Oblivion

30

By Horror Haunted

Varen tried to wrench free, like Isobel knew he would. But she was ready.

Holding him steady, she willed her butterflies closer.

When the throng followed her silent command, swooping near enough for wings to rasp against Varen’s coat and snag loose wisps of her hair, she actually smiled.

Varen looked left and right, his confusion melting into disbelief.

Taking advantage of his disorientation—the distraction she’d created—Isobel concentrated fully on banishing Varen’s sideways tower. In its stead, she pictured the first place she could think of.

The butterflies dispersed to reveal an enormous room with a gallery walkway lining its upper level: the warehouse where the Grim Facade had taken place.

They stood together in the very spot she’d imagined, on that patch of dance floor where they had shared their first last kiss.

Gathering into clusters, the butterflies merged into people and things.

Caught in mid-sway, leather-clad boys and bodice-laced girls stood all around, frozen in tableau as though, for them, time had stopped. Leaning this way and that in the fog-machine haze, the goths held wrists aloft with bracelets and studded cuffs, their masked and painted faces half-lost in shadow, half-illuminated by the eerie blue-green glow spilling from the stage.

All eyes were closed, including those of the singer, who cradled her microphone between hands gloved in lace, her face lined with false stitching like a rag doll’s.

Though her lips were frozen, the girl’s siren voice, far away and muffled, rebounded through the hall. The unintelligible lyrics of her song joined with the low, echoing moan of a cello.

Isobel stood as motionless as the spectral goths.

She wanted to grant Varen enough time to acclimate to their altered surroundings. To check with himself to be sure he had not been the one to cause the shift.

Then, unable to hold back any longer, she released his hands and, touching his cheek, drew his gaze back to her.

Varen’s scowl had returned, but his anger seemed false now, just another mask meant to hide the doubt he was still too afraid to let go of.

If it was more proof that he needed . . .

Grasping his collar with both hands, Isobel rose onto her tiptoes. She tugged him down to meet her halfway and, pressing her lips to his, delivered the softest of kisses—a shadow of the one they had shared in this exact spot on Halloween night.

Varen tensed. He gripped her upper arms, as though bracing himself for the worst.

He did not return the kiss. But, Isobel noted, he did not try to pull away, either. And as he allowed the connection to linger . . . and linger, the cold loop of that silver ring searing her lips, Isobel decided to count it a win.

Only when the metal warmed to match her own temperature did Isobel lower herself onto her heels again, ending her kiss.

As difficult as it was for her to relinquish her hold on him, she let her hands fall to her sides.

For a long time, Varen only stared at her in that unreadable way that always left her feeling scorched from the inside out. She wanted so badly to whisper her own I told you so, but she held her silence, letting her persisting presence speak for her.

Memories make better weapons than words, Pinfeathers had said, and Isobel hoped that, for both her and Varen’s sakes, the Noc’s final scrap of wisdom would prove as true as his warnings.

Lifting his hand at last, Varen grazed hesitant fingertips along her jawline, his touch tentative and unsure, as if he were testing the realness of a polished window to see if the glass could truly be there. Or if it was all just air.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he murmured, and Isobel remembered that he’d uttered these same words before, in that forever-ago moment.

Was he still testing her? Waiting for her to repeat old lines and reveal herself as yet another hallucination, another nightmare waiting to self-destruct and eradicate the remaining fragments of his sanity?

“You’re right,” Isobel replied, resting a hand on his sleeve. “I shouldn’t. But that’s why I am here. Because . . . neither should you.”

He frowned, pain flickering across his face.

“It can’t really be you,” he said. “I know it can’t.”

“Why not?” Isobel asked, offering him a rueful smile. “I mean, don’t you think it’s at all romantic, the idea that love could conquer death?”

Alarm flashed in Varen’s eyes. He snatched his hand away as if she’d burned him.

When he began to back away from her, Isobel knew she’d struck a chord. The chord?

Of course Varen would recognize the question; he’d once posed the same one to her. On that night she’d stayed late to help him clean up after Brad and the crew had trashed the ice cream parlor where he’d worked.