But . . . if the others had gone, if her concentration had fallen away from maintaining their presence, was it possible that one could linger?
As a test, Isobel sent a dismissing thought at the figure. When the doppelgänger remained, though, Isobel knew her own mind couldn’t be responsible for its existence. She doubted it was one of Varen’s imagined phantoms either, because, squinting at the copy, she saw that it bore a matching scar on its cheek.
That detail, more than anything, warned Isobel that something more insidious was at work.
She began walking toward the duplicate.
“You,” Isobel said, but stopped when the pawn spoke in perfect unison with her.
Nails of ice pricked her skin, and this time, Isobel took a long moment to formulate the words she would speak next. Because now she had no doubt to whom she was speaking.
“I know it’s you,” Isobel said, and again, the double matched her words, its inflection timed exactly with Isobel’s to create an eerie echo effect.
“You led me to the courtyard, to Varen, on purpose,” Isobel went on, doing her best to ignore the copy’s mimicking speech. “That was you in the hallway at Trenton, too, wasn’t it? In that dream you told Reynolds to take me to. You were the one holding the stack of papers. Am I right?”
Going quiet, Isobel waited for a response, but it never came. The double only stared, blinking when she did.
Isobel sneered, a flash of fury igniting inside of her.
“Haven’t you learned yet not to mess with me?” she asked, walking forward again, and this time the duplicate did not copy her.
Instead, as Isobel drew closer, it began to deteriorate.
Turning sallow, the entity’s skin shriveled, sucking inward, clinging to the underlying framework of bone like cellophane. Its eyes welled black, sinking farther into its head with each of Isobel’s approaching steps. But Isobel didn’t stop, because the distortion only helped to affirm what she already knew.
“What’s the matter, Bess?” Isobel hissed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was making you sick.”
This had happened before when Isobel had neared Lilith while wearing the hamsa necklace. Nestled under Isobel’s shirt now, it bolstered her with the same strength Gwen’s presence had given her that morning at the cemetery. The charm’s small and steady pressure, coupled with the obvious effect it had on the demon, helped to remind Isobel that a power greater than this monster standing before her did exist. It had helped her once, and would again.
“I told you before,” Isobel went on, stopping three feet from the silent demon and its hollow, penetrating stare. “You won’t get what you want. No matter what you do, how hard you try to get rid of me or to twist Varen’s mind, you won’t win. I’ll find him because I always do. You should know by now that you can’t stop me. You haven’t yet. And when he wakes up from this nightmare and sees that I am real, we’re both going to put you back into that filthy stone box you crawled out of. And that’s where you’re going to stay. Forever.”
Now a ragged corpse, its cheerleading uniform hanging limp from an emaciated frame covered in gray, weblike flesh, the demon smiled at her.
Revealing two rows of sharp and spindly needle-teeth, that grin seemed to dare Isobel to venture a single inch nearer.
But when she stayed put, the demon slowly lifted an arm, extending a skeletal fist toward her. Through those disintegrating fingers, Isobel glimpsed something small clutched in the wraith’s grip.
“Death comes for us all eventually,” the double said at last, again using Isobel’s own voice. “Sooner for some than others, though nearly always sooner than expected. Especially, as you just witnessed, in regards to those we hold most dear.”
The demon opened its hand, those awful fingers crumpling toward the palm where there rested a small wad of what appeared to be pink construction paper.
Isobel hitched a quick breath when she recognized the crushed origami butterfly as the very same she had made at her family’s kitchen table the evening before.
“And to think,” Lilith said with a giggle, her voice going guttural and low, mutating to match her decomposing body, “they actually believed I was you.”
With that, the entity fell apart into ash—just like all the other pawns.
Oh God, Isobel thought as she snatched for the crushed paper butterfly, rescuing it before it could float to the floor with the rest of the demon’s discarded guise.
The paper felt too real in her grasp.
Her mom and dad.
Danny.
25
Disturbances