Soft as snow, the ash fell to collect in the grooves of sculpted gowns. It gathered in the folds of trailing robes, pooled in the palms of outstretched hands and on the curves of fanned seraphs’ wings.
Scattered between the figures, gnarled woodland trees twisted toward the clouded gray sky like thorn bushes, their limbs dotted with the black bodies of crows.
Nocs, Isobel thought when the ghouls-in-bird-form began cawing, rankled by the presence of her and her double.
As Isobel followed her own ghost into their midst, the birds flittered and flapped. They croaked back and forth to one another, frill feathers bristling. One of the larger birds, its plumage scraggly and ragged, launched itself from its branch to cross the courtyard. Its dark shadow skimmed the fog, and glancing up, Isobel saw the bird crane its neck toward her, as if to get a better look with its single good eye.
When the bird lighted on another knotted bough, the layers of fog thinned, and Isobel was suddenly aware of a form seated on the low brick wall directly across from her. Of feathery edges of jet hair and slumped black-clad shoulders. Someone living.
Varen.
He sat with his head hanging, his attention fixated on the small object he kept turning over and over in his hand.
Another of Isobel’s stone twins sat at his side. Arms stiff and shoulders hunched, she clutched the edge of the wall. Her wings tucked, the statue leaned toward him as if patiently waiting for him to take notice of her. Or for a kiss.
A wreath of ash-dusted stone flowers crowned her head, and the layers of her dress spilled onto the floor in folds that, like the statue itself, held only the appearance of softness.
While Isobel stalled at the sight of him, her ghost double sprinted straight for him, and disturbed by the sudden burst of movement, the crows in the trees began to squawk.
Their shouts of warning echoed across the courtyard, ricocheting from wall to wall.
Varen looked up. Setting eyes on Isobel’s double as it closed in on him, cutting a straight path through the fog, he stood. His fist closed around the item he’d been studying, and his arms fell open.
That single gesture, so helpless, caused something inside Isobel to leap out of dormancy.
Though her heart had been restarted in a literal sense once before, jogged from a state of dead matter into a beating force of life, she had not since felt the electricity of her renewed existence. Not until that precise moment when Varen enwrapped her ghost, pulling the phantom in close as it swung its arms around his neck.
His face pinched tight with pain, though, as if he knew what would come next.
Almost the instant the two collided, Isobel’s double shriveled in Varen’s grip. Its limbs fell limp and its skin sucked inward, its face hollowed out, flesh contracting. Blond hair faded to scraggly gray. Now a skull, the phantom’s head lolled backward, its jaw falling open as if in a silent scream.
Still Varen refused to release the double. He held tight to the bones even as they broke apart.
Transforming to ash, the entity’s remains fell through his grip, cascading into the vapors that swirled in their wake.
Varen lowered his arms. He looked up, his face smudged with the gray dust of the phantasm’s essence. His dull eyes, despondent, black as nothing, flicked to Isobel.
A beat passed, and she knew how this must seem to him. That a replay was about to begin.
When he began striding quickly toward her, she felt her heart stop all over again.
Isobel’s terror returned, dousing the bittersweet spark that had flickered awake inside her.
Dropping open of their own accord, her arms invited him in the way his arms had her ghost.
But Isobel could sense what Varen intended to do. He’d send her away like he had last night. He’d obliterate her to nothing to prevent her from deteriorating in front of him again.
Reliving her demise over and over, seeing her image all around him, frozen in the form of these cold, unfeeling monuments locked in eternal sleep—this had become his fate in this horrendous realm. His existence.
This was his darkness.
His hell.
But she wasn’t dead. And she wasn’t ready to be sent back, either. Not yet.
Brushing aside the nagging memory of Reynolds’s warning not to interact, Isobel focused her mind on doing the only thing she knew to do. The only thing that would hold any power at all.
More power than any words.