“They have taxis there,” Isobel said, even though she wasn’t sure.
“Yeah,” Gwen said, “right along with a crime rate that makes the Big Apple blush. And in case you forgot, taxis cost money. A lot of money. And forgive me for mentioning it, but last time I checked, your brother’s troll bridge tax rate hadn’t gotten any lower. Like I told you before, you’re going to need a plan. And you’re going to need help.” This time, Gwen aimed the fry at herself. “My help,” she said, then popped the fry into her mouth.
Isobel struggled to come up with some valid reason why she didn’t.
“You know there’s gonna be a ton of people there that night, don’t you?” Gwen asked. “And security, too. Turns out the Lone Ranger’s got quite a following,” she added before chomping down on a handful of fries bundled together between her fingertips.
“I might have heard something about that,” Isobel mumbled. “How—how did you know?”
“Google is a verb now,” Gwen said.
Isobel lifted the shake’s straw to her lips. She took a long tug, swallowed, and then took another. Brain freeze radiated through her skull like a crawling frost, but the pain felt good in a strange way, an active reminder that she was, as yet, still among the living.
“And you’re right,” Gwen said. “It probably is better if I don’t know any more than that. Otherwise, I might actually come to my senses and try to stop you. So I’m figuring why not just cut the crap and go along so I can keep you alive myself?”
Isobel smiled sadly as the slow freeze inside her head gradually subsided.
“You’re really coming?” she asked.
“Couldn’t stop me if you tried. It’s one of those pesky things we have in common.”
“You do and I deal, right?”
“Finally,” Gwen said. She lifted her tea from its holder and raised the foam cup toward Isobel as though in a toast. “You’re starting to catch on.”
THAT NIGHT, NO MATTER HOW hard she tried, Isobel could not fall asleep.
She rolled back and forth on her mattress, flipping from one side to the other, unable to make up her mind whether it was better to face her window or to have her back to it.
Neither felt comfortable. Or safe.
Nothing did anymore.
Finally she settled on lying flat on her back and staring up at her ceiling. But then her doorway, which stood open and empty across from the foot of her bed, took on a menacing presence, as though it might fill at any moment with some horrible new nightmare, or the scenery beyond would transform from white walls into woodlands back-lit by violet light.
She already knew it would do no good to shut the door. So she shut her eyes instead.
As she lay there, exhausted and yet firmly wired into wakefulness, Isobel thought she was beginning to understand something Pinfeathers had once told her in the moments before she’d first come face-to-face with Lilith.
Open this door, and no matter what, you’ll never close it.
By degrees, Isobel had grown to fear the night, to fear what the veil of sleep would allow to worm through her slumbering mind, what holes its images could burrow through her heart. And the seeds of doubts it could plant in her soul.
She rolled onto her side again, facing her closet. Huddling into herself, she clutched her blankets tightly. What she’d seen in the dreamworld, with Varen in the attic of the reversed bookshop, couldn’t have been real. It had been a fabrication meant to confuse and detour her. Something Lilith had concocted to distract her and cause her to lose hope so she would give up.
Because if it had been real, Isobel would have found the ribbon that afternoon. It would have been in the bookstore, just like the gramophone and the crooked sign and the black burn mark on the floor and everything else that had been the same. But the ribbon, the only thing that had mattered, hadn’t been there at all. And that alone should have proved to her that what she’d seen had been an illusion. That Varen still had to have the ribbon in his possession. He would never let it go. He would never let her go. She had to believe that. They’d been through so much.
Sitting up, Isobel wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging herself into a tight ball, and lifted her eyes to the smooth surface of her mirror.
If Varen existed within the world beyond the mirror, trapped there without the ability to return, then what or who had his father seen last night?
Had Varen truly stepped out of nowhere, causing his dad to swerve and almost careen into the fountain that sat in the center of their old Victorian neighborhood?