AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Brown leaves plastered the pavement beneath her wheels, their slick bodies smoothed sticker-flat by the rain and the tires of passing cars. The gas lamps lining the grass median between the two one-way lanes glowed with live flames that fluttered tall and thin within their glass holders.
She stopped pedaling and let the bike roll on its own, gliding between the two rows of darkened Victorian homes while she took a moment to catch her breath.
Their wide windows, like so many eyes, seemed to follow her as she went.
Isobel clutched the handle brakes as she drew nearer to the solemn redbrick house Varen had once invited her into. Even though she had not planned to, as soon as the darkened stained-glass front door came into view, Isobel extended one foot and pressed her toe to the pavement, stopping the bike. From the middle of the street, she watched the house.
Looking up at Varen’s bedroom window on the third floor, she felt as though something within was watching her back. But she could see nothing beyond the darkened panes.
Isobel turned away and pushed off on the bike once more, telling herself she couldn’t afford to linger. Not when she needed to be back in her room before her mother woke to make her dad’s coffee and pack Danny’s lunch.
As she approached the fountain, she again squeezed the handlebar brakes. The tires squealed very slightly, and she did not wait for the bike to reach a complete stop before standing up on the pedals, swinging one leg over, and dismounting.
She walked the bike to the circular curb that surrounded the fountain and, gently lowering it to the pavement, strode across the brief strip of grass all the way up to the ornate grillwork railing that separated the dry concrete reservoir from the frozen turf.
Wrapping her already numb hands around the painted metal, Isobel peered up at the fountain. Floodlights, nestled just below the drained concrete base, lit the tarnished bronze basin from every angle, illuminating the leaf-and-scroll-flourished underside of the shallow and empty, goblet-shaped basin.
Isobel glanced to her left and then to her right.
Even though a row of parked cars lined both of the lanes and a few sconce lights glowed beneath porticos and wrap-around porches, the neighborhood felt eerily deserted.
Her grip on the railing tightened, and with a sinking sensation, as though she were standing in quicksand and not on solid ground, she began to wonder why she’d come. What had she been hoping for? That he would appear before her the way his father’s note said he had last night?
Maybe, she thought, she’d been holding on to the distant hope that, like the bookstore, the place he had told her she would find him in the dreamworld had some connection to its real-world counterpart. Some traversable link.
But if not Varen himself, then there at least had to be something for her here. Some kind of token or sign that would reassure her that he was still waiting for her, still holding on.
Even something as minute and simple as a single red rose petal.
There was nothing, though.
Instead the entire street felt hollow, drained of the timeless beauty it had possessed that autumn afternoon when he’d first brought her here.
Isobel looked back at the fountain.
Curly-haired cherubs frolicked beneath the basin in a captured moment of abandon. Though the figures might have seemed playful in the daylight, something about the mix of shadows and stark light cast on their small faces by the floodlights made them appear more mischievous than free-spirited, more impish than gleeful.
The large swans that reveled with them, rearing back with wings outspread, looked somehow frantic.
Isobel took a step back and then another.
Blocked by the wide bowl of the basin, the lights could not reach the sultry figure of the nude woman who stood at the very top of the fountain, her veil billowing out behind her. She remained swathed in shadow, a silhouette that belonged to the night.
“You won’t win,” Isobel whispered under her breath.
Her gaze locked on the woman’s face, featureless in the dark.
“Whether what I’ve seen is true or not,” she went on, her voice growing louder with conviction, “no matter what you’ve made him believe, you won’t stop me. As soon as I find him, as soon as he sees me, he’ll know you’ve lied. Demon or not, you can’t scare me anymore. I will bring him back. And then I’ll find a way to stop you for good. To keep you from doing this to anyone ever again. I swear it.”
Isobel turned her back on the fountain. She strode to the curb and bent to pick up Danny’s bike.
“Is that some kind of bad habit of yours? Making promises you can’t keep?”
Isobel halted. That voice . . .
Slowly she turned, glancing toward the fountain again. Then, lowering the bike, she let it drop at the last second before hurrying to make her way around its circumference in quick strides, stopping when she found him.
He sat with his back pressed to the fountain’s base, just below one of the unfurling swans. To his right, one of the bronze cherubs seemed to lean toward him with cautious interest.
