Isobel looked to Gwen, issuing a silent plea. Gwen frowned, eyes oozing suspicion as they flicked to Reynolds.
“Gwen, please,” Isobel said.
Gwen stared unflinchingly at Reynolds for another long beat. Then Isobel felt Gwen’s hand bump her own, passing over the tube of pepper spray. Isobel accepted the cool cylinder as she fought another smile.
Breaking her sharp glare at last, Gwen turned and rattled down the steps after Varen.
As Isobel watched her friend go, she had only a second to wonder what this place was—where Varen had vanished to in such a rush and why. Because when Reynolds spoke again, his words drew her focus entirely back to him.
“I have lied to you but once, Isobel,” he said.
Isobel waited a beat before speaking.
“You’re talking about today,” she said, her voice a monotone. “In the gym. When you told me Lilith thought I was dead.”
“Her discovery of my identity, that I was the one Lost Soul who could freely enter your world, made it necessary, in the beginning, for me to agree to her demands. To follow her plan. I could not, after all, have aided you from a tomb.”
“Hold that thought,” Isobel said, flashing a palm. “More on that in a second. But before we pass Go and collect two hundred here, let’s just back up one space.” He tilted his head at her, but Isobel hurried on. “So, putting aside the fact that I’m kind of over it now, because I have to be, I am curious how the whole ‘Varen is safe at home’ thing doesn’t qualify in your book as a lie.”
“That night I carried you through the park,” Reynolds said, referring to Halloween, “I told you the boy was home. I said nothing of his safety.”
“Oh,” Isobel said, pointing at him. “I see what you did there. Neat trick omitting the truth. That’s not lying at all.”
“Would you truly rather berate me again than learn how your freedom may be won?”
Isobel’s cool skepticism faltered. Suddenly she understood what Reynolds was trying to convey in his archaic, roundabout manner. This was his way of telling her that there was a way. That the bait he’d used to lure her through the veil, to entice her into trusting him again, hadn’t just been lip service. Poe really must have attempted to break his connection to the dreamworld. To Lilith.
“You said Edgar tried to get away,” she murmured, speaking fast. “You said he tried to break the bond but that he got caught before he cou—”
“And that is why you must now listen very carefully.” Reynolds unknotted Isobel’s ribbon from his waist. “For far more depends upon what happens next than just your soul or the boy’s.”
Reynolds extended the graying pink satin to her and she took it gingerly, surprised to find it had somehow retained its original silkiness. Her eyes searched Reynolds’s, and in the shadow cast by the wide brim of his fedora, the lines on his face seemed deeper than before.
“Should you fail to do what Edgar could not,” Reynolds went on, “those who inhabit this world, as well as those from my own realm, will suffer the wrath of the demon whose rage we have, in your name, dared to provoke.”
Isobel’s eyes widened. “M-my name?”
“That is why I stayed behind,” he said. “To rally them. I knew they would join me only after witnessing for themselves the magnitude of your power. What you are capable of.”
“Me?” Isobel blurted. “I—you were the one who—”
“You lived, Isobel,” said Reynolds, cutting her off again. “You survived the fire you created when you destroyed the link. Then you died at that hospital and, through sheer self-will, returned to life. Not only that, but you live on. And until you dared to confront me in that churchyard, until I saw you brazenly face death and damnation upon that cliff—all for the sake of another—I had forgotten that a power greater than darkness did, indeed, exist. I had forgotten, as well, what it meant to possess a soul.”
“Okay,” Isobel said, clenching the ribbon tighter in her fist, “I don’t know what’s freaking me out more. You admitting you might have one emotion more than none at all, or the news flash that I’m supposed to save the world plus your parallel dimension buddies.”
“You’re afraid,” Reynolds said with a nod. “And that is good. For the worst of her fury, I vow to you, she holds in reserve for you.”
“See? Right there,” Isobel said. “Just . . . stop saying stuff like that.”
“When Edgar was captured,” Reynolds said, “when he was pulled back into the woodlands, he’d been in transit on this side, in reality. Traveling between cities. He was trying to complete the ultimate objective of a quest that he believed would save him.”
Isobel looked down to the ribbon in her hand, thinking back to what Varen had said about Poe’s final days during their project presentation.
Poe, Isobel remembered, had disappeared after leaving Richmond. He’d been on his way to New York, where he was to meet with Muddy, Virginia’s mother—his aunt. Poe’s plan had been to collect Muddy and bring her to live with him at his new home in Richmond. But he never made it that far. Richmond was the last place that anyone who knew him personally had seen him.
o;I have lied to you but once, Isobel,” he said.
Isobel waited a beat before speaking.