“You, strange puzzle of a girl, are very lucky.”

“Where—where are we?”

“We are nearly through the park behind your home,” he said.