“They’re taking her to the ICU. Your mom and dad are wait—”
Danny’s face crumpled. “No, they’re not taking her there!” he shouted. “She was fine. I just saw her and she was fine!”
“Danny—”
The nurse reached for him, but he jerked his arm away and skittered around her, running past Isobel and through the open doorway.
Hurrying after, the nurse continued to call out to him.
Isobel began to follow but stopped suddenly when a glimmer of light erupted in the space right in front of her, like the glint of a shining object. It drew her attention downward. There, extending outward from her center, she saw it—the silver cord. It wavered, fluttering in and out of existence, as though struggling to remain intact.
When it glimmered into sight again, visible for longer than an instant, Isobel reached out and touched her fingertips to the ethereal strand. Suddenly, in a whir of movement and a haze of images, she was somewhere else—another room in the hospital. One filled with doctors and harried nurses, all of them wearing clean blue medical masks.
They stood gathered around a long table. Whoever was lying on the cold metal surface, Isobel could see only her bare feet, which poked out from the huddle of medical personnel.
“Clear!” she heard someone shout, followed by a harsh slamming sound.
The light inside the room grew instantly brighter around her. Intense enough to smudge away the walls and the cabinets and the swinging doors that flapped like shutters in the wind as nurses came and went. Clean and white, blindingly bright, it erased everything but those two limp feet, the table, and those who stood closest to it.
Already knowing what she would find—who she would find—in the center of their frenzy, Isobel slowly rounded the table. All the while, the nurses and doctors remained oblivious to her dual presence, taking turns applying instruments, their frantic movements reminding her of swarming ants.
Peering between the shoulders of two of the medical personnel, Isobel did not think the battered and bruised girl on the table looked much like her. And yet she knew by the thin scratch on her cheek that it could be no one else.
Isobel lifted a hand to her face but felt no trace of the scratch. Yet she remembered in an instant how it had gotten there.
Pinfeathers . . .
The Noc’s image was the first to spring forth from behind the previously locked door. Then came the memory of the rose garden and the chaos that had transpired there. From there, her thoughts reeled backward in fast rewind, and she recalled being in the graveyard where Poe was buried, and that that place had been the reason she’d come here, to Baltimore.
The tone of the heart monitor continued to sound its long and unceasing note, making it harder to think.
“Clear!” someone shouted again.
The doctor shocked her again, and Isobel saw her body convulse.
The sight made her wonder whether she wanted to continue remembering, and yet she knew she was dying. Or was she already dead? How? What had brought her here, to this point of destruction?
“We’ve lost her,” she heard someone announce.
Lost.
She’d been searching for something she’d lost. No, she recalled. Not something. Some one.
A vision of a pale face and black eyes flashed through her mind.
“Varen,” she whispered. Of course. She’d come all this way to find him, to face Reynolds in the graveyard, and to bring him home. But then, if she was here, where was he?
Had she been able to bring him back? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t delve that deep.
Isobel looked up, distracted from her thoughts when she saw the nurses beginning to unhook the equipment from her lifeless form on the table.
She looked down at her astral body, searching for any sign of the silver cord, but now she could barely see the outline of her astral figure either. It was as if she was fading out, like a ghost.
But it couldn’t end like this, she thought. She had to know what had happened to him. At the very least, she had to know if she’d been able to bring him home. She couldn’t leave, she couldn’t go anywhere until she knew for sure.
“Stop,” she said to the man who’d begun to unroll a smooth, clean white sheet over her body.
“Stop!” she shouted again, and this time, as the lights above him and the equipment around him stuttered and fizzled, he did.
Isobel took her chance. She closed her eyes, using the split second of bought time to imagine the silver cord back into existence.
But it was too late, she was slipping backward, falling away. Dissolving. She opened her eyes to see the world whir into an indefinite blur.
