Between (16 page)

F
or Isobel, all times, all places are as one.

That she should be engaged one moment in a fruitless search for razor blades in the bathroom and the next moment find herself in this blood-spattered kitchen with no chain of events, no passing of time in between does not seem strange. Both are prisons of a sort, outside either her desire or her control.

She remembers continuity, long stretches of it, days, maybe even years, where events seemed to follow one another in a logical sort of way. But mostly there is no narrative to tie it all together, and she knows, besides, that nothing is ever what it seems. Everything in this room, all that she can see and touch and smell, is nothing more than a collection of particles. If she believes
here is floor, here is chair
, the particles will hold together so she can stand, or sit, but floors and chairs come and go without reason.

At this time, in this kitchen, she is fastened to a chair by rope so solid she doesn’t have to work to believe that it will hold her. A woman stands over her, a woman both familiar and strange, who runs through many fragments of existence. Something in the woman’s laughter excites her and she laughs, too, although nothing here is funny and her hands,
bound behind her back, ache with their position and the tightness of the rope.

Although she is here in the kitchen she is also standing on a stone platform in a dark cave that stinks of dragon and of blood. In both places the woman is with her, holding the knife, and something is going to happen, does happen, a monstrous thing, she knows, but she can’t remember, won’t remember.

She is sitting on a bench in a garden where a fountain plays, and the man she loves with every atom of her body puts a ring on her finger, a small gold ring set with rubies red as blood. It is the blood of his heart, he tells her, for her to keep with her always, and she slides an identical ring onto his finger, a promise.

She is sitting in a rocking chair and she holds a baby in her arms and she is the mother now. The baby cries and she rocks and soothes, because that is what mothers do. There is another chair in the hospital where she finds herself, again and again, oh so tired, pretending to swallow the pills they give her. Risperdal, Desyrel, Seroquel. She knows their names, knows they will seem to stop this shift of realities, but fears this more than anything. If she ever fully believes there is only one world, one time, that everything around her is real, then she will truly be insane.

This chair in this now is all of these things and none of these things. Her head is full of voices, all with different stories to tell, and it is hard, so hard, to hear the voice of the woman with the hazel eyes and the long dark hair, who very much wants her to answer a question.

Over and over the woman says one word—
key
. Isobel hears the shape of it, knows it is the name for an object meant to open doors. Vivian has a tiny key on a chain around her neck that she thinks Isobel does not see, but she will not speak of her daughter in this now. She lets herself slip away from the woman and her demanding voice, following the trail of other voices that leads nowhere and everywhere other than here.

When she again surfaces, the chair is gone and Isobel finds herself in a place both new and old. Here there is a fountain, mesmerizing and perfect. Water droplets rise and fall, fragmenting ordinary light into colors, bending reality.

She knows this fountain, this space of grass, the stone bench where she sits and has sat a hundred times before.

She also knows the castle towering black in the not very far away, all sharp turrets and twisting towers.

Her mind grapples with what she sees. The fountain belongs in Dreamworld. This she knows because it was her dream, her very own, even though she chose to give it away. As for the castle, she lived there for eighteen years. It belongs to Surmise, and the two—the fountain and the castle—should not come together in this way.

Even with this disconnect, time holds steady between the fracture lines. She looks past the falling water to watch a man pacing a well-worn path along the far edge of the pool. Logic, surfacing from a long imprisonment, tells her that this cannot possibly be
him
, not after all these years. See—this man’s clothing is ragged. There are holes in his elbows and one knee. His hair is gray; there is a stiffness in his steps, as though his knees hurt him; and above all, he does not look up with eyes alert and wide, blue as the sky above them, does not sense her here and run to fling his arms around her, is so intent on this pacing, forth and back, and back and forth, that he is unaware of her presence, he whose heart beats faster whenever she is close by.

And so she knows that it cannot be him, and yet her heart refuses to accept this and beats an erratic and rapid rhythm and her knees begin to tremble. She presses her hands flat against the cold stone bench, grateful that it clings together, remains solid, does not become another chair in another place and time.

As she sits, she becomes aware of the sound of the fountain, the plink and splatter of water drops, the susurration, the flow. A bird trills and is answered by another. Near her feet a grasshopper explodes into the air with a crackle of
wings. A low buzzing, the sound of bees, is all around her. Even the sound of the pacer’s footsteps on grass, the rhythmic pad, pad, pad of his feet reaches her and she realizes that the clamor in her head is still and silent.

It is a luxury to sit in silence without the constant voices in her head, asking, demanding, instructing, so many of them and all at once so that she can’t possibly ever get it straight what it is that they want. She has taken endless notes over the years, has tried writing color-coded shorthand, what this voice says in red, and that in green, and another in blue, but there are too many and they all talk at once and she can decode only bits and pieces. This has, for uncounted years, seemed so important that she feels she is neglecting a duty on the days when she gives up and sits silent and overwhelmed, or when she takes the pills that mute them.

At times the only thing she can think to do is to lay a sharp edge against her skin, to release the blood that powers her brain, hoping to break free. Always they find her—her daughter or her jailers—always there are sirens and bandages and the spell once more of medications.

But now, in this moment, the voices are silent and she watches the man, pacing, and it occurs to her, at last, that he is sad, with his bowed head, and his hands clasped behind him, that perhaps he wears away the hours and the grass like this because it is the only thing that eases some ache in his heart. She feels that ache herself, and so, even though it isn’t, cannot possibly be him, she gets up and walks around the pond toward him, intercepting him by standing directly in his path as he paces in her direction.

He stops in his trajectory, staring at her feet. She is barefoot, she realizes, feeling for the first time the dust between her toes, slightly cool, and looking down she sees also that her legs are bare and that she is wearing only a nightgown. But then she looks up and sees him raise his head. His eyes, so wide, so blue even after all these years, reach hers.

There is a sunrise on his face. He whispers in a voice on the edge of breaking, “Isobel?” And then she is in his arms
and he holds on to her as though she is life itself, crying, “Tell me it is really you, I cannot believe.”

She is laughing and crying all at once, trying to tell him, “Yes, Landon, it is me,” and he is kissing the tears from her cheeks, her eyes, and then his lips find hers and the kiss is the end of all the insanity, a perfect moment of rejoining something that should never have been sundered and nothing else matters, nothing, except that the two of them are together.

“I couldn’t find you,” she says, “except for that one dream.” Sees his face change as she says the words and begins to understand what has happened here, why the fountain and her prince are in Surmise, a thing that should not be.

It takes a moment, over the beating of her heart and his, before she hears the laughter, and another moment beyond that before he hears it also and they pull away from the kiss, still clinging to each other, and turn toward the sound.

The woman of the hazel eyes stands in the water under the fountain, but her hair is not wet. Neither is the gown she wears and she is laughing and clapping her hands. “You should never have given him the dreamsphere, child.” She holds something out on the palm of her hand, round and shining. Tosses it in the air and catches it in her hand. Again she laughs.

“You should see yourselves. If you were young yet, it would be beautiful—true love, here by the fountain. But you are old, or worse yet, middle-aged, and look like fools.”

“Have you not done enough?” Landon says, and there is bitterness in his voice.

“Oh, I’ve hardly begun.”

Isobel feels his arms tighten around her, pulling her harder against him. She recognizes this gesture as a signal for something bad about to happen, and her heart begins to hammer in fear.

“Let us be,” Landon says. “There must be more important things you could do with your power. You’ve been gone a long time.”

“One hundred years the old bastard locked me up. Do not underestimate yourself—you are an important piece on my chessboard, if it makes you feel any better. I play to win. There must be sacrifices.”

“No,” Isobel murmurs through flashes of dream, shards of memory.

“Come here, Isobel,” the woman says, no longer laughing.

Isobel clings to her prince. She knows she cannot resist the Voice and the way it phrases commands. Still, Landon’s arms are warm around her, and her mind is clear for the first time in so many years and she feels that this is the only solid ground. If she takes one step away from him, it will all fall apart around her; nothing will be solid, ever again, even her own body will disintegrate, and there will be nothing ever after but the voices and the noise.

Her body tenses, but she stays where she is, her hands twisting into the worn fabric of Landon’s tunic. She wonders, just for an instant, why he wears these threadbare clothes, but then Jehenna is speaking again.

“Isobel, come to me at once. Leave him; he is nothing but a dream.”

Isobel presses her lips against Landon’s, knows he is the only real thing she has ever known. Everything she ever wanted is right here, holding her in the circle of his arms; this is her sanity, and she is not going to step away from it, not for all of the magic in the world.

But before she can stop them her feet are moving without her consent; she is stepping away, breaking the safe circle of the arms that hold her. Her hands are still clenched in the fabric of his tunic and she will not open them as the Voice pulls her away. The fabric tears in her hands, and she is walking backward, empty hands stretched out to Landon.

His hands clasp hers, holding on, tight, tight.

“Let her go,” Jehenna says, and his hands loosen and allow Isobel’s to slide away. Their eyes hold as the current of the command pulls her away from him, saying all that needs to be said.

Isobel’s feet are in the water. It is cold, but she cannot stop to shiver, cannot slow her pace, until she bumps up against the rocks, feeling the spray of the fountain falling over her like tears, as though the pond itself is weeping for the pain that wrenches her heart.

“I will come for you,” Isobel hears Landon say as she closes her eyes, knowing she will open them somewhere else. She tries to hold on to this clarity, the look in his eyes, the promise that he will find her.

The ring still circles her finger, and that is her only hope.

T
he truck had been running on fumes for miles. When it hiccupped, jerked, and sputtered to a stop in the middle of the narrow track, Zee was only grateful to have made it so far. None of his plans extended to finding a way back; there was no point. Whatever happened next, there would be no return to his old life.

His best guesses and calculations, based on his glimpse of the Google Map in Vivian’s apartment and what the old man had told him, indicated that the cabin shouldn’t be much farther on. He looked around to make sure he wasn’t being pursued and then struck out on foot.