“You knew?” he asked, his voice quiet, disconcertingly calm.
“I—I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Isobel stammered. “I wanted to, but . . . Varen, I’m so sorry.”
“How long?”
Isobel fidgeted with the ribbon, uncertain of what, exactly, he was asking her.
“How long has he been gone?” Varen snapped, louder this time.
“The funeral was today,” Isobel said. “This morning. Gwen and I were both there. I went because I—”
“Goddamn it,” he said, snatching a small lamp from a nearby nightstand and sending a cascade of empty orange medicine bottles to the floor. He slung the lamp at the far wall, where it smashed and fell.
Isobel flinched. She watched the lamp’s fractured bulb sputter before dying out.
Suddenly the objects in the room—books and boxes, a trash can, the medicine bottles—shifted. They rose together and hovered in place.
Tensing, Isobel checked the grandfather clock, the hands of which had started to spin.
“Varen,” she began, but she stopped, her words catching at the sound of a woman’s humming.
It was the melody from Varen’s lullaby, the heartrending song Madeline had written for him when he was a child. When he’d still been her child.
Then the humming dissolved, becoming laughter, low and insidious.
An electric charge filled the air, causing the hairs on the nape of Isobel’s neck to stand at attention. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to look back in the direction she’d come from—toward the end of the hall where the building laughter rebounded.
Instead she kept her gaze fixed on Varen as he slowly turned to face the door.
Black once more, his eyes stared straight through her.
44
White-Robed Forms
Radiating fury, Varen stalked toward Isobel.
As he moved, the doorway that stood between them expanded, its rectangular arch rounding as it transformed to stone. Then Varen walked right past her, across the wide threshold and into the hall, where his continuing steps triggered more change.
Like a crawling frost, cracked stone spread out from beneath his boots. Plaster and drywall faded into rough gray brick. While the emerging walls of Varen’s palace absorbed the doorways on Isobel’s right, the entries on her left morphed into more Gothic arches, and the passageway before her took the form of a cloister.
Through the open arcade, Isobel saw that Varen had returned them to the courtyard of statues.
Or was it that he’d brought the courtyard of statues to them?
But then, this was not the same courtyard she’d encountered before. Not only were there no angels among the gathering of fog-enveloped white forms—no sets of wings, neither tucked nor unfurled—she saw no faces, either.
None fully decipherable . . .
Draping stone shrouds covered the statues’ heads, spilling long down their feminine bodies in clinging sculpted folds.
Lilith’s laughter echoed all around, trailing off into the eerie garden.
Another trap, Isobel thought. The demon’s final play.
And Varen, with his mind now firmly set on revenge, was about to walk straight into it.
“Varen, wait,” Isobel called after him.