Memory and Dream

Angels And Monsters

I

Newford, September 1992

For Isabelle, the act of unwrapping the painting of Paddyjack was like that moment in a fairy tale when the crow, sitting on the fencepost, or the spoon one held in one’s hand, suddenly begins to speak, its advice, however confusing, still calculated to restore order, or at least balance. In the world of fairy tales, what was strange was also invariably trustworthy. One quickly learned to depend upon the old beggar woman, the hungry bird, the grateful fox.

So she fully expected the figure in the painting to speak to her, or for its numena to appear at her window, tapping his long twiggy fingers against the glass pane, requesting entry. She remembered a winter’s night, a fire escape festooned with ribbons, the tip-tappa-tappa-tip of wooden fingers on a wooden forearm, three bracelets that she’d woven from those ribbons, one of which lay at the bottom of her purse, the cloth frayed, the colors faded, the other two vanished into memory, or dream. But the painting kept its own counsel and the only sound she heard was the repeated knock at the door of her studio.

It took her another long moment to register what the sound was before she cleared her head with a quick shake. Laying down the painting, she went to the door to find Jilly standing out in the hall, worry clouding her normally cheerful features.

“I was about to give up,” she said. “I’ve been knocking for ages.”

“I’m sorry. I was ... thinking.”

Remembering. Wishing she could reclaim what was gone. Regretting that the world would no longer allow her even that small touch of magic. But perhaps when she began the paintings to illustrate Kathy’s stories, perhaps when she once again breached the bathers that lay between the world of her numena and her own ...

“Isabelle?”

She blinked, returning her attention to her visitor.

“You went all vague on me,” Jilly said. “Are you sure you’re all right?” Isabelle nodded and stepped aside to let Jilly in. “I’m fine—a little distracted, that’s all.”

“Well, I’ve had the weirdest thing happen to me,” Jilly said. She paused in the middle of the room to look around. The studio looked exactly the way it had when they’d left it last night, still furnished in unpacked boxes and suitcases, sacks and bags, all heaped up in various piles.

“I just got back from running a few errands,” Isabelle explained.

“This is why I don’t ever move,” Jilly said. “It’s way too much like work. I don’t know how Christy can stand to do it almost every year—especially with all those books.”

“Imagine if I’d really moved.”

“No thanks. But listen to this.” Jilly boosted herself up onto the counter that held the studio’s sink and a hot plate and sat there with her legs dangling. “John Sweetgrass stopped by to see you at my place this morning.”

“John,” Isabelle repeated.

A deep stillness seemed to settle inside her. She put a hand on the counter to steady herself. Only moments ago she’d been yearning to reclaim the past, but now that it was here, looking for her, she wasn’t so certain what to do about it. After all these years, what could she possibly say to him?

“Except,” Jilly said, “he told me he wasn’t John. He was quite rude, really. The only similarity between this guy and the John I knew is that they look exactly the same.” She went on to relate the morning’s encounter, finishing with, “I mean, isn’t it weird? I know we were never the best of friends—I don’t think anybody really knew John well except for you.”

And did I even know him at all? Isabelle wondered.

“But still,” Jilly said. “It’s not as if I hadn’t just seen him a few days ago and he was perfectly normal—well, perfectly John, anyway: friendly enough, but a little distant. This guy had such a mean look in his eyes. Does John have a twin brother? More to the point, does he have an evil twin brother?”

Isabelle shook her head. “I’ve no idea. He never really talked much about his family, or his past. I know he had an aunt living here in the city and that’s about it.”

“It’s funny how you can know someone for years, but not really know them at all, isn’t it? There’s people I’ve hung around with for years whose last names I still don’t know.”

“Considering how many people you do know, I’m surprised you can remember anybody’s name.”

Jilly smiled. “Yes, well, I’m not exactly renowned for my very excellent memory. I never forget something I’ve seen, but anything that requires words, which includes names, forget it. My memory becomes very selective then, tossing up information only as it feels like it, instead of as I need it.”

“I think it’s called getting old.”

“This is true, more’s the pity.”

Isabelle was trying to match July’s lightness of mood, but it was a losing struggle for her. She couldn’t help but remember what Rushkin had told her, how the numena could be either monsters or angels, and sometimes it was difficult to tell which was which. Except Rushkin had always had his own agenda when it came to parceling out what he wanted her to know, hadn’t he? But what if her turning away from John was what had changed him? What if it wasn’t so much that numena were either monsters or angels, but that they became what we expected them to be? That they could be transformed, monster into angel, angel into monster, by our expectations. If there was only one John—and really, how could there be another, identical version of him walking around?—then she couldn’t even protect herself from him because his painting had already been destroyed, burnt in the fire along with most of the rest of her work.

At that thought her gaze went to the window seat, where she’d been sitting when Jilly had arrived earlier. Except she’d always believed that Paddyjack had burned in the fire as well, hadn’t she?

Jilly’s gaze followed Isabelle’s to the small painting. “Oh wow,” she said, hopping down from the counter. “I haven’t seen this in years.” She picked it up to admire it, then turned to look at Isabelle. “But wasn’t it one of the ones that was destroyed in the fire?”

“That’s what I thought.”

Jilly looked confused. “But then ...”

“What’s it doing here? I don’t know. I was picking up some things that had been left for me by an old friend and that was part of the package. I never thought I’d see it again, yet here it is, as though it was never hanging in the farmhouse when the place burned down. I mean, obviously it wasn’t, though I can remember it hanging beside the fridge in the kitchen—right up until the night of the fire. What I don’t remember is taking it down or giving it away or it even having been stolen. But here it is all the same.”

“So who’s had it for all these years?”

Isabelle shrugged. ‘just this guy who works at the bus terminal.”

For some reason Isabelle felt uncomfortable in sharing the communications from Kathy that had recently found their way into her hands. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Jilly to keep a confidence, but that their arrival was still too fresh, their message too private for her to share. She wanted to deal with them on her own first. Letter and painting and the mysterious book that was still wrapped in brown paper on the window seat.

“Just this guy,” Jilly repeated.

Isabelle nodded.

“This is so mysterious. So how did you meet him?”

“It’s kind of a long, weird story ....”

Jilly sensed her discomfort. “Which you’re not ready to share quite yet.”

“I just don’t know where to start. I ...”

“You don’t have to explain,” filly said as Isabelle’s voice trailed off. “Nosy, I might be, but I’m patient, too. Just promise you’ll tell me all about it when you’re ready to talk about it.”

“That I can promise.”

Jilly admired the painting for another couple of moments before laying it back down on the window seat.

“But I do have to know something,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Did you borrow some paint and brushes before you left this morning?” Isabelle waved a hand at her unpacked boxes. “The one thing I don’t need is more art supplies.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Why? Have you lost something?”

“The only thing I care about is my favorite brush, but there’s also a couple of tubes of paint gone missing. A piece of hardboard, some turpentine. I can’t figure it out at all.”

Isabelle thought of her surviving numena. It would be so like Cosette to have “borrowed” the art supplies that Jilly was missing.

“That kind of thing happens to me all the time back on the island,” she said. “I think I must have brought one or two of the local Good Neighbors along with me.”

Jilly gave her an interested look. “Really? You’ve seen faeries on the island?”

July, Isabelle realized, was probably the only person she knew who would take something like that at face value. And it wasn’t really a lie—many of her numena were very much like the little mischievous sprites and hobgoblins that inhabited folk and fairy tales.

“I don’t see them,” she explained, “but things are often rearranged or borrowed for extended periods of time. I’ve gotten used to it.”

“Well, they’re welcome to share,” Jilly said. “I just wish they hadn’t taken that brush.”

“Why don’t you leave out a note, asking for it back?”

Jilly gave her a quick smile. “Maybe I will. But that doesn’t help me at the moment. It’s back to the art shop for me. Will you be coming by this afternoon?”

Isabelle nodded. “I shouldn’t be here too much longer. Rubens isn’t giving you any trouble, is he?”

“Rubens,” Jilly announced, “is an absolute angel, just like he always is.”

Isabelle waited until Jilly had left before returning to the windowseat. When she was sitting down again, she picked up the other parcel, the one that felt like a book, but first she looked out the window, not at the view of the river, but down below at the street, searching for a dark-haired man in white shirt and jeans. But if John Sweetgrass was skulking about Joli Coeur, trying to catch a glimpse of her the way she was of him, he was being surreptitious about it.

After a while she sighed and began to open the parcel. The book inside had no title, or byline. But three-quarters of the pages were filled with a familiar handwritten script that she immediately recognized as Kathy’s, and although the entries were undated, it was obviously a journal.

Yet another mystery, Isabelle thought, for Kathy had never held with the business of keeping a journal—or at least not in all the time that they’d lived together.

“If people want to find out about me,” she’d said once, “they can read my stories. Everything I want anybody to know about me is in them.” Apparently, she’d changed her mind.

II

Marisa felt guilty taking Alan’s bed from him while he slept on the sofa, but as usual, once he’d made up his mind there was no arguing with him. His gentlemanly quota was as high as ever—a feature of his personality that she found both endearing and frustrating. Just for once she wished he wouldn’t feel the need to always do the right thing. If he could just have put aside his sense of decency for one night and come to bed with her—it didn’t have to be a lifetime commitment; just for tonight. Much as she cared for him, she wasn’t so sure she was ready for any long-term commitment ever again anyway. All she wanted was to be held through the night, held by someone who cared about her. Who understood her.

But that wasn’t Alan, and she hadn’t been able to quite muster enough courage to ask him, so she found herself lying in his big bed on her own, listening to the sound of his washing up in the bathroom, followed by the creaking of the sofa’s springs as he shifted from one position to another, trying to get comfortable.

She didn’t think she’d ever fall asleep. Her head was too full of a bewildering jumble of worries and emotions. Questions prowled through her mind without respite. What was George going to do when it finally sank in that she’d really walked out on him? What was going to happen to her? How was her relationship with Alan going to be affected? What did she even want out of their relationship? When was she going to take control of her own life for a change?

Leaving George was a step in the right direction, she knew, but it had left her in a state of limbo. If only Isabelle hadn’t come back into the picture. If only she’d had the courage to leave George earlier—even a week ago would have been time enough. Or was that it at all? Perhaps she’d been waiting for this situation to arise, for Alan to be taken, before she could make the move on her own. That seemed to be perverse enough to fit into the constant mess she made of her life.

When she finally fell asleep, it was to dream of a face looking in at her through the bedroom window.

She couldn’t tell if it was male or female, friendly or hostile; if it was some anima risen up from her subconscious, panicking at what she had done, or a night muse looking in on her with approval, eyes dark with the promise of what was to come. All she knew for sure was that when she woke in the morning, she was alone in the bed and there was no one at the window.

She rose, still wearing Alan’s shirt, and went into the living room, where she watched him sleeping for a few moments before going on into the kitchen to brew some coffee. When she returned to the living room, two mugs in hand, Alan was sitting up, blinking sleep from his eyes. She didn’t know the details of the dreams he’d been having just before he woke up, but judging from how his penis lifted the sheet up between his legs, they hadn’t been chaste.

Were they about Isabelle or me? Marisa found herself wondering.

He bunched up the bedclothes onto his lap and blushed, but he didn’t look away.

Me, she realized. He’s been dreaming about me.

The realization both excited and scared her. She sat down on the coffee table in front of the sofa and placed the two mugs beside her. Alan reached for her hands and she wasn’t sure if he was simply comforting her as he had last night, or if he was about to draw her to him on the sofa.

What about Isabelle? she wanted to ask him, not sure she even wanted to know.

But before she could speak, before he could reveal his intentions, before she could find out if this impulse toward intimacy came from his heart or from what had sprung up between his legs when he woke, the doorbell rang. They both jumped, starting with a guilt she knew neither of them should be feeling. Alan let go of her hands.

“I, uh, I’m not wearing anything,” he said.

Marisa couldn’t resist making a small joke. “Not even a bow tie?” she asked. The small grin he returned helped diffuse the awkwardness of the moment. “Do you want me to answer that?” she added.

“If you don’t mind.”

As she went to get the door, Alan fled into his bedroom, trailing a sheet. Marisa hoped whoever this was wouldn’t take long. Last night’s indecision had fled and she was determined to grasp the moment as it arose. But when she opened the door it was to find two strangers in waiting in the hall. They both wore dark suits that seemed to have been bought off the same rack. The smaller man had dark hair combed back from his forehead and a thin mustache that followed the contour of his upper lip, giving him the outdated air of a forties ladies’ man. His companion had short brown hair and broad, placid features that seemed at odds with the sharp intensity of his gaze. The smaller man, standing to her right, held up a billfold to show his identification.

“Detective Michael Thompson, ma’am,” he said, “of the Newford Police Department.” He nodded to his companion. “This is Detective Roger Davis. We’re looking for a Mr. Alan Grant of this address.

Would he be available?”

“What’s going on?” Marisa asked. “What do you want with Alan?”

“Nothing to worry about,” the detective assured her. “We have a few questions for Mr. Grant, that’s all.”

“Questions about what?” Alan asked, coming up behind Marisa. He’d changed into jeans and a shirt, but was still barefoot.

“Just a few routine questions concerning an ongoing investigation,” Thompson said. “If you’d like to finish getting dressed, sir, we’ll drive you down to the precinct.”

“Can’t you tell me what this is all about?”

“We’d prefer to deal with this at the precinct, sir.”

“I’m coming with you,” Marisa said.

When Alan gave her a grateful look, she realized that he didn’t want to be alone on this, whatever it was about. It gave her a good feeling that she could be here for him.

“Would that be a problem, officers?” Alan asked.

Both men shook their head.

“Not at all, sir,” Thompson said. “Do you mind if we wait inside while you get ready?”

“Please, come in.”

The smaller detective made his way to the sofa and sat down while his companion drifted across the room to stand by the window. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, but Marisa got the definite impression that he wasn’t missing a thing. Pillow on the sofa. The sheet Alan hadn’t wrapped himself in bunched up on the floor. The open bedroom door through which he could see the bed with its rumpled bedclothes. She wished she’d taken the time to put some clothes on herself, rather than be standing here in Alan’s shirt.

“We won’t be long,” Alan said.

“No problem,” Thompson assured him.

Marisa followed Alan into the bedroom, where she collected her clothes. She paused at the doorway to look at Alan where he sat on the edge of the bed putting on a pair of socks. She held the bundle tight against her chest, wishing it were Alan she was holding, that Alan was hugging her back.

“What do you think it’s about?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But it can’t be good. They don’t take you in for questioning when it’s only an unpaid parking ticket or something else as innocuous as that. Still we should take comfort in the fact that they obviously don’t think we’re dangerous or they’d never have let us out of their sight, even to get dressed.”

“But you haven’t done anything wrong, have you?”

Alan shook his head. “Not that I know.”

“Then why—”

“We’re keeping them waiting. You should go get dressed.”

“I know,” Marisa said. “But this whole business is giving me the creeps. Why can’t they just tell us what it’s all about?” She hesitated, then asked, “You don’t think it’s got anything to do with my leaving George, do you?”

Alan gave her a thin smile. “There’s no law against leaving your husband—not unless you killed him first.”

“Ha ha.”

“Just get dressed, Marisa. We’ll find out what’s going on when we get down to the precinct.”

“I don’t see how you can be so calm.”

Alan shrugged. “I’ve nothing to feel guilty about.”

But maybe that won’t make any difference, Marisa thought. As she stood there looking at him, every miscarriage of justice that she’d ever heard about reared up in her mind, tormenting her with the possibilities of what might be waiting for them at the precinct. Just last week she’d read about a man accused of molesting his niece. He’d been proven innocent—the girl had admitted that she’d made the story up to get some attention from her own parents—but according to the article, the stigma of the accusation still clung to the man and the whole sorry affair had opened a breach in the family that showed no signs of being diminished. But now wasn’t the time to bring anything like that up, she realized.

“I guess I’ll go get dressed” was all she said.

“Things will work out,” Alan told her.

She nodded.

“But if anything does happen when we’re at the precinct—I mean, if they decide to hold me or whatever—I don’t want you to think that it changes anything. You’re still welcome to stay here. You’ll have to get someone else to help you pick up your things, that’s all.”

“I don’t even want to think along those lines.”

“But just in case.”

Marisa sighed. “Fine. Just in case. But that’s not going to happen.”

“I sure as hell hope not.”

He might look calm, Marisa realized, but inside he was feeling just as worried as she was. She straightened her back, determined to put on as good a face herself. If he could do it, when he was the one the police wanted to question, then she could do it too.

“Well, let’s get this over with,” she said.

She went into the bathroom to get dressed herself and was out again in record time, having paused only long enough to put on a touch of lipstick.

III

Come midmorning, Rolanda was still sitting beside her bed, watching Cosette sleep. She’d left once to go downstairs to cancel her morning’s appointments and get herself a coffee. That had been over an hour ago. The coffee was long finished and Cosette still slept—if what she was doing was sleeping.

Rolanda couldn’t shake the memory of that awful moment earlier this morning when the girl had run an Xacto blade across her hand, the sharp metal cutting deeply into the palm, but the wound hadn’t bled.

Hadn’t bled at all. What it had done was close up again as easily as you might seal a zip-lock plastic bag.

Hey presto, just like that.

It wasn’t possible, of course. What she’d seen couldn’t have happened. Except there was no denying that she had seen it and now the whole world had become unsafe. Nothing could be trusted to be as it once had been. The hard-wood floor of her apartment seemed spongy underfoot, the walls pulsed, the air was thick with light that appeared to have a physical consistency. Dust motes didn’t so much float in it as were encased. Everything was changed.

You think you’re safe, Rolanda thought, looking down at her sleeping charge. You think you know who you are and you’re content with the comfortable familiarity of your life, and then something like this comes along and the next thing you know, everything becomes foreign. It wasn’t just Cosette, lying there on her bed; it was that everything now had the potential to be other than what she always believed it to be.

This must be what people meant when they spoke of an epiphany, she thought, except she didn’t actually understand what she was seeing. She simply knew that there were no more safe corners to turn.

That underlying what everyone accepted as true was another truth. A different truth, one that allowed for god knew how many interpretations.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?”

She looked down to see that Cosette’s eyes were open, their luminous gaze regarding her sympathetically, and Rolanda realized that she no longer considered the girl as a potential client, in need of the Foundation’s services. Their roles hadn’t so much reversed as evened out so that they were meeting now as equals, each able to learn from the other.

“I don’t know what I am,” Rolanda admitted. “Everything seems changed. Anything seems possible.”

Cosette sat up and scooted over to where she could lean back against the headboard. “Except for happiness.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to be real.”

Rolanda smiled. “You sound like Pinocchio.”

“Who’s Pinocchio?”

“A little wooden puppet in a story who wanted to become a real boy.”

“And did he?”

“Eventually.”

Cosette leaned forward eagerly. “How did he do it?”

“It was just a story,” Rolanda said.

“But that’s what we all are—just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we’d just fade away.”

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

“When you’re real,” Cosette added, “your stories have more weight, I think. There’s less chance of being forgotten.”

“I don’t know about that. There are any number of characters from books and movies who are a lot more real to some people than anyone in their own life.”

“How did the puppet become real?”

Rolanda sighed. “I don’t remember exactly. I think it had something to do with his having to be a good boy. Doing good deeds. There was a fairy involved as well—except now I think I’m mixing up the book and the Disney film. I remember the fairy from the movie but I can’t remember if she was in the book. In the movie, she was the one who finally changed him into a real boy.”

Cosette was hanging on to her every word. “I wonder if Isabelle would paint a fairy like that for me.”

“You don’t need a fairy,” Rolanda said. “You’re already real.”

“I don’t dream. I don’t bleed.”

“Maybe that’s a blessing.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to feel so ... so hollow inside.”

“Perhaps,” Rolanda admitted. “But I think you’re making more of what other people feel than what they actually do. Lots of people go through their whole lives with a sense of being unfulfilled. Of feeling hollow.”

But Cosette wasn’t prepared to listen to that line of argument.

“I’ll do good deeds,” she said. “We’ll all do good deeds. And then when Isabelle paints the fairy for us, we’ll all become real. The red crow will beat its wings in our chests and we’ll dream and bleed just like you.”

“But—”

“I have to find Isabelle and ask her.”

She stood up on the bed and danced about excitedly, bouncing on the mattress, clapping her hands.

“Thank you, Rolanda!” she cried. “Thank you!”

Rolanda stood up. “Don’t get too excited,” she began. “That was only—”

But she spoke to herself. Her guest had disappeared, vanishing with a sudden whuft of displaced air.

Rolanda stared slack-jawed at the empty space above her bed.

“A story,” she finished softly.

She heard cries of astonishment rise up from downstairs, followed by the sound of the front door slamming. She made it to the window in time to see Cosette running off down the sidewalk. Something Cosette had said earlier echoed in her mind.

That’s what we all are—just stories.

She stared through the window, watching until the girl’s trim figure vanished from her field of vision, then slowly made her way down to the Foundation’s offices. The waiting room was in an uproar.

“—out of thin air, I swear—”

“—looked just like—”

“—not possible—”

Rolanda stood in the doorway, feeling as untouched by the noisy bewilderment of her coworkers and the children in the waiting room as though she were the calm eye in the center of a storm. She looked at the painting of The Wild Girl. There was no question but that Cosette had been the model. There was no question but that the world had changed on her and nothing would ever be the same again.

She had to speak to Isabelle Copley, she realized. She had to know where Cosette had come from, why she didn’t bleed, why she had weight and mass and presence but claimed she wasn’t real.

Shaun noticed her standing there in the doorway and called her name, but Rolanda ignored her coworker’s attention. Instead she retreated back up to her apartment. She put on her shoes and a jacket.

Stuck her wallet into a small waist pack and belted it on. And then she left the confusion behind.

She walked in the direction that Cosette had taken until she realized she had no idea where she was going. Stopping at the first phone booth along her way, she looked for Copley’s address in the white pages, but there was no listing. She thought for a moment, then looked up Alan Grant. She noted the number, but decided she wanted to speak to him in person, rather than over the phone. She wanted to be able to look him in the face before she decided how much she would tell him about what had brought her knocking on his door.

As she headed for Waterhouse Street she found herself wondering if he could dream, if he bled. If he was real. Or was he another story, like Cosette, strayed from some mysterious before? He’d never seemed any different from anybody else before, but then, Rolanda thought, up until last night, she’d never looked at anyone with the perspective she had now.

IV

Isabelle closed Kathy’s journal after having read the first twenty or so pages, unable to absorb any more in one sitting. Holding the book against her chest, she stared out the window of her studio. The view was quickly becoming familiar. The Kickaha River, the neighboring buildings, that line of rooftops across the water marching up from the slope of the riverbank into Ferryside like patches on a quilt ...

Another couple of days here and she’d be able to draw it from memory.

She sighed. Her chest was tight and her eyes kept welling with tears, but she was holding up better than she had the morning Kathy’s tardy letter had arrived. Whatever that meant.

Don’t avoid the issue, she told herself. Never mind the view or how you feel. The real question was, how much of the journal could she take at face value? Was Kathy truly being honest with what she’d written in its pages, or was she merely telling stories again, this time cloaking them as fact instead of fiction?

Isabelle pulled the book away from her chest and looked down at its plain cover. She ran her fingers across the worn cloth, feeling each ridge and bump and dent it had acquired while being toted around in Kathy’s bag.

No, Isabelle realized, the real question was, had Kathy truly been in love with her?

The idea of it felt completely alien to her—though not so much as it would have felt if Kathy had confided that same love to her back in the Waterhouse Street days. The journal was certainly accurate in predicting how that would have gone over. But she’d been a different person back then. She’d even had a different name. Izzy had become Isabelle. Izzy had been almost militantly heterosexual, while Isabelle counted any number of gays among her friends. In many ways, Isabelle was far more liberal than Izzy had ever been, for all her more conservative lifestyle. Isabelle ...

Isabelle didn’t know what she felt. The love she bore for Kathy ran as deep as that she’d known for any man—deeper, perhaps, for it had never ended. Not even with Kathy’s death. And while she’d never had any yearning to be sexually active with Kathy, she couldn’t deny that she’d loved to draw Kathy’s sensual body lines, loved to be held when times were bad, to comfort in turn, the welcoming hugs, to be out walking the streets with her at night, arm in arm, the kisses of hello and goodbye and sometimes even goodnight.

But that was because they’d been friends. Because she’d loved and admired Kathy. The leap of joy she’d felt seeing Kathy come up the street, the way she’d missed her so terribly when she first moved back to the island, that, too, had been because they were friends. The best of friends. So where did the one kind of love end and the other begin? Or were there merely gradations of love, differing in their intensities and nuances, but the love was the same?

If Kathy were still alive, Isabelle could have asked her. But Kathy wasn’t alive. No, she’d gone and died and ... and left ... and left her all alone ....

The tears that Isabelle had managed to hold at bay for so long could be held in no longer. They flooded her eyes with the suddenness of a summer storm. The journal fell from her lap onto the windowseat as she hugged her knees, pressing her face against her legs, crying until the knees of her jeans were soaked. When the flood was finally reduced to a sniffle, she went looking for a tissue but had to settle for a long streamer of toilet paper that she tore from the roll in the studio’s tiny bathroom. She blew her nose, once, twice, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, eyes rimmed with red and swollen, nostrils runny and florid, face flushed.

Portrait of the artist embracing her despair, she thought as she turned away.

But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present. She remembered how Kathy had put it—something she’d said once as opposed to having written about it in a story or one of the journal entries.

“It’s a mistake to go poking about in your own past,” she’d told her. “It makes you shrink into yourself. Every time you return you get smaller and more transparent. Go back often enough and you might vanish altogether. We’re meant to put the past behind us and be the people we are now, Izzy, not who we were.”

But what if your now is built upon unfinished business in the past? Isabelle knew what Kathy’s reply to that would be as well: Why do you think the psychiatry industry is booming and that there are so many self-help books on the market?

Maybe so, Isabelle thought. But that didn’t help her now. Her now was inextricably tied to what had been left undone in the past. It wasn’t just Kathy. It was her numena. And John. And Rushkin.

But Kathy—how could she have known Kathy so well and yet not have known her at all? Isabelle felt like Mary in Kathy’s story “Secret Lives.” There was a journal in that story, too, only it was left behind when the dancer Alicia left her lover Mary without a word of explanation. She hadn’t died as Kathy had and the journal hadn’t appeared five years later. The journal in “Secret Lives” had been lying on the coffee table when Mary came home; Alicia had wanted her to find and read it.

Isabelle had never liked that story; not because the lovers were both women—that had merely made her uncomfortable at the time—but because of

Alicia’s meanness in leaving that journal behind. Mary discovered an entirely different woman from the one she’d known in the pages of that journal. Much of what Mary read was Alicia’s fantasies. But not all of it. Not enough of it.

“You don’t understand,” Kathy had said when Isabelle complained to her about the story. “She didn’t have any other way to tell the truth. Mary would never have listened to her. None of what she read should have come to her as a surprise. It only did because she wasn’t paying attention. Because she’d already defined the boundaries of who Alicia was and anything that didn’t fit inside them had to be discarded. The reason Alicia left was because Mary wasn’t in love with her anymore; she was in love with who Alicia had been.”

Was that the case with Kathy’s journal? Isabelle couldn’t help but wonder. Had the clues all been there in the years they were living together, but she’d been like Mary, unwilling to change her definition of who she thought Kathy was? Had the story been Kathy’s way of trying to tell her to pay more attention?

No, she told herself. That kind of speculation wasn’t dealing with unfinished business. That was poking around in the past. If she kept it up she really would become invisible. Maybe she already was ....

Isabelle looked across the room to where Paddyjack and the journal still lay on the window seat.

The only thing she was doing at the moment was driving herself crazy. She needed to talk to someone about it. To her surprise, the first person she thought of was Alan. She didn’t know what else was in the journal, but she knew she had to show it to him, uncomfortable as sharing parts of it would make her feel.

If nothing else, he had to know who Margaret Mully really was. If it was true. If it wasn’t just Kathy changing the world to suit herself—changing it so that it wouldn’t change her.

She collected the journal and stuck it in her shoulder bag. But before Alan got to see it, he had to make a promise, she decided as she prepared to leave the studio. He had to promise that what lay in its pages remained between them. She didn’t want to read about Kathy’s life in a newspaper, or hear about the journal being a forthcoming book from his East Street Press.

Isabelle checked to make sure she had her keys with her, then opened the door to the studio. The door swung open, but she remained rooted where she stood, staring out into the hall. Standing there waiting for her was another piece of her past. Dark-haired and darker-eyed, dressed in the same white T-shirt and jeans as always, the same silver feather earring hanging from his left earlobe, the same broad handsome features that she knew so well. John Sweetgrass. The only difference was the bracelet of braided ribbons he wore on his right wrist, more frayed than her own, the colors more faded. Almost a ghost of the bracelet she’d made—as his reappearance in her life was like that of a ghost.

Who was it that had said it took two to make a haunting? Christy Riddell, she supposed. Or Jilly.

The one to haunt, the other to be haunted. It was the story of her life.

“Izzy,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

She didn’t want there to be a distance in her eyes. She didn’t want to hold him at length the way she felt she must. She wanted to hold him close, to tell him she was sorry for that night all those years ago.

But all she could do was remember what Jilly had told her. She couldn’t see the meanness in his eyes that July had seen, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, hidden behind the mild gaze his dark eyes turned to her.

“Which John are you?” was all she could ask.

Something dark sped across his features. She wasn’t sure if it was hurt or anger.

“What makes you think there’s more than one of me?” he asked. “What makes you think there isn’t?”

John sighed. “Maybe my coming here was a mistake.”

He started to turn away, but Isabelle called him back. He hesitated. When he finally looked at her, Isabelle couldn’t bear the sadness in his eyes. He fingered the bracelet she’d woven all those years ago, but he didn’t speak.

“Why did you come, John?” she asked.

“Not to fight with you.”

“But not to make up either, or we’d have had this conversation a long time ago.”

John nodded. “That decision was yours to make. You sent me away.”

“I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. I dreamed of you that night. You and Paddyjack.”

“And you left us these,” John said, holding up the wrist enclosed by the cloth bracelet. “But it was already too late. You sent me away, Izzy, but I had to go as well. It was never going to be the same between us, not with you thinking you’d created me.”

“But I did. The painting—”

“Brought me across. You brought all of us across. But that doesn’t mean you made us. In the before, in our own world, we already were.”

Isabelle didn’t want to get into a repeat of that argument. “So why are you here today?” she asked.

“To warn you. It’s starting again.”

“You mean my paintings.”

John nodded.

“But I haven’t even begun the first one.”

“Doesn’t matter. The veil that lies between my world and yours is already trembling in anticipation.”

“Is it so wrong, bringing you across?” Isabelle asked. “I know what I’m doing. This time I’ll be responsible. I won’t let any of you be hurt again.”

John regarded her steadily for a long moment. Isabelle tried, but she couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.

“Rushkin’s back as well,” he said finally. “And this time he’s not alone.”

“The other John,” Isabelle said.

“What do you mean?”

Isabelle told him what had happened at Jilly’s apartment this morning. “He might look like me,” John said, “but he’s not.”

“So Rushkin made—brought him across?”

John shrugged. “That’s something you’ll have to ask him when you see him.”

“I don’t want to see him—not ever again.”

“Then why are you here? Why are you so set on bringing more of us across? Surely you knew it would call him to you.”

Isabelle nodded. “I’m doing it for Kathy.” She told him about the book Alan had planned, the children’s Art Court. And then she asked him, “How did you survive, John? The Spirit Is Strong was destroyed in the fire. I thought you couldn’t live if your painting had been destroyed.”

“My painting wasn’t destroyed.”

Isabelle looked for the lie, but it wasn’t there. Not in his features, not in his eyes, not so she could read it. Of course it wouldn’t be, she thought. This was John and the one thing he didn’t do was lie.

She’d ignored that truth once, but she wouldn’t do it again.

“You and Paddyjack,” she said softly. “Did I imagine all those deaths, then? Did any of the paintings bum?”

“We survived,” John said, “but the others weren’t so fortunate.”

“How? Who rescued you?”

John shook his head. “That’s not important right now. What you have to think about is what you’re going to do when Rushkin comes for you again.”

“I’ll kill him before I let him hurt anybody again.”

“Will you?”

Isabelle wanted to make it a promise, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know what the hold was that her old mentor had always had on her, but it was still there.

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

“We bless you for bringing us across,” John told her, “but our lives are in your hands.”

“I know.”

“You’re the only one who can stand up to him in this world.”

“Will he still be so strong?”

“Stronger.”

“Then what can I do?”

“That’s something nobody can decide for you,” John said.

“If I don’t do the paintings ...”

“Then he’ll still be out there, waiting. He will always be a piece of unfinished business. The only way you can be free of him is to stand up to him.”

“And if I do ...”

“You will have to be sure that you’re stronger than him.”

“I don’t want to be like him,” Isabelle said.

“I didn’t say as ruthless—I said stronger.”

“But—”

“Rushkin has put a piece of himself inside you,” John told her. “That’s the hold he has over you.

What you have to do is find that piece and exorcise it. That’s what will make you stronger than him. Not force. Not matching his ruthlessness with a ferocity of your own.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then I would think very carefully upon what you’re about to do.”

“Will you help me?” Isabelle asked.

“I am helping you. But you’re the one who invited him into your life. Only you can best him.”

When he started to turn away, Isabelle called him back a second time.

“I never meant for any of this to happen,” she said. “I never meant to drive you away or for anyone to be hurt.”

“I know.”

“Then why didn’t you come back to me?”

“I’ve already told you, Izzy.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest that she was about to make.

“If you can’t think of me as real,” he said, “why would you want me to come back to you? Would you love me for myself, or for what you thought you’d made me to be?”

It was Kathy’s story all over again, Isabelle realized. Secret lives that weren’t really secret at all.

They only seemed like a secret when you weren’t paying any attention to them. When you couldn’t accept the difference between who you thought someone was and who they really were. You could hang onto your misperceptions all you wanted, but that didn’t make them real.

John wasn’t who she or anybody else decided he was. That wasn’t the way the story went, whether Kathy wrote it or it took place in the real world. John was who he was. It was as simple, as basic as that, and she knew it. In her mind, in her heart. So why was it so hard for her to accept that he was as real as she?

“Think about it,” John said.

She nodded.

“I always know where you are,” he said. “I always know when you want me. That hasn’t changed.

That will never change.”

“Then why has it taken you so long to come and see me?” Isabelle asked. “God knows I’ve wanted to see you, if only to apologize for the mess I went and made of everything.”

John shook his head. “We could have this conversation forever, Izzy, but it all boils down to one thing: first you have to change the way you think of me. Until you manage to do that, each time we try to talk to each other we’re doomed to an endless replay of what happened that night in the park.”

He turned away once more, but this time she didn’t call him back.

V

As soon as they reached the Crowsea Precinct, the two detectives hustled Alan into their lieutenant’s office, leaving Marisa out in the hall. Waiting inside the office were the lieutenant—Peter Kent, according to the name plate on his desk—and a woman introduced as Sharon Hooper, who proved to be an assistant DA. Neither of them stood up when Alan was brought in. By the grim looks on their faces, Alan realized that whatever the detectives had told him in his apartment, he hadn’t been brought in to answer some routine questions.

Kent had the look of a man who rarely smiled anyway—and considering all he would have seen after his years on the force, that didn’t particularly surprise Alan. He appeared to be in his late forties, a lean dark-haired man, greying at the temples. Obviously a career officer. The ADA was another matter. From the laugh lines around her eyes, Alan assumed Hooper was normally a cheerful woman. The grim set to her features seemed more out of place and only served to increase the nervousness that had begun when the two detectives showed up at his door.

A tape recorder was produced and turned on. After he waived his right to counsel at this point, the interrogation began.

Two hours later, they were still at it. At one point the larger of the two detectives left the room to speak with Marisa. He returned, confirming that Marisa could corroborate his story. Then they made him go through it all again. Finally, Lieutenant Kent sighed. He looked resigned, if no less grim.

Hooper pushed her blonde hair back from her temples before leaning across the lieutenant’s desk to hit the Off button on the tape recorder.

“That ... is that it?” Alan asked.

“You’re free to go, Mr. Grant,” Kent told him. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

They were letting him go, Alan realized, but they didn’t believe him. The only reason he could walk out that door behind him was that they couldn’t prove anything against him. At least not yet—that message was plain from the tense atmosphere in the office. He could go, but they weren’t finished with him. They’d be watching him, pushing and prodding, waiting for him to make a mistake. But he didn’t have any mistakes to make. He hadn’t done anything.

“Why won’t you believe me?” he asked.

“No one said anything about not believing you,” the ADA replied. “But you don’t.”

“We have to keep our options open,” the lieutenant said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Grant, but going on all the information we have to date, you’re the only one with a plausible motive.”

“I ... I understand. It’s just, I’ve never been in any kind of trouble like this before and I ...”

His voice trailed off. Why was he even bothering to explain? The only person in this office who cared about what he was going through was himself. He had no allies here.

The lieutenant leaned forward, a brief look of sympathy crossing his features. “We’re certainly taking that into consideration, Mr. Grant. But look at it from our point of view. If you didn’t kill her, then who did?”

Not me, Alan thought as he finally stepped out of the Crowsea Precinct with Marisa holding his arm.

He was surprised to find it was still daylight outside. It felt as though he’d been in that office the whole day, but it was still early afternoon. He blinked in the bright September sunshine. It was a perfect autumn day, the air crisp, the sky a startling blue. Up and down the street, the maples and oaks were bright with color. None of it really registered for Alan.

“What did they want?” Marisa asked.

She’d asked him that same question when he joined her outside the lieutenant’s office, but he’d shaken his head, a wordless “not yet, wait until we’re outside.” No one offered to drive them back to his apartment. No one had apologized for what they’d put him through.

“Margaret Mully was killed last night,” he told Marisa now as they stood there on the precinct steps.

“They think I did it.”

Marisa’s eyes widened with shock. “No.” She gripped his arm. “How can they even think that?”

“I’m the only one they’ve got with a motive,” Alan said.

“But they let you go, so they’re not accusing you anymore, are they?”

“They just haven’t got anything to hold me on.”

“But—”

Alan turned to her. “I won’t say I’m sorry that she’s dead, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her, Marisa.”

“I know that, Alan. I would never believe that of you.”

He put his arm around her and held her too tightly, but Marisa didn’t flinch. “The way things are shaping up at the moment,” he said, “you’re the only one.”

Alan thought he’d gotten through the worst, back there in the lieutenant’s office. But then he saw them, gathered there at the bottom of the precinct’s steps like a pack of vultures. The reporters. More tape recorders. Photographers. Live feeds back to the studio.

“Mr. Grant, can we have a word with you?”

“Why did the police want to speak to you?”

“How do you feel about Margaret Mully being out of the picture?”

“Do you still intend to go ahead with the book?”

Oddly enough, all Alan could think of at that moment was that anyone watching the news was going to see him standing here on the steps of the Crowsea Precinct with his arm around Marisa Banning, a married woman who wasn’t his wife. Her husband George could see it. Or Isabelle. Anyone at all. And he didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.

“No comment,” he said over and over again as they made their way through the crowd.

He held on to Marisa’s hand until they managed to flag down a cab and he didn’t let go of it the whole way home.

VI

Nobody could run as fast as her, that was for sure, Cosette thought as she sped away from the Newford Children’s Foundation. Nobody at all. Maybe that was what happened when you had a red crow beating its wings inside your chest. Maybe it slowed you down. People like her new friend Rolanda and Isabelle never seemed to want to run and dance and skip and simply toss themselves about for the sheer fun of it. The whole body could make a music that they so seldom played. Handclap, the stampa-stamp of feet on a wooden floor. Click and clack, whistle up a wind, cheeks puffed out, expelled air tickling the lips. Or the tip-tappa-tappa-tip of Paddyjack playing wooden fingers against his wooden limbs.

She paused in her headlong flight to think about that. Up she perched on a low wall and watched the slow parade of pedestrians go by. The day was perfect, perfect, perfect, but so few of them were smiling. Maybe having a red crow inside you took too much energy and you didn’t have enough left over for fun. Maybe it made you so tired that you couldn’t even see how perfect a day it was and how much it deserved a smile and a laugh and a dance in return for the gift of it.

And dreams, too. Did you have to think them up, or did they just come to you? How much energy did they take?

But being real was important—not just the real that Rosalind claimed they were, but the kind of real that made everyone you happened to bump into pay attention to you, the kind of real that said, yes, you had a red crow beating its wings inside of you, too. Most people only saw her when she wanted them to.

Otherwise she was no more than a vague flicker of movement caught out of the corner of an eye, something that seemed more likely to be a flutter of leaves or debris tossed up by the wind.

Sometimes she liked the surprise of popping up out of nowhere and the silly looks on people’s faces when they couldn’t help but notice her. Like back at Rolanda’s house, where her gateway hung. That had been fun. It didn’t matter where she was in all this world, it took only a thought and she could find herself standing in front of it. Usually she was careful that no one saw her—Rosalind was always saying, be careful, be careful, be careful, so Cosette was. But not always. She didn’t endanger her gateway, but she liked to pop in there from the island and then make her way back home, secreting her way, peeping into houses, listening to the lives lived by those who could dream and bleed, appearing and disappearing right in front of people’s eyes and then didn’t they look foolish.

But sometimes she would stand for hours in front of her painting and wonder if the gateway opened both ways. Could she go back through it into the before the way she’d come across? Nobody knew.

Not Rosalind or Paddyjack or Annie Nin. Not even Solemn John, who was the cleverest of them all, even more clever than Rosalind, though much too serious, that was for sure. Nobody knew and nobody wanted to try. Nobody dared. It was probably so awful—why else would they have come across the way they all had instead of staying there?

But still and still, she had to ask, her curiosity an itch that simply had to be scratched. What had it been like, truly? Why couldn’t they remember what it had been like? And always it came back so unsatisfactorily: because it must’ve been bad. Which made perfect sense, Cosette supposed. Nobody liked to remember bad things. She never had. She’d learned how to forget the bad things from when she used to watch the dead girl. And from Isabelle.

Like the night of the fire ...

Cosette shivered and hugged herself. No, no, no. That had never happened.

Except it had, it had, and everybody had died. Almost everybody. Died and gone away forever. But where? When you had a red crow in your chest, it took you up and away when you died, up into the sky into an even better place. But if you didn’t, if you weren’t real, there was nothing left of you when you died. Nothing left at all.

She watched the passersby, but no one paid the least bit of attention to her. No one saw her because she wasn’t concentrating on letting them see her. Because she wasn’t real.

Don’t be sad, she told herself. Everything’s going to change, you’ll see.

Isabelle would paint the fairy and she’d do the good deeds and then the fairy would make her real, very and truly real, just the way Rolanda had promised.

Casette brightened up at the thought of that. She kicked her heels against the wall she was sitting on and tried to think of just what sort of good deeds would be required. Rosalind would know. And so would Solemn John. But she didn’t want to ask them. She wanted to do this on her own, to show everyone that she, too, could be clever and wise. She grinned to think of the looks of surprise that they’d wear when they realized that she had a red crow beating its wings inside her. They would look at her and know that she was filled with red blood and dreams and then she would tell them how they could become real, too, and everyone would have to remark on just how clever she really was, even Solemn John, and then ...

Her thoughts trailed off as an uneasy prickling sensation crept up the back of her neck. Someone, she realized, was watching her. Which was impossible because she hadn’t chosen to be seen. But the feeling wouldn’t go away.

She looked about herself, pretending a disinterest that she didn’t really feel, her gaze traveling from one end of the street to the other. When she finally did notice the girl leaning by the door of a shop across the street, she couldn’t figure out how she could ever have missed spotting her straightaway since she seemed more like a black-and-white cutout that had been propped up in the doorway than a real person: alabaster skin, short black hair, midnight eyes ringed with dark smudges, black lipstick. Black leather vest, black jeans torn at the knees, black motorcycle boots. There was no color to her at all.

How can she see me when I don’t want to be seen? Cosette wondered. But she already knew. The black-and-white girl must have crossed over from the before just as she had herself. Someone had brought her over. Only who? Not Isabelle. There was only one other person Cosette could think of and she didn’t like the idea of that at all.

At that moment, the girl smiled, but it wasn’t so much a pleasant expression as spiteful—feral and hungry. When she saw that she had Cosette’s attention, the black-and-white girl slowly drew a finger across her throat. Then she pushed herself away from the doorway and sauntered off down the street.

Cosette sat frozen on her perch on the wall, unable to do anything but watch her go.

I’m not scared of her, she lied to herself. I’m not scared at all.

But she was unable to stop shivering. Long after the stranger had disappeared from sight, all she could do was hug her knees and wish she were back on the island, or in Solemn John’s company, or anywhere at all that might be safe. She remembered what Rosalind had said to her just before she left the island.

Promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me you won’t let that dark man find you.

That promise had been easy to make but, she realized unhappily, probably impossible to keep.

She knew she should go looking for Solemn John, right now, but she didn’t seem able to move. All she could feel was the feral look in the black-and-white girl’s eyes and wonder how many more just like her had been brought across from the before.

VII

Rushkin has put a piece of himself inside you.

Isabelle thought about that as she locked up her studio and slowly made her way down the two flights of stairs that would take her out into the central court on the ground floor of Joli Coeur. John had that much right, but she wasn’t sure if he understood the many levels that simple statement held for her.

Her love/ hate relationship with Rushkin was far more complex than she could begin to explain—even to herself. At the same time as she dreaded a new encounter with her old mentor, a part of her still couldn’t hate him.

She didn’t know who she’d be today if she had never met him on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral all those years ago. The abstract expressionism that was so much a part of her work since the fire still owed a debt to all she’d learned from Rushkin. His techniques, his views on art, the ability to call up the numena ... they all lived on inside her, along with an affection for him that she knew was as perverse as it was irrefutable. She understood he was a monster, but he had saved her from a life of prosaic ignorance, both as an artist and a person. Without the fire that he had woken in her, she might have put her art aside long ago and be working in some office right now. It had happened to so many of her contemporaries from university days; how could she be so certain it wouldn’t have happened to her? Rushkin had found the butterfly confused into thinking it was a moth and nurtured it so that instead of being drawn to the flame, she had become the flame. For that, for everything he had done for her, how could she not be grateful toward him?

She pushed open the door that led out of the stairwell and stepped out into the bustle of the courtyard. How could she explain any of this to John when she didn’t understand it herself? John would simply

She paused in the doorway, gaze caught by a familiar figure crossing the courtyard toward her. It was as though she had conjured him up by thinking about him, but she knew that this time that wasn’t the case. His returning to her now gave her a new sense of hope. This was what she wanted from John, she realized as she waited for him to reach her. She didn’t want a confrontation. She didn’t just want him to show up only because she had called him to her, but because he wanted to come.

It wasn’t until it was too late to retreat, until he was right upon her, that she noticed that the braided cloth bracelet he’d been wearing only minutes ago was no longer on his wrist. The doppelganger looked so much like her own John that for long moments all she could do was stare at him. She was struck with the same immobilizing shock as when she’d first seen her John’s face and realized that he was an exact double of the figure she’d painted in The Spirit Is Strong.

The courtyard’s crowded, she told herself. He can’t hurt me with all these people around. Maybe he doesn’t even want to hurt me.

Neither thought brought her any comfort as she looked into the dark wells of his eyes and saw not her John’s gentle warmth, but a feral quality and promise of cruelty that the man she knew couldn’t even have mustered in anger.

“Who ... who are you?” she asked.

“A friend.”

The voice was John’s, too, soft-spoken and firm. But the eyes mocked her, giving up the lie that his looks and voice so easily disguised.

“No,” Isabelle said, shaking her head. “You’re no friend of mine.”

“So quick to judge.”

Isabelle looked for help, but no one was paying any attention to their exchange. And what would it look like to an outsider anyway? John’s double hadn’t attacked her. He’d made no menacing gesture.

There was nothing in what he’d said that could be found threatening in the least. There was only the feral glitter in his eyes.

“Please,” she said. “Just leave me alone.”

“Too late for that, ma belle Izzy.”

Isabelle flinched at the sound of Kathy’s endearment falling so readily from his lips.

“What do you want from me?”

“A piece of your soul. That’s all. One small piece of your soul.”

The way he smiled did more to disassociate him from her John than had the missing bracelet, or the darkness that waited in his eyes. It was a hungry smile and gave his entire features an inhuman cast.

“Who brought you across?” she asked. But she knew. There was no one else it could have been but Rushkin.

“What does it matter? I’m here now to collect the debt.”

Isabelle shook her head. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“Not directly, perhaps, but you owe me. Of this you can be very certain.” But Isabelle was still shaking her head. “I don’t owe you a thing,” she repeated. “Now get away from me before I call for help.”

The mocking smile left his lips, if not his eyes.

“No, no,” he said. “Don’t even think of it. You’d be dead before you opened your mouth.”

Isabelle tried to dart by him, but he moved in close to her, moved quicker than she could have thought possible. With his body shielding the action from the view of anyone watching in the courtyard behind him, his hand shot up to her neck. The fingers felt like steel cables as they pushed her head roughly up against the doorjamb and held it there.

“You don’t really have any choice in the matter,” he told her conversationally, “except whether you come in one piece or not.” The fingers tightened slightly. “Understood?”

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t even move her head, but he could read the defeat in her eyes. When he let her go, she gasped for air, her own hands rising protectively about her throat. The doppelganger put his arm around her shoulders.

“Are you all right?” he asked, all concern now.

Without waiting for her reply, he led her away across the courtyard, through the light scattering of midmorning shoppers, his face turned solicitously toward her, the feral hunger hidden under hooded lids.

But the bruising grip of his hand on her shoulder was a clear reminder of who was in control.

Outside Joli Coeur they were met by a teenage girl. The girl appeared to be colorless, a monochrome study brought to life. The hungry look in her eyes matched that of Isabelle’s captor.

“Mmm,” the girl said. “She looks tasty.”

“She’s not for you.”

“Not for you either, Bitterweed.”

Bitterweed, Isabelle thought on hearing her captor’s name. That made sense. Bitterweed to John’s Sweetgrass. Monster to his angel.

“Maybe not now,” Bitterweed said. “But later ...”

The girl laughed, a dark unpleasant sound that matched the maliciousness in her eyes. “There’ll be no later for this one.”

“Shut up, Scara.”

The girl’s humor merely grew. “Hit a nerve, did we? I think a bit more John Sweetgrass went into your making than you’ll ever admit to. Next thing you’ll be wanting her to fall in love with you.”

“I said shut up.”

“Who ... who are you people?” Isabelle asked.

Her throat was still sore and the words came out in a rasp. The pair turned to her. Her question seemed to have startled them, as though they were surprised that she could speak.

“Sweet dreams,” Scara replied.

“Memories,” Bitterweed countered.

Scara’s lips pulled into a thin, savage smile. “Or maybe nightmares—take your pick.”

They hustled her toward a small black car that stood at the curb. Bitterweed pulled her into the back with him while his companion slid in behind the wheel. She had the motor started and was pulling away from the curb before Bitterweed was able to close his door.

“Watch it,” he told her.

Scara’s dark gaze regarded them from the rearview mirror. She sang softly, the melody nagging at Isabelle’s mind until she placed it as a song by the Australian group Divinyls. They’d been one of Kathy’s favorite bands, although this song had come out long after Kathy had died. Scara tapped her fingers in time on the steering wheel as she wove in and out of the traffic.

“Bless my soul,” she sang, reaching the chorus.

Isabelle shot a glance at the man beside her. What do you want from me? she’d asked him.

A piece of your soul. That’s all. One small piece of your soul.

You owe me.

He felt her glance and turned to meet her gaze. The shock of the alien person inhabiting that oh-so-familiar and much-missed body struck home all over again. She had to look away, out the window. The streets seemed unfamiliar, as though she were being taken through a city in which she’d never lived, never even been before. She realized that she didn’t know where she was, where she was going, what was going to happen to her. All she knew was that they were going to hurt her. They wanted something from her and, once she gave it to them, they were going to hurt her.

She looked up into the rearview mirror to find Scara’s hungry gaze fixed on her. When the girl mimed a kiss at her, Isabelle quickly turned back to the view outside her window.

Oh, John, she thought as she watched buildings she couldn’t recognize speed by. I need you now.

VIII

At first Alan didn’t recognize the black woman who was coming down the steps of his building just as he and Marisa were disembarking from their cab. When she stopped in front of them and called him by name, he immediately replied with a terse “No comment.”

“What?” she said, obviously confused.

Alan looked at her, a sense of familiarity coming to him now, but he still couldn’t place her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were a reporter.”

She shook her head. “I’m Rolanda Hamilton—from the Foundation.”

“Right. I knew that. I’m really sorry. I ... I’m just ...”

“He’s not been having a very good day,” Marisa explained as Alan’s voice trailed off. She held out her hand and introduced herself

“It looks like I’ve come at a bad time,” Rolanda said. “Maybe I should come back later.”

Alan shook his head. He’d had a moment to collect himself by now. “I’ve had better days,” he told her, “but that’s no reason to take it out on you. What can I do for you?”

“This is a little embarrassing, but I have this problem ....”

“Don’t worry about intruding,” Alan said when at first she hesitated, then fell silent. “To tell you the truth, you couldn’t have come at a better time.” Rolanda raised her eyebrows.

“There’s nothing that helps you forget your own troubles like listening to someone else’s,” Alan explained. “So why don’t you come in?”

“I’ll put some water on,” Marisa said as they went into the apartment. “Tea or coffee, Rolanda?” she added.

“Whatever you’re having.”

Marisa went into the kitchen with Rolanda and Alan trailed along in her wake. They each took a chair at the kitchen table. As Marisa bustled about, filling the coffee maker and setting out mugs, Alan turned to their guest.

“So,” he said. “I hope you’re not here to tell me about the plans for some celebration that the Foundation has planned, now that we’ve finally got the okay to go ahead and publish the Mully omnibus.

I’d hate to put a damper on them, but there have been some ... complications.”

Rolanda shook her head. “No, it’s not that at all. Actually, now that I’m here, I really do feel embarrassed. You’re going to think that I’ve completely lost it.”

“Now I’m really intrigued.”

“But—”

“And I promise, I won’t laugh.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

“So,” Alan prompted her when she hesitated again.

Rolanda took a deep breath. “It’s just ... do you know a girl named Cosette?”

Everything went still inside Alan. Only in my dreams, he wanted to say, but all that came out was

“Cosette?”

“She’s about fifteen or so, maybe older. Red hair. She—actually, she looks just like that painting by Isabelle Copley that’s hanging in the Foundation’s waiting room. You know, the one with all the roses.”

“The Wild Girl,” Marisa offered from where she was leaning against the counter.

Rolanda nodded. “Cosette looks exactly like the wild girl. She says she was Copley’s model, but of course that’s impossible.”

She looked from Alan to Marisa as though expecting one of them to contradict her, but neither of them made a comment. Alan thought of that early-morning visitation on Isabelle’s island that he had convinced himself had only been a dream. His Cosette had looked exactly the same as Isabelle’s painting as well.

“What about her?” he asked finally when Rolanda didn’t go on. “She says she knows you.”

“I’ve ... met her. Or at least I’ve met someone calling herself Cosette who looks just like the girl in Isabelle’s picture.”

Rolanda appeared relieved at that. “Did you notice anything, well, strange about her?”

“Everything was strange about her.”

“I’m in the dark here,” Marisa said, joining them at the table. “Who are you talking about?”

Alan sighed. “It was when I stayed over at Isabelle’s place the other night.

On Wren Island,” he added, for Rolanda’s benefit. “I woke up just before dawn and she Cosette, that is—was sitting in the windowseat of the guest room just looking at me. We had a mostly one-sided conversation that didn’t make any real sense at all, but before I could get her to clarify anything, she opened the window and took off across the lawn.”

“That’s the only time you’ve met her?” Rolanda asked.

Alan nodded.

“She told me you were her boyfriend.”

“I don’t think anything she says can be taken at face value,” Alan said. “Well, she also told me that her feelings for you weren’t reciprocated.”

“What did Isabelle have to say about her?” Marisa wanted to know. “Nothing,” Alan said. “I never told her about it.”

Both women regarded him with surprise.

“But why not?” Marisa asked.

“I thought I was dreaming. I did ask Isabelle if there was anyone else living on the island and she told me there wasn’t. It was all very weird. Isabelle herself seemed jumpy that morning—I think she’d been up all night drawing—and I was afraid of getting onto the wrong foot with her again.” He turned to Rolanda. “She was going to illustrate the omnibus.”

“Was?” Rolanda asked. “She’s changed her mind?”

“Not exactly. Have you seen the news today?”

Rolanda shook her head.

“Margaret Mully was murdered last night.”

Rolanda’s eyes widened with surprise. “Maybe we should have a celebration,” she said. “I know one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but that’s one woman the world can certainly do without.”

“You won’t hear any argument from me.”

“But what does Mully’s death have to do with your publishing the omnibus?” Rolanda asked.

“It’s going to complicate things, as in—just to give you one example—what’s her estate going to do in terms of the appeal Mully filed a couple of days ago?”

Rolanda frowned. “So she’s going to stand in our way even after she’s dead. God, how I hate that woman. It’s hard to believe that she could have had a daughter with as big a heart as Kathy’s.”

“And that’s not the only problem,” Alan said. “The police think I killed her.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Very serious,” Marisa said. The coffee maker made an odd burbling noise, indicating that the coffee was ready. “We were just coming back from the precinct when we ran into you,” she added as she rose to fill their mugs.

“Now I know what you meant by ‘No comment,’” Rolanda said.

Alan nodded. “The media was waiting for us when we left the precinct. It was a zoo.”

“Well, if they’d wanted a real story, they should have been at the Foundation this morning,” Rolanda said.

Marisa brought the mugs over to the table, along with the sugar bowl and a carton of milk.

“What happened?” she asked as she poured a generous dollop of milk into her coffee.

“I’ll bet it had something to do with Cosette,” Alan said.

Rolanda nodded. She took a sip of her coffee and then told them about her own experiences with Cosette.

“She said that?” Alan asked. “That Isabelle made her?”

“‘Brought her over’ was the way she put it, but I definitely got the idea that she thinks Isabelle created her by making a painting of her.”

Alan closed his eyes. He could see the small red-haired girl again, perched on the windowsill. Could hear her voice.

I’d suggest that you simply use monochrome studies to illustrate the book ... but I have to admit I’m too selfish and lonely. It’ll be so nice to see a few new faces around here.

It seemed like something right out of one of Kathy’s stories, but as soon as Rolanda had come to that part of her story, Alan had found himself remembering the fire. How all of Isabelle’s paintings had been destroyed. How her art had changed so drastically after the fire. How she couldn’t—or wouldn’t, he amended now—explain why her art had changed so drastically. This even explained why she’d been so adamant that the finished art she did for Kathy’s new book had to always remain in her possession.

At the same time that all those disparate puzzle pieces were coming together for Alan, he saw that Marisa was shaking her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t buy any of this. It’s just not possible.”

“You weren’t there,” Rolanda said. “I saw her draw that Xacto blade across her palm. She didn’t bleed. And then she literally vanished from my room. They’re still talking about how she appeared out of nowhere downstairs in the waiting room.”

“In front of the painting,” Alan said.

Rolanda nodded slowly. “Where I first saw her. Do you think it, I don’t know, draws her to it somehow?”

“It would be her anchor, wouldn’t it? If what she says is true.”

“Oh please,” Marisa said. “You can’t be taking this seriously.”

“I know what I saw,” Rolanda said.

“And I know what I felt,” Alan added. “There was something unnatural about that girl. I felt it right away. That’s why I found it so easy to pass it off as a dream. It just didn’t feel real to me. And what Rolanda’s telling us goes a long way to explaining Isabelle’s strange behavior after the farmhouse burned down and all her art was destroyed.”

“I don’t get it,” Marisa said.

But Rolanda knew. “If the paintings give these ... whatever they are. If it gives them life, then if something happens to the painting, if it should get destroyed—”

‘—then the beings she created with those paintings might die as well. After all, there is a connection between them, like in that Oscar Wilde story.” Rolanda shivered. “This is so weird.”

Marisa looked from her to Alan. “This is so ridiculous. We’re talking real life, not fairy tales.”

“I know how it sounds,” Alan said. “But you haven’t met Cosette. You don’t know what it was like in the old days with Kathy and Isabelle. There was always a kind of magic in the air.”

“It’s called nostalgia,” Marisa said with a smile.

Alan returned her smile. “I know how we can give everything a glow when we look back on the past, but this is different. I feel that it’s true.”

“And I know what I saw,” Rolanda added.

“I don’t have the answers,” Alan said, “but you’ve got to admit that we’re dealing with something unusual here.”

“You might not have the answers,” Rolanda said, “but you know someone who does.”

Alan nodded. “Isabelle. We’ll have to ask her.”

“Do you know where she’s staying?” Marisa asked.

“No. But Jilly would know.”

“Jilly Coppercorn?” Rolanda asked.

“We all go back a long way, but Jilly’s the only one who’s really maintained a relationship with Isabelle over the years.”

“Do you have her number?”

Alan nodded. He made the call and five minutes later they were leaving his apartment, on their way to Isabelle’s new studio in Joli Coeur.

IX

It took Cosette forever, and then a little longer still, to find Solemn John. It wasn’t just that John was hard to find, which he was. John was always on the move, as restless as the sky was long and always so sad, so serious. He could be grim, too, though he was never like that with her. But he could be infuriating in the way he almost always answered a question with one of his own. He was the oldest of them, the strongest and the fiercest. Cosette liked to think that she could be fierce, but compared to John, she could only play at fierceness.

So John was hard to find. But the other reason it took Cosette so long to track him down was that the strange black-and-white girl had frightened her so badly. Afraid of encountering her again, Cosette didn’t walk down the middle of the sidewalks anymore, she crept through the shadows and alleyways.

When she had to cross a street or the open stretch of a deserted lot, she did it with a scurrying sideways movement, trying to look all around herself at once feeling so very much like a tiny little deer mouse in an open field as the shadow of the hawk falls upon it.

She went almost all around the downtown core of the city, from Battersfield Road as far east as Fitzhenry Park, from the Pier as far north as the abandoned tenements of the Tombs, and then found John sitting on a fire escape no more than two blocks from where she’d first set out to find him. Of course, she thought. Wasn’t that always the way? But she was so relieved to see him that she couldn’t even muster up a spark of irritation.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she said. She dug out an empty crate from a heap of garbage on one side of the alley and dragged it over to the fire escape. “You can be ever so hard to find,” she added as she sat down upon her makeshift stool.

John shrugged. “I’ve been here.”

“I can see that now.”

This time he made no reply. His solemn gaze was fixed on something far beyond the alleyway.

“Something awful’s happening,” Cosette told him.

John nodded, but he didn’t look at her. “I know. I started to poke around after we talked the other night, listening to gossip, chasing rumors.”

“Someone else is bringing people across from the before,” Cosette informed him.

Now John did turn to look at her. “You’ve seen him?”

“Her. She has no color to her, John. She’s a black-and-white girl and I think she’s going to kill me.”

“I’ve heard there’s more than one, but the only one I actually knew existed was my twin.”

“You have a twin?”

John shrugged. “Not so’s I ever knew. But I talked to Isabelle and she said he looks just like me.”

“You talked to Isabelle?”

“Briefly.”

The idea of John and Isabelle finally speaking to each other after all these years was enough to distract Cosette from her fear of the black-and-white girl and the danger that her existence appeared to represent. She gave John a careful look, then sighed.

“Did she send you away again?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

“But still.”

“But still,” John agreed. “She didn’t call me back either—not in a way I could come.”

“I’m sorry about what I said to you the other night.”

John shrugged. “I knew you didn’t mean it.”

“No,” Cosette said. “I did mean it. I really don’t understand why people bother to fall in love. But I didn’t say it to make you feel bad. It just sort of popped out. I know how much you care about her. I know it’s not your fault that she makes you feel the way you do.”

“I used to think I loved her so much because she brought me across,” John said. “That it was all tied up with the magic that allowed her to open the gate for me. I didn’t think I had any choice in the matter at all. When I met Paddyjack and realized that he was hopelessly devoted to her as well, that only seemed to confirm it. But then she brought more and more of us across and I saw that it wasn’t so. Some liked her, some didn’t. Some didn’t care one way or the other. After a while I came to realize that while I still didn’t have any choice, it was a matter of my heart, not because of any enchantment of hers. But by then it was too late. She never called me back to her.”

“Couldn’t you have gone to her?” Cosette asked.

John shook his head. “She sent me away.”

“But—”

“It wasn’t a matter of my pride, Cosette. Isabelle just didn’t want me anymore. I’m not real to her.”

When he fell silent this time, Cosette didn’t know what to say. She sat on her crate and tapped the toes of her shoes together, picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater.

“So this man Isabelle told you about,” she asked finally. “Does he really look exactly like you?”

John gave Cosette a thin, humorless smile. “Apparently. He has my looks, but not my sunny personality.”

Cosette digested that slowly. For someone who looked exactly like John to have been brought across meant ...

“So,” she said. “Isabelle must have made another painting of you.”

Only when? Cosette made it a point to visit Isabelle’s studio on a regular basis as much as for a simple curiosity to see what Isabelle was currently working on as to borrow various paints and brushes and pencils and the like. She hadn’t seen a new painting of John. Isabelle hadn’t done a portrait in years.

“Not Isabelle,” John said. “But Rushkin. Couldn’t you feel his hand in the girl you saw?”

Cosette shivered. John was right. Rushkin had been the first to come to her mind when she saw the black-and-white girl.

“Can they feed on us, too?” she asked. “You know, the way that he can?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But they could bring us to him.”

“You said he could only hurt us through the paintings—or in Isabelle’s dreams.”

“I don’t know everything,” John replied sharply.

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not mad at you. I ... what I am is scared.”

Cosette started to feel sick to her stomach then. If John was scared, then they were all doomed, weren’t they? They were going to die without ever having the chance to dream.

“Can’t we do anything to stop him?” she asked in a small voice.

She wished she weren’t so scared. She wished she could be brave, but it was so hard. Just thinking of the dark man made her want to curl up into a small ball and hide away, far away. Maybe courage was something the red crow gave you along with dreams. She’d never thought of that before, but if even John was scared ...

“We could kill him,” John said.

Cosette looked at him in surprise. She couldn’t imagine killing anyone, couldn’t imagine silencing the beat of their red crow’s wings, spilling their dreams and blood. Not even a monster such as Rushkin.

“Have ... have you ever killed anyone?” she asked.

John hesitated, then slowly nodded his head.

“I don’t know if I ... if I could do it,” Cosette said.

“They mean to kill us,” John said.

“I know, but—”

“They mean Isabelle harm. They mean us all harm. You and I. Rosalind and Annie Nin. Bajel and Paddyjack. All of us who are left. There’ll be no more gathering in the birch woods to sing and dance then, Cosette. There’ll be no more chance than we can ever learn to dream. We’ll all be gone.”

Cosette gave him a strange look. “You’ve been to the island?” she asked. “You’ve seen us dancing?”

John nodded. “And listened to the stories that Rosalind tells. I’ve watched you paint. I’ve read Bajel’s poems and heard Annie sing.”

“Why did you never make yourself known? Why didn’t you join us?”

“I didn’t feel I belonged.”

“Paddyjack was always talking about meeting you in the woods but I thought it was just another one of those stories he likes to tell. You know, the way he makes something up because that’s the way he wishes it could really be.”

“I remember,” John said, smiling. But then his features grew serious once more. “I’d give my life for him. I’d give my life for any of you, but especially for Isabelle.”

“Even though you don’t feel you belong with any of us? Even though Isabelle sent you away?”

“None of that changes the way I feel,” John said. “Knowing you are safe makes my exile bearable.”

“But you never had to be an exile.”

“You don’t understand, Cosette. You’re more like Isabelle is. All of you are. You sing and dance and paint and tell stories. I have only one talent. I’m a hunter, a warrior. When Isabelle sent me away I realized there was no place for someone like me in your lives. But I could still watch over you. I could still protect you.”

“That’s what you’ve done all these years?”

“Partly. I’ve also tried to teach myself gentler arts.” A sad smile touched his lips. “I haven’t been particularly successful.”

“But neither have I,” Cosette said. “With my painting, I mean. We need the red crow to be any good.”

John shook his head. “A red crow will let you do what Isabelle and Rushkin can do—bring others across. You don’t need it for your art to prosper.”

“You can’t have looked very closely at my pictures then.”

“What you lack is patience, Cosette, not a red crow.”

Cosette ducked her head so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.

“But none of that matters now,” she said without looking up. “Not with the dark man’s return.”

“I won’t let him hurt you,” John assured her. “I said I would give up my life for you. I would also take a life.”

Cosette lifted her gaze until it met his.

“Me, too,” she said, surprising herself because she realized it was true. She didn’t feel any braver than she had before. If anything, she was more scared. But she knew she would do it. Isabelle and the others were the closest she had by way of a family. They were bound by deeper ties than blood and dreams. She would do anything to protect them.

“It really is true, isn’t it?” she added hopefully. “What Rosalind always says. We are real.”

John nodded. “The lack of a red crow only makes us different.”

“If we weren’t real, we wouldn’t care so much about each other, would we?”

John gave her a long thoughtful look. “I think that’s what makes us real,” he said finally.

He stood up and wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans.

“How will we find the dark man?” Cosette asked.

“Isabelle will know where he is. He left a piece of himself in her when he went away. It’ll tell her where he is.”

They closed their eyes, waking their own connection to Isabelle. Cosette opened her eyes in alarm to find a similar worried expression in John’s. “She’s already found him,” Cosette said.

“Or he’s found her,” he said grimly.

Cosette’s newfound courage faltered. “We really have to kill him, don’t we?”

“We have to try,” John said. “Though I don’t know if it’s possible for us to actually kill him. He’s a maker and makers will always wield a certain power over our kind—even if he didn’t bring us across himself. Maybe only Isabelle can kill him.”

Cosette shook her head. “Isabelle could never hurt anyone.”

John gave her an odd look. Then, without waiting to see if Cosette would follow, he set off down the alleyway at a brisk pace, heading north toward the burnedout tenements and abandoned buildings that made up that part of Newford known as the Tombs. Cosette hesitated for only a moment before hurrying off to join him.

X

Across town from her numena, Isabelle was as frightened as Cosette, but for another reason. She had no idea where her captors were taking her, or what was going to happen to her. All she knew was that it would involve Rushkin, and seeing him again made her feel even more afraid.

Cowardice, she remembered Rushkin telling her once, was a crime like any other. “The difference is,” he explained, “is that it’s boring. You don’t so much commit cowardice as surrender to it. We live in a world that seems to celebrate cowardly behavior, Isabelle, except we call it compromise. We call it getting along. Not making waves. We don’t stand by our convictions anymore because we’re too busy trying to make sure that we don’t upset anybody. I don’t care if it’s with our art, or confronting injustice, nine out of ten times the average person will let the world run roughshod over them because they’re too intimidated to make a stand and stick to it.”

“But where do you expect people to find that kind of courage?” Isabelle had asked. “This is the world we live in. If we didn’t get along with each other all that would be left would be chaos.”

“Who wants to live in a world where you have to be a coward to get along?”

“The world isn’t so black and white,” Isabelle had said.

“No, but it could be if we stopped compromising our values. We have to confront evil, no matter where we find it, and then stand up to it.”

Isabelle had shaken her head. “The world isn’t like that. People aren’t like that. How are they supposed to become brave when the best most of us can ever seem to to manage is to avoid a confrontation?”

“By not surrendering,” Rushkin replied. “It’s that simple. If you believe in the truth of what you’re doing, why in god’s name would you want to compromise?”

“But—”

“We owe it to our art to face the truth without flinching. We owe it to ourselves. Every so-called advantage that evil has can also be used against it. The world isn’t fair, in and of itself. We have to make it fair.”

Rushkin had always remained true to his ideals, but at what cost, Isabelle had remembered thinking more than once when she saw the way he lived. Alone and friendless, with only his art.

Kathy had always remained true to her ideals, as well, though unlike Rushkin, she was willing to compromise when necessary. Still, there were some things that remained forever sacrosanct to her.

She’d fought injustice wherever it confronted her; she’d never compromised the vision that drove her to write; she’d created the Newford Children’s Foundation and worked on its front lines, dedicating herself to what she called the four C’s necessary for successful guerrilla social work: cash, contributing, counseling and consoling. You gave what you could. Money, if you didn’t have the time.

Kathy wouldn’t have found herself in her own present situation, Isabelle thought. They’d both taken a self-defense course, but here it was, the first time Isabelle had found herself confronted with actual violence since taking that course, and she’d surrendered. Kathy wouldn’t have. Kathy would have booted Bitterweed between the legs and made a break for it. She wouldn’t be sitting here, allowing herself to be driven to god knew where.

Isabelle sighed. But she wasn’t Kathy, was she?

The car pulled over to the curb in front of an abandoned tenement and Scara killed the engine. She turned in her seat and leaned her arms on the backrest, hunger glittering in her eyes.

“End of the line, sweetheart,” she said.

Isabelle shivered. I could still try to stand up for myself, she thought as Bitterweed pulled her from the car. I could still fight them. But what was the point?

She knew where she was now: in the Tombs. That vast sector in the middle of the city that consisted of derelict buildings, burnedout structures and empty, rubble-strewn lots. Streets that were often little more than weed-choked paths, most of them too clogged with buckled pavement and abandoned cars to drive through. Deserted brownstones and tenements that served as squats for Newford’s disenfranchised, those who couldn’t even cling to the bottom rung of the social ladder. The area stretched for a few square miles north of Gracie Street, a ruined cityscape that could as easily have been Belfast or the Bronx, East LA or Detroit.

She could fight her captors, Isabelle thought. And she could run. But to where? The streets of the Tombs were a dizzying maze to anyone unfamiliar with the rubble warren through which they cut their stuttering way. Many of its inhabitants were easily as dangerous as her present captors: wild-eyed homeless men, junkies, drunken bikers and the like. Desperate, almost feral creatures, some of them.

Sociopathic monsters.

So once again she surrendered. She let the two numena lead her into the building. They stepped over heaps of broken plaster and litter, squeezed by sections of torn-up floor. The walls were smeared with aerosoled graffiti and other scrawled marks made with less recognizable substances. The air was stale and close, and reeked of urine and rotting garbage. It was the antithesis of her home on Wren Island.

And the opposite of those worlds once brought to life by the paintbrush of the man into whose presence she was led.

She saw him in a corner of a room on the second floor, lying on a small pallet of newspapers and blankets, his bulk dissipated, his features sunken into themselves. No longer the stoop-backed, somewhat homely mentor now. Not even a troll. More like some exotic bug, dug up from under a rotted log and left to fend for itself in the harsh sunlight. An infirm, helpless thing, weakly lifting its head when Bitterweed and Scam led her into its room. But there was still a hot light banked in the kiln of his eyes, a fiery hunger that was even more intense than what burned in the gazes of his numena.

“It’s time to make good the debt you owe me,” Rushkin said. Even his voice was changed—the deep tones had become a thin, croaking rasp. “I don’t owe you anything.”

The wasted figure shook its head. “You owe me everything and I will have it from you now.”

Isabelle knew all too well what he wanted. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it.

“John was right,” she said. “All along, he was right. You really do feed on my numena.”

“Numena,” Rushkin repeated. “An interesting appellation. Effective, if not entirely apt. I never bothered to give them a name myself”

“I won’t do it.”

Rushkin indicated his own numena. “They will kill you if you don’t.”

“They’ll kill me if I do. I heard as much before they brought me here.”

Confronted with Rushkin, Isabelle’s fear was swallowed by the anger she felt toward her old mentor.

She looked at him and saw a hundred painful deaths, the fire that had licked away at canvas and flesh, consuming all in its path. Never again, she had promised herself, and then she’d stopped painting gateways that would allow numena to cross over from their before. Never again, she repeated to herself now. Any of her numena that still survived, any that she might bring across with her new work, she would protect with her life. Where she couldn’t be brave for herself, the courage was there for those who had died before, for those who would die if she gave in to him.

“You have my word that you’ll be safe,” Rushkin assured her. He hid the hungry fire in his eyes behind an earnestness that Isabelle didn’t accept for a moment.

“Until the next time you need my ... my magic.”

Rushkin shook his head. “Once I have ... recovered, I will find myself a new protege. You will never see me again.”

“A new protege?” Isabelle said, startled.

All she could think was, how could she allow him to continue to spread his evil? But Rushkin, intentionally or not, mistook her shock for something else.

“I doubt we could work that well together anymore,” he said. “And besides, I’ve taught you all I know.”

Isabelle gave him a look of distaste.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You thought you were alone.” He shook his head. “Hardly. There were many before you, my dear, and one since. Her name was Giselle, a lovely French girl and very, very talented. I met her in Paris, and though the city has changed, discovering her and working with her rendered my relocating there worthwhile all the same.”

“What ... happened to her?”

“She died,” Rushkin replied. He ducked his head and gave a heavy sigh. “Killed herself, actually.

Burned down our studio with all of our work and herself in it.” He indicated the two numena who had brought Isabelle to him. “These two were the only survivors of the conflagration and lord knows how I managed to save them.”

A deep stillness settled inside Isabelle. She remembered sitting at her kitchen table one morning some two years ago with that week’s edition of Time magazine and reading about that fire. The whole of the art world had been in shock about it, but it had particularly struck home with her because of her own fire all those years ago.

“Giselle Marchand,” Isabelle said softly as her memory called up the artist’s name.

“So you know her work. She could have given Rembrandt a run for his money with her use of light.

We lost a great talent that day.”

Isabelle stared at him in horror. “You killed her. You killed her just so you could feed on her numena.

You set the fire that burned down her studio.”

“I no more set that fire than I did the one that destroyed your studio.”

“At least have the courage to admit to your crimes.”

Rushkin shook his head. “You wrong me. And if my word is no longer of value with you, then look at me. Do you think I would have left myself in a position such as this? She had a death wish, Isabelle, and all that gorgeous art of ours fell victim to it. Without it, I am reduced to begging favors from an old student.”

“No,” Isabelle said. “You set that fire—just as you set the one in my studio.”

“I didn’t set that fire.”

“Then who did?”

Rushkin gave her a long considering look. “You really don’t remember?”

“Remember what?”

He sighed. “Isabelle, you set that fire.”

Those few simple words made her reel back from him. She would have fled the room, except Bitterweed caught her by the arm and returned her to Rushkin’s pallet.

“You always had a gift for restating the truth to yourself,” Rushkin said, “but I never realized how thoroughly you would come to believe your own lies.”

“No. I would never ...”

She closed her eyes, but then the burning figures reared up in her mind’s eyes. She could hear the roar of the flames, the crackle of flesh burning, the awful stink of smoke and sweet cloying smell of cooking meat. But it hadn’t been meat, not meat that any sane person would ingest.

“The only difference between yourself and Giselle,” Rushkin said, “is that she let the fire consume herself as well as her art.”

“No!” Isabelle cried. She shook off Bitterweed’s grip and knelt on the floor, her face now level with Rushkin’s. She glared at him. “I know what you’re trying to do, but it won’t work. You can’t make me believe your lies. I won’t believe them.”

“Fine,” Rushkin said. “Have it your way.”

It was plain from the tone of his voice that he was humoring her, but Isabelle refused to let him bait her any further. She clenched her teeth and sat back on her haunches. Cold. Silent. Staring at him.

“But you will still repay the debt you owe me,” Rushkin added.

Isabelle shook her head. “I won’t do it,” she said. “I won’t make people for you to murder.”

“People? You call them numena, yourself. Strictly speaking, a numen is merely a spiritual force, an influence one might feel around a certain thing or place. It has no physical presence.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“Of course I do,” Rushkin told her. “But you have to remember they’re not real.”

Isabelle looked at the two numena who had brought her to this place. “You heard it from his own lips,” she said. “How can you serve a monster such as this? How can you help him prey on your own kind?”

But neither of the numena appeared particularly perturbed.

“What do we care about the others?” Scam asked. “What have they ever done for us?”

Bitterweed nodded. “And we will be real. We have been promised.”

“By who? This father of lies?”

“He has never lied to us.”

Isabelle shook her head. “You don’t need him. He needs you. You’re already real. My numena live lives of their own and so do you. To believe otherwise is to believe his lies.”

“No,” Bitterweed said. “We need him.”

“All we ever did,” Isabelle said, “was open a door for you to cross over from your own world to this. You don’t need him any more than the man he based you upon needs me.”

“Quite the remarkable job I did making Bitterweed, don’t you think?” Rushkin remarked. “Of course it helps to have an eidetic memory.”

“I’m not talking to you,” Isabelle said.

“I know,” Rushkin said. “But you are wasting your time trying to convince them to see things your way. They know the truth.”

“Then how will you make them real?” Isabelle challenged.

“It’s quite simple, frankly. They require only a piece of your soul. Or mine. Or that of anyone such as us who can make them.”

Now Isabelle knew what Bitterweed had meant when he said she owed him. Though what he should have said was that she was owed to him. He and Scara had brought her to Rushkin so that she would rejuvenate her erstwhile mentor and in return Rushkin would give her to them. So much for Rushkin’s assurances of safety. So much for his giving his word. But then she already knew he was a liar.

“You’re a monster,” she said.

Rushkin shook his head. “You take everything far too seriously, Isabelle. You think of us as parasites, but it’s nothing so crass as that, I can assure you. The beings I require to restore me are not real in the sense that you or I can claim. I murder no one; I hurt no one. No one that is real.”

Isabelle thought of John, of the arguments they’d had on this very subject, and all she could do was shake her head in denial.

“And to make them real,” Rushkin went on, “costs so little. They will step into your sleep and take a small morsel of your soul. A memory, a hope, a piece of a dream. Nothing you can’t live without.”

“You were in my dreams once,” Isabelle said, “and you weren’t nearly so benign. You killed the winged cat. You would have killed Paddyjack, too, if John hadn’t driven you away.”

Rushkin neither denied nor agreed to what she said. “It’s harder for you and I to step into each other’s dreams. It’s because we are both makers—dreamers. It’s much easier for what you call numena since they are already so close to our dreams. They are born from our art and our art is born from our dreams—from what we remember, and what we envision.”

“You still killed the winged cat.”

Rushkin shrugged. “There was a need upon me that night. In retrospect, I should have been more patient. But I must remind you, Isabelle: none of your numena that I took were real. They need that piece of your soul to fuel them and I would have known if you had given it to them. I would never harm any that you made real. I am not the monster you make me out to be.”

“Oh no? Then what would you call yourself?”

“A man who has lived for a very long time and who is not yet ready to end his stay in this world.”

“No matter what the cost.”

“There is always a cost,” Rushkin agreed. “But in this case, it is not the one you assume it to be. I did not want to come back into your life and bring you more heartbreak, Isabelle. But I was weaker than I thought and in the two years since Giselle died, I have found no one with the necessary talent to take under my tutelage. It was Bitterweed who reminded me of you and even then I would not have returned into your life except that I heard that you would be illustrating a new collection of stories by your friend.

Since I knew you would once again be creating numena ...” He shrugged.

“How could you have heard that? I only agreed to it yesterday.”

“Really? I heard about it over a month ago. Or perhaps it was only that you were being considered for the project. It makes little difference, now, since here we all are.”

“So this was all Bitterweed’s idea,” Isabelle said. “Kidnapping me and bringing me here.”

“He is very eager to become real,” Rushkin told her, “and like your own John, headstrong. We meant to wait until you had completed the work for the book before we stepped in, but then ...”

“But then what?” Isabelle asked when he hesitated.

“There are so many things that could go wrong or delay such a project,” Rushkin said.

He kept that same earnest expression in his eyes that he’d been wearing throughout their conversation, but Isabelle didn’t think that this was what he’d meant to say. He was hiding something.

Then she had to laugh at herself. When had she known Rushkin to ever be straightforward about anything?

“You can see how weak I am,” Rushkin added. “Bitterweed was afraid that I wouldn’t survive the wait. And besides, he is so eager. So impatient. I think he would do anything to become real.”

“But he already is real.”

Rushkin sighed. “The numena do not need to eat or sleep. They are unable to bleed or dream. They are not real.”

“You say that only because it suits your purpose.”

“Then what would you call them?”

Isabelle glanced at his numena. Scara lounged on the floor, cleaning her nails with a switchblade, and didn’t even seem to be paying attention to the conversation. Bitterweed leaned against a wall beside her, arms folded, listening, but his face was a closed mask. Unreadable.

“Different,” Isabelle said. “That’s all. Not better or worse than us, only different.”

Rushkin smiled. “How very open-minded of you. How politically correct. Perhaps we should refer to them as the dream-impaired in the future.”

“I’m not Izzy anymore,” Isabelle told him. “I’m not that impressionable teenager that you took under your wing and who’d believe anything you’d say because you were Vincent bloody Adjani Rushkin.

God, I hate you.”

“And yet you named your studio after me.”

Isabelle gave him a withering look. “You know up until this very morning I couldn’t have said which was stronger: my admiration for you and the gratefulness I’ve felt for everything you taught me, or my fear and loathing for everything you stand for. You’ve certainly clarified that for me today.”

“And yet you will help me,” Rushkin said.

Isabelle shook her head. “I can’t believe you. Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying?”

“If you help restore me with your numena,” Rushkin told her, “I will give you the one thing your heart most desires.”

“What would you know about my desires?”

“I’ll bring her back—the friend you still mourn.”

It took her a moment to understand what he was getting at. She was sure that she was wrong.

“You don’t mean Kathy?” she asked dubiously.

When Rushkin nodded, Isabelle stared at him in disbelief.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“And the numena aren’t?”

“Just because one improbable thing is true doesn’t mean anything can be true.”

“I promise you, I can bring her back to you.”

How many times had she longed to see that mass of red-gold hair tossed aside as Kathy turned to look at her the way she always did, the welcoming smile, the kind light in those grey eyes? How often had she seen something, or read something, or felt something, and thought, Wait’ll I tell Kathy, only to remember that Kathy was dead? Five years had passed, and it still happened. Not every day. Not even every week. But enough.

And how often had she railed against the unfairness of Kathy’s death? How often had she thought she’d do anything to have her back? Anything at all. But this?

She’d considered painting Kathy herself, waking her the way she had John and the others, but knew it wouldn’t work. The numena were new to this world. Kathy had lived here and died here. There was no return for her. This world had been hers before.

But even knowing that, even knowing that Rushkin would call up a ghost, a simulation, not the real Kathy, she couldn’t help being tempted. Because what if Rushkin really could do it? There were so many questions she had for Kathy, so many riddles that needed answers only Kathy could give.

I realized that I had fallen in love with her from day one, but I never once got up the courage to tell her.

I hope I do before either of us dies.

I’m not attracted to men, but I’m not attracted to women either. It’s just Izzy I want. She had to know if it was true.

“Well?” Rushkin asked. “Do we have a bargain?”

Isabelle blinked, startled out of her reverie. She gazed at the insectlike cast into which his features had fallen. Slowly she shook her head.

“You’ll bring her back,” she said. “And what will she be? Like him?” She jerked a thumb in Bitterweed’s direction. “A flawed copy of the real thing? A monster?”

“No,” Rushkin said. “I’ll bring back an angel.”

“I don’t believe your lies anymore, Vincent. I haven’t believed them for a very long time.”

“And if I bring her back first?” Rushkin asked. “If, before you paint one stroke for me, I bring her back and you can judge for yourself?”

“What ... what are you saying?”

“I will bring your friend back to you. If you are satisfied that it is indeed her, you will paint for me. If not, then we will part ways here and I will never trouble you again.”

Isabelle hated herself for what she was thinking.

You wouldn’t be doing this for yourself, she tried to tell herself. Not entirely. Sure, you’re selfish and you want her back, but it’s not like you’d be the only person to benefit. She thought of what Kathy had written about her in the journal:

It’s not because she’s beautiful, which she is; it’s because she’s an angel, sent down from heaven to make us all a little more grateful about our time spent here on planet earth. We’re better people for having known her.

Kathy might as well have been talking about herself.

“These paintings,” Isabelle began.

“I will ask you to do only enough to restore me. Two—three at the most.”

“And your numena?”

“I will give them what they need from my own dreams.”

Could she do it? Isabelle asked herself. Could she bring two or three of her own numena across from the before and sacrifice them for Kathy’s sake?

She knew it would be wrong. She was wrong to even consider it. It put her on the same level as Rushkin. She knew that Kathy would be horrified at the price paid for her return.

“Well?” Rushkin asked.

“It wouldn’t even be necessary for you to make new paintings,” Rushkin said. “You must have one or two left over from before you entered this abstract expressionism period of yours.”

“No,” Isabelle said. “I couldn’t do that.”

It was hard enough that she had to sacrifice anyone for Kathy to be able to return, but not them. Not John and Paddyjack, the wild girl and the handful of others who had survived.

“But you will paint for me?”

41

“Isabelle,” he said softly. “What do you have to lose? If I fail to bring your friend back to your satisfaction, you owe me nothing. If I succeed—surely it would be worth any price?”

“I don’t know.”

God, she felt so confused.

If Rushkin wasn’t lying about being able to bring Kathy back, then perhaps he was also telling the truth when he said that the numena weren’t real. Isabelle couldn’t barter with true human lives—even for Kathy’s sake. But if the numena weren’t real. If they were only paintings. Dream-born figments without any true life of their own ...

But then she thought of something Sophie had told her back when they were sharing a studio in the early eighties. They’d gotten to talking about dreams, and Sophie, who had very vivid dreams, had insisted that you always had to maintain your principles, even when you were dreaming. What you did in a dream might not be real in terms of the waking world, she explained, but that didn’t change the fact that you had done it. That you were capable of doing it. If you killed someone in a dream, you were still guilty ofmurder, even if there was no corpse when you woke, even if no one had really died. Because you would still have made the choice where it counted: inside yourself.

So how would this be any different?

“I repeat,” Rushkin said. “What do you have to lose?”

My soul, Isabelle thought. And everything I’ve ever believed in. “You don’t know what you’re asking of me,” she said.

Rushkin shook his head. “But I do, Isabelle. I do. We have always had our differences, but I respect your beliefs. Just because I believe your feelings concerning the numena to be untrue doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the torment you are going through.”

His gaze met hers, guileless and clear. She could almost believe he honestly cared for her. Could almost feel herself falling under his sway again. Oh, Kathy, she thought. What am I supposed to do?

XI

There was no answer at the door to Isabelle’s studio.

“Jilly said she was running some errands this morning,” Alan said. “She mustn’t be back yet.”

As he turned away, Marisa stepped up to the door and tried the knob. The lock was engaged but the door hadn’t been completely shut and it swung open at her touch.

“Why don’t we wait for her inside?” she said.

“No,” Alan said. “We can’t just barge in ....”

But Marisa had already stepped inside. Alan and Rolanda exchanged uncomfortable looks, then reluctantly followed her inside. The studio was crammed with boxes and suitcases, but otherwise empty.

“Look at this,” Marisa said, standing by the windowseat.

She held up the painting of Paddyjack and Alan drew a sharp breath.

“That’s a character out of one of Kathy’s stories, isn’t it?” Rolanda said.

Alan nodded. He crossed the room and took the painting from Marisa. In the corner by Isabelle’s signature he found a date, 1974. So it was the original, not a copy.

“This shouldn’t exist,” he said.

Marisa gave him an odd look. “Why not?”

“It was destroyed in the fire—almost all of her early work was destroyed except for the one I’ve got, some juvenilia and the paintings in the Foundation’s waiting room.”

“That must have been so horrible for her,” Rolanda said.

“It devastated her,” Alan said, “though she tried not to show it.” He shook his head. “All that astonishing work ... gone, just like that.”

He pictured the one painting by Isabelle that he owned—a ten-by-sixteen oil pastel of a small angular, red-haired gamine that she’d called Annie Nin—and a thought came to him then. If Cosette really had been brought over through Isabelle’s painting The Wild Girl, then the subject of the painting he owned would be alive, too. Out there in the world somewhere. But the others, the others were all dead.

Destroyed in the fire.

“It must have killed her,” he said softly.

“Killed who?” Marisa asked.

But Rolanda was with him. “Isabelle,” she said. “The way she must have felt when the people who were born from her paintings all died in that fire.”

“No wonder the direction of her art changed so drastically,” Alan said. He stared down at the painting he held. “Except ... what if they weren’t destroyed?”

“You just said that the fire took almost everything she’d ever done up to that point in her career,”

Marisa said.

Alan nodded. “Including this painting. But it’s here, isn’t it?”

“Do you think she only pretended that they were destroyed in the fire?” Rolanda asked. “That she hid them so that she could keep them safe from harm?”

“I don’t know,” Alan replied.

But he remembered again how Isabelle had insisted on the condition that the originals of the art she did for Kathy’s book remained in her possession at all times.

“She’d be in a lot of trouble with her insurance company, if that’s true,” Marisa said.

Alan nodded absently. He placed the painting back down in the window seat, setting it on top of the brown wrapping paper that it had been lying upon before Marisa picked it up. He noticed the envelope as he was straightening up. Before he knew what he was doing, he had the envelope in his hand and was studying the handwriting.

“What’s that?” Marisa asked.

“A letter from Kathy. I recognize the handwriting.”

“Wait a sec,” Marisa said as he started to open it. “I know I walked us in here, but that’s because I didn’t think she’d mind us waiting in her studio, you being old friends and all. But we should definitely draw the line at reading her mail.”

Alan agreed with her. Normally he would never have considered prying the way he was about to.

But the need to know what Kathy had written overtook him, shadowing common courtesy. The compulsion had him going ahead and opening the envelope at the same time as he nodded in agreement to Marisa.

“It’s dated from just before she died,” he said. “It ...” He continued to scan down the page, turned to the next one. “It’s her suicide note,” he said when he got to the end. “She mailed it to Isabelle instead of leaving it in her apartment.”

His chest was tight with the old pain of Kathy’s loss. The unfamiliar room suddenly seemed to be choked with ghosts. He gave Marisa an anguished look.

“Isabelle really knew all along that Kathy ... that she killed herself. So why did she pretend otherwise?”

“I don’t understand,” Marisa said.

“The big fight we had at Kathy’s funeral. It was about how Kathy died. Isabelle was mad at me for not going to the hospital to see her ... but Kathy was never in a hospital. She died of an overdose ofsleeping pills in her own apartment and Isabelle was the one who found her on one of her visits to town. When she kept claiming that Kathy hadn’t killed herself, I thought it was because there was no note—you know how people want to deny that someone they cared about could have killed herself? But then it got crazy with all this talk about cancer and hospitalization and the radiation treatments not working ....”

“I still don’t get it,” Marisa said. “Her suicide was reported in all the newspapers. And even the other night on the TV, they mentioned it when they ran the piece on how the injunction had been lifted.”

Alan nodded.

“So why would Isabelle try to convince you different?”

“That’s something I would love to know,” Alan said. “It’s gotten to the point now where I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Rolanda cleared her throat. “Maybe I should leave you two to hash this out with Isabelle.”

Jesus, Alan thought. What must she think of us? Barging into Isabelle’s studio and going through all of her stuff.

“I can come back some other time to talk to her,” Rolanda added.

Alan shook his head. “No. There’s something very strange going on here and what you told us about this Cosette girl is a part of it.” He paused to study her for a moment. “Don’t you want to know what it’s all about anymore?”

“Yes, of course. But this all seems so ... personal. I can’t help but feel as though I’m intruding.”

Marisa nodded. “I know exactly what you mean. We should go, Alan.”

Alan knew they were both right, but he also knew he had to deal with the tangle of memories that rose up from the past every time he thought of Isabelle and Kathy. The past lay so thick upon him at the moment he could hardly breathe. He looked down at the letter once more, wishing it actually explained things, rather than calling up new questions.

This is what I’m leaving you. For you and Alan, if you want to share it with him.

What had Kathy left in that locker at the bus terminal all those years ago? And why had Isabelle never told him about it—about the letter or the contents of the locker? Was whatever it had been the real reason that Isabelle had gone all strange at the funeral? They had all been so close, almost inseparable for so many years. He had never been able to understand how it fell apart. And surely Isabelle knew how much he’d cared for Kathy, how much her death had devastated him. What had she found in that locker that she couldn’t share with him?

“Alan?” Marisa said.

Alan nodded. He returned the letter to its envelope. He looked at it for a long moment, then tossed it onto the window seat beside the painting.

“Nora Dennis has a studio here, doesn’t she?” Marisa asked as they made their way down the hall to the stairwell.

Alan nodded. “Why?”

“Maybe she’s seen Isabelle.”

“Doesn’t seem likely. Isabelle only just got back to town.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask,” Marisa said.

So they left the stairwell at the second floor and went looking for Nora’s studio. It wasn’t hard to find. Halfway down the hall they came upon a door that was standing open. Loud music spilled out of it, a song sung in an Irish dancetune signature but with drums and electric guitars augmenting the acoustic instruments. The Waterboys, Alan thought, recognizing the song. Looking through the doorway, they found Nora sitting on the floor with watercolor paintings scattered all around her. She glanced up and grinned when she noticed them standing in the doorway.

“Sorry about the mess,” she said, standing up to turn down the volume of the music, “but I’m just getting organized for a show.” She looked around herself, her smile widening. “What am I saying?

Organized? I wish.”

Unlike Isabelle’s studio, where everything was still unpacked, Nora’s studio looked as though a tornado had just touched down in the middle of it. Alan felt like a relief worker, showing up at the scene of a major disaster with the best of intentions to help out, but being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what had to be done.

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to her yet,” Nora said when they asked her about Isabelle. She ran a hand through her short brown hair, making it stand up at attention. “But I saw her down in the courtyard about an hour ago with Johnny Sweetgrass.”

Isabelle’s old boyfriend, Alan thought. Another ghost from the past. But then he remembered something else: that painting of John that Isabelle had done. What if Isabelle hadn’t painted his portrait?

What if John had come into being because of the painting? A painting which, Alan reminded himself; had also supposedly been destroyed in the fire.

“I haven’t seen him in years,” Alan said, keeping his voice casual. “How’s he doing?”

“Oh, you know Johnny. He never changes. I swear he gets younger while the rest of us grow ungracefully old. But Isabelle didn’t seem at all well. She looked as though she couldn’t stand up without his support. I spotted them coming across the courtyard but before I could get to them to see if I could help, they were out the door and gone.”

Alan hung on to the first part of what Nora had said.

He never changes. I swear he gets younger while the rest of us grow ungracefully old. He never changes. Because he was like Cosette, forever locked into looking how Isabelle had painted him?

“Gone?” Marisa asked.

Nora nodded. “Um-hmm. She got into a car driven by some real punky-looking girl and drove off Here,” she added. “I can show you.”

She led them across her studio, wending a careful way through the scattered piles of watercolors that they all tried to emulate. At the open window, she pointed off down the street.

“They were going north, the last time I—Hey, wait a minute. There’s Johnny now.”

Alan looked down at the street. He recognized John Sweetgrass immediately, as well as his companion.

“He’s with Cosette,” he said, more for Marisa and Rolanda’s benefit than Nora’s.

Rolanda nodded in agreement while Marisa craned to get a better look.

“Well, that’s not the girl who was driving the car,” Nora said from beside him. “She didn’t have that gorgeous head of hair.” She opened the window and leaned out. “Hey, Johnny!” she cried.

John and Cosette lifted their heads. Alan thought John looked irritated at having been noticed, but Cosette smiled happily and waved up at them, recognizing Alan and Rolanda. John gave them a brisk wag of his hand himself, then started to walk on, pausing when Cosette held onto his arm.

“Wait a minute,” Alan called down to them. “I have to talk to you. We’ll be right down.”

But when they reached the street, John was gone. Only Cosette was there, waiting for them.

XII

What are you doing?” John demanded when Cosette tugged on his arm. “They’re friends,” she said.

“Maybe they can help us.”

“Good friends?”

“Well, not really. But Isabelle’s known Alan for ages.”

“And hasn’t spoken to him for years,” John said.

“But—”

“Do you think they’re such good friends that they’d help us kill a well-respected artist like Rushkin?”

John asked. “Just on our say-so?”

“Maybe if we explained things ...” Cosette’s voice trailed off at the withering look John gave her.

“Okay. So maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

“They have their concerns and we have ours,” John said. “By what each of us are, they are mutually exclusive. We have too little common ground, Cosette.”

“That’s not really true.”

John didn’t want to argue anymore. “We should go.”

“But that would be so rude.”

“Fine,” he said, exasperated. “Wait for them. You know where to find me when you’re done.”

Cosette nodded. “I wonder,” she said, before he left. “Should I contact the others—you know, Rosalind and the rest of them still on the island?”

“It wouldn’t hurt,” John told her. “They should have a little forewarning in case we fail.”

“But we’re not going to fail, are we?”

She looked up at him, afraid and hopeful all at once. John wanted to set her mind at ease, but he couldn’t lie to her.

“If we do,” he said, “it won’t be from lack of trying.”

He left her then, heading east and north, aiming for a tenement in the Tombs where Isabelle spoke with Rushkin and prepared to sell her soul. He arrived in the middle of their conversation, finding a perch outside the second-story room where they spoke, sharing the narrow ledge with a grotesque gargoyle that reminded him of Rothwindle, one of Isabelle’s earlier creations who had died in the fire at Wren Island.

“My darling ‘goyle,” he said softly.

It was the name Isabelle had given the painting of Rothwindle. The gargoyle had come across from the before with her own name, just as John had. Come across and lived her life in the shadows of this world until John had let her die. He’d let them all die. Since the night he’d rescued Paddyjack from Rushkin he’d vowed to protect each and every one of Isabelle’s numena, but he’d failed. He hadn’t been there when the fire swept through the farmhouse.

John frowned when he heard Rushkin accuse Isabelle of starting the fire. Isabelle knew what she was about when she called her old mentor the father of lies. But then John found himself thinking of how Isabelle could confuse the truth, even in her own mind—claiming she was mugged when it had actually been Rushkin who’d beaten her. Insisting her friend Kathy had died of an illness in a hospital when she’d committed suicide. What if the mystery of the fire was another of her stories? What if it hadn’t been Rushkin who had set the farm-house ablaze, but Isabelle herself?

Simply considering the possibility made him feel as though he was betraying her, but now that the question had lodged in his mind, he couldn’t shake it. All things considered, hadn’t she betrayed him in how she’d cast him out of her life? Hadn’t she betrayed them all by allowing so many of them to die?

Couldn’t she have saved some of them?

He listened with growing disquiet as Rushkin explained how numena could be given the gift of true life. Another betrayal, he thought, but then shook his head. No, Isabelle hadn’t known ... had she?

He wished now that he’d never come. He didn’t want to consider Isabelle to blame for all the deaths.

Didn’t want to think that she could have given all of them what Cosette called the red crow at so little cost to herself. If they’d been freed from their paintings, none of them would have had to die. How could she not have known? And yet ...

Rushkin was a master of lies, but like all such men, he had to use a certain amount of truth to lend his lies the echo of veracity they required to be believed. So what was lie, what was truth?

No, he told himself. This is exactly what Rushkin wants. To raise so many doubts that you could no longer be sure what was true and what was not. Undoubtedly, he was the cause of Isabelle’s own confusion with the truth. Rushkin’s presence, his voice and the half-truths he wove in among his lies—they were like a virus. How could you do anything but doubt everything you believed in once you’d been infected by him?

That was when he realized what it was that Rushkin was demanding of Isabelle. Doubts were put aside, to be dealt with later if not forgotten. Right now all he wanted to do was burst into the room and kill Rushkin where he lay on his pallet. Squeeze the life out of him the way Rushkin had taken the lives of so many of Isabelle’s creations. But he still wasn’t certain that a maker could die at his hands and there were Rushkin’s own creations to consider—his double and the strange monochrome girl that Cosette had described to him earlier, the one’s gaze more feral than the other.

So he waited. He hugged the wall and willed, with all the potency he could muster, that Isabelle would stand up to her old mentor, rather than fall under his sway once again.

“Tell him no, Isabelle,” he whispered, his voice pitched so low that not even the stone gargoyle squatting a half-dozen feet away could have heard him. “Deny him, once and for all.”

XIII

Isabelle didn’t honestly believe that Rushkin could bring Kathy back. She was a naïf when it came to his magics, to what could and could not be done, but not so innocent as to believe that the dead could be raised, unchanged and whole. The creation of numena almost made sense. If you accepted that there was an otherworld, then it stood to reason that there could be pathways leading from it to this world. Didn’t Jilly always say that a hundred centuries of myths and fairy tales had to be based upon something?

But the dead didn’t return, unchanged and forgiving. Not even folktales pretended differently. She knew that. She knew it, but still her heart broke when she finally looked up to meet Rushkin’s gaze and shook her head.

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I won’t do it.”

He gave her a look that she knew so well—he was the teacher again, disappointed in his pupil—only this time she didn’t buy into that role.

“Not now,” he said finally. “But you will.”

“You can’t make me.”

Rushkin only smiled. “A handful of your numena still wander loose. Bitterweed and Scara will find the paintings that brought them across. And then you will have to make a choice: sacrifice them, or paint others for me.”

Isabelle shook her head.

“It makes no difference to me,” Rushkin told her. “But I will survive. Make no mistake about that, ma belle Izzy.”

There was honey dripping from his voice as he used Kathy’s endearment, but all Isabelle could do was shudder. From where she lounged against the wall, Scara tittered.

“Take her away,” Rushkin said.

Isabelle cringed and pulled out of Bitterweed’s grip on her shoulder. “Don’t touch me,” she told him.

After giving Rushkin a questioning glance, Bitterweed stood back from her. Isabelle rose under her own steam and let him guide her back out into the foul-smelling hallway. She stared down at her feet as he led her a half-dozen paces to another door.

“In here,” Bitterweed said.

She hesitated at the doorway, gaze taking in the easel and art supplies laid out upon a long wooden table. Brushes and palette knives. Tubes of paint and rags for cleaning up. Linseed oil and turpentine. A palette and beside it, a stack of primed canvases. A white cotton smock hung over the back of the room’s one wooden chair. The only windows were set high in the wall, casting a northern light down into that part of the room where the easel stood. There was already a canvas standing in the easel.

Isabelle turned to her captor. “I told him I wouldn’t do it,” she said. Bitterweed shrugged. It was a familiar body gesture of John’s, but John never put the insolence into it that Rushkin’s creature did.

Oh, John.

“God, he named you well, didn’t he,” she said.

“Rushkin didn’t name me,” Bitterweed replied. “I chose my own name.” Isabelle was intrigued despite herself “Why would you choose to give yourself a name in mockery of someone else’s?”

“Bitterweed is my name.”

“Just that. A surname. No given name.”

“There has to be someone to give you a given name,” Bitterweed said. Isabelle sighed. “You know he doesn’t own you, don’t you? You don’t have to echo his evil.”

Bitterweed smiled. “We’re not evil, Isabelle Copley. We’re no different from anyone else. We just want to survive.”

“But at what cost?”

“Don’t talk to me about cost. Look at you. You’re young and beautiful and why not, considering on how many of us you gorged yourself.”

“I did not set that fire. I would never—”

But Bitterweed wasn’t interested in continuing the conversation any longer. Before she could protest, he shoved her into the room and slammed the door behind her. It took her a moment to catch her balance. She heard a lock engage, then his receding footsteps. Then silence.

She leaned against the table and bowed her head. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody knew Rushkin had returned. Nobody would even think to consider that he would have kidnapped her. She was utterly and entirely on her own—not the way she was on Wren Island, cloistered from the world, but helpless. Even on his deathbed, Rushkin had so easily returned their relationship to how it had been. Even now, he was in control.

After a long moment, she sat down on the chair and stared at the blank canvas set up on the easel.

She didn’t doubt that Rushkin’s creatures would track down the paintings of her existing numena. The two at the Foundation would take no great detective work at all. The creatures would acquire them and Rushkin would feed upon them and she’d still be trapped here. Nothing would be changed except that two more people, whose existence in this world were her responsibility, would be dead.

Unless, she thought, staring at the canvas. Unless ..

She rose abruptly from the chair and strode to the end of the table. Without giving herself the time to change her mind, she started picking up tubes of paint and squeezing their pigment out onto the palette.

She didn’t bother to be careful. She didn’t put on the smock. She didn’t bother to put the tops back onto the tubes, but tossed them onto the table when she was done with them, one after the other. Once she had a half-dozen colors on the palette, she opened the can of turpentine and stuck the brush into its narrow mouth. She mixed a thin wash on the palette as she stood in front of the canvas and tried to clear her mind before she began work on a sketchy underpainting.

She knew she had to work fast. There’d be no time to let the paint dry, no time for finesse or precision. But then she was used to working under adverse conditions. Not lately, not for years. But she hadn’t forgotten. Izzy was long gone from her life, but what Izzy had known, what she’d learned and how she’d made do when money and supplies were scarce and time ran against her—all of that was still inside Isabelle. Her memories were something that no one could take away.

Memories.

Standing in the garden and watching the farmhouse as it was engulfed in flames. Seeing the first frail body stumble out to fall charred at her feet. And then the others. All the others ...

Tears blurred her vision, making it hard to see what she was doing, but she carried on all the same.

“I did not start that fire,” she whispered to the ghostly image taking shape on the canvas. “I did not.”