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“This isn’t a dream,” she snapped. “I know I’m awake. I know what’s real and what’s not. I know you can’t hurt me, and now what I want to know is how you’re getting here. I’m not asking again, and if you won’t tell me, I will smash in your foul, ugly—”
“We are here,” he growled, edging closer again, crimson teeth bared in a grimace, “because of what we know. And that is how. She taught us. And what one can do, so can the other.”
Isobel watched him closely, too distracted by his continued approach to absorb his meaning. “What—what are you saying?” she stammered. “That the other Nocs can—?”
In an instant, he dispersed into smoke, rushing her like a gust of wind.
She had no time to scream before the tendrils of vapor wrapped around her throat.
Isobel dropped the trophy. She heard it thud against the carpet in the second before she lifted her hands to claw at the looping threads of swirling mist.
Her nails scraped her own skin, but the tightness remained.
“We didn’t want to be right about you,” his voice seethed in her ear.
Isobel twisted. Stumbling backward to escape, her heel caught on the brick ledge of the fireplace. She fell, almost landing in the hearth.
The inky swirls whisked around her and Isobel held her breath, afraid of what would happen if she dared breathe in any part of it.
“But we were,” he whispered as he re-formed and crouched over her, hands braced on his knees.
Turning his head to the side, he glared at her through one black eye the same greedy way a bird inspects a shining beetle.
She watched his teeth, serrated and gleaming, part and come together through the cavity in his cheek as he spoke. “All along. We were right.”
Isobel fought the urge to shut her eyes, to shut him out. “You know you can’t hurt me,” she said, more in an effort to affirm that to herself than to him. “You can’t do anything. So why do you keep coming back? What do you want?”
“There,” he said, leering at her, cupping her chin with one cool clay hand. “Good for you, cheerleader. You’re finally asking the right questions.”
He drew his hand slowly back, his claws grazing her cheek. Isobel winced as the razor tips raked her skin. There was no pain. Only the surge of dread as his face drew nearer to hers. “I want what I thought we both did,” he said.
Isobel kept her eyes squarely on his, wide and unblinking. Meanwhile, she trained the fringe of her vision on the wrought-iron stand that sat only inches to her right, her attention zoning in on the handle of the fireplace poker sticking out of the very middle.
“You don’t scare me anymore,” she said, even though she could tell by the wistful smile he wore that he knew it was a lie. She didn’t care. She only needed him to stay distracted long enough for her to make her move. “So why do you keep trying?”
He brushed his thumb across her lips. “I guess you’re not as easy to forget as we’d hoped.”
Growling, Isobel jerked her head away from him. She lifted a knee and kicked hard.
His body loosened, and her leg went through smoke.
Seizing her chance, she rolled onto her side, groping for the iron poker. It rang out with a low clang as she snatched it from its stand. Scrambling to her feet, she began taking swipes at the darkness around her.
The poker sliced through the tendrils again and again with no effect. The haze slid back from her, and Pinfeathers’s face, translucent and vaporous, re-formed within the tangle of violet wisps.
“Your necklace,” he snarled. “It’s a clever trick, but it won’t help you.”
Isobel charged him, the poker whistling as it arced through the air. Again the monster slithered back, his face dissolving, lost once more amid the thickening murk.
“It’s true she won’t be able to touch you,” hissed his disembodied voice, the violet mist now drifting toward the ceiling and out of Isobel’s batting range. “But at this rate, she won’t have to.”
Isobel eyed him as he took solid shape again, his back pressed into one high corner, his arms outspread to brace himself, heels planted against the wall behind him, making him look like an enormous spider.
With that thought, Isobel stooped and grabbed her trophy where it lay on its side next to the couch. She launched it at him.
Pinfeathers caught the trophy with one clawed hand. His face screwing up with rage, he flung it back at her. Isobel yelped, clutching tighter to the fireplace poker as the trophy smashed the fat-bellied lamp that sat on the end table just beside her.
“Listen to me!” he railed. “Why won’t you ever listen to me?”
