Nevermore

Blessed warmth rushed over her as she re-entered the stockroom. As her nose thawed, she blew warm air into her fists, curling and flexing her fingers in an effort to regain feeling.

He came out behind her, kicking away the makeshift doorstop, letting the enormous freezer door ease shut and click into place.

She didn’t wait for him to tell her to leave, and she didn’t ask him where to find the cleaning supplies. Instead she went straight to the double-tub sink against the opposite wall and crouched to peer underneath. There she found an empty janitor’s bucket and a stack of folded rags. She wrestled the bucket free, straightened, and turned on the hot water.

She glanced back at him. “Do you have a mop?”

“Who did you say this was again?” she asked, using a napkin to peel a wad of gum she could only assume had belonged to Alyssa off the display glass. She sprayed Windex in its place and wiped the case down with a rag.

“Cemetery Sighs,” he replied, nodding his head to the grim beat of the churning, haunting music. Before they’d set to cleaning up the mess the crew had left, Varen had replaced the steel drum CD with one from his own collection, which he’d dug out of his car. He’d brought it in along with her gym bag, which Brad, gentleman that he was, had dumped in the parking lot before speeding off. She was actually grateful, though, seeing as the bag held both her phone and her house keys.

“This song is ‘Emily Not, Not Gone,’” he said. “It’s about a woman who dies and then rises from the grave to be with her true love.”

“How romantic,” Isobel scoffed.

“It is,” he said, and dragged the mop through the last of the malt goo that had gone runny on the floor while they’d been in the freezer.

“It just sounds gruesome to me.”

“Gruesome can be romantic.”

“Sorry.” She shook her head and made a face. “But that’s just a strange thing to say.”

He stopped mopping and turned to regard her. “Don’t you think it’s at all romantic—the idea that love could conquer death?”

“I guess.” Isobel shrugged, but really she didn’t want to think about it. The only thing that came to mind was the phrase “death breath.” She grimaced at the thought of kissing a dead guy and walked to the sink behind the counter to rinse out her rag. Over the rush of cold water, the churning music broke to silence, and the female vocals crooned a cappella, beautiful and sad.

Let this death shroud be a wedding veil,

Though this skin is clay, my lips so pale.

My eyes, for you, ever more shine bright

Blacker than the raven wings of night.

’Tis I . . .

’Tis I . . .

Your lost love, your Lady Ligeia. . . .

Isobel paused in thought as the haunting melody began again and then dissipated, the woman’s voice trailing off, reverberating in a mesmerizing throb. She shut off the sink and swiveled around. “I thought you said her name was Emily,” she said, her words seeming to pull him out of a trance.

He looked at her, lifted the mop from the floor, and dunked it into the dingy water. “It is. Lady Ligeia . . .” But he stopped and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as though considering whether or not to explain.

“What?” Isobel asked. Was she missing something? Did he think she was too stupid to get it?

“Lady Ligeia,” he began again, “is a woman in literature who returns from the dead, taking over another woman’s body to be with her true love.”

“Oh, yes. Lovely.” Isobel blanched. “I guess the other chick didn’t mind at all?”

He smirked and, grasping the mop handle, wheeled the janitor’s bucket behind the counter, guiding it toward the back room. “It’s actually one of Poe’s most famous stories.”

Oh, she thought. So that’s why he hadn’t wanted to elaborate. She stood for a moment, arms crossed, thinking, one hip leaning against the display glass. Then, rounding the counter, she dropped her rag into the sink before going to stand in the doorway of the staff room. Hands braced on either side of the door frame, she leaned in.

“Hey,” she called. “Speaking of, did you do the project yet?”

“No.”

She watched him hoist the bucket and pour the filthy water into the tub sink.

“It’s due week after next.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. He set the bucket down and kept his back to her while he washed his hands. “Shouldn’t you be the one worried about that?”

“I guess so,” she mumbled, and cast her eyes to the polished floor. They’d scrubbed the place till it sparkled and she was convinced that it was actually cleaner now than it had been before Brad and the crew trashed it. If she had learned one thing for certain about Varen now, it was that he was thorough.

She looked up again and watched in silence as he opened the locker cabinet in the corner and brought out his wallet, strung with three different lengths of chain. He scooped something else out with his other hand, and when he made for the door, she stepped out of his way.

He brushed past her into the main room and deposited his wallet, coils of chains, and a handful of rings onto one of the wicker tables. Next he grabbed the plastic trash bag they’d filled during the cleanup and, pulling the plastic drawstring closed, tied it off.

“Give me a sec,” he said. “I gotta take this out.” Isobel watched him disappear into the staff room again, lugging the trash bag behind him. She heard the back outer door open.

She glanced down at the wallet on the table and the small collection of rings. One of the rings, she realized, was his high school ring. No one could have guessed by looking at it from a distance, though. The ring’s boxy silver frame cradled a bulky, black rectangular gem in place of the traditional Trenton blue sapphire. A silver V stood in the middle of the onyx stone instead of a T and, on the side, where people usually had the school’s hawk-head emblem, there was the profile of a crow or a raven or something that wasn’t a hawk.

Her gaze drifted away from the rings to his wallet.

She glanced at the open staff door, then back to the wallet. Outside, the Dumpster banged.

Quickly Isobel snatched up his wallet and pried it open.

The first thing she found was a little plastic insert for pictures. It held a single oval photograph—the girl from Varen’s morning group, part of the woe-is-me convergence that met at the radiator next to the side doors every morning. It was the girl who had handed him the red envelope, Isobel realized, and she thought her name was Lacy. Did this mean she was his girlfriend?

The girl wasn’t smiling in the picture. She had a defiant expression on her round face, as though she were silently daring the onlooker to address her directly. She had mounds of thick black hair that fell past the cut of the photo, though Isobel knew that the black waves ended in coils dipped in red dye. She had full lips, too, painted a deep burgundy, and her eyeliner, drawn with sharp wingtips, made her huge dark eyes seem even larger. Those eyes, combined with her copper skin, made her look like an Egyptian goddess.

Varen’s music ceased without warning. Silence pulsed. Hands fumbling, Isobel snapped closed the wallet and set it back on the table amid the rings, just as he’d left it. She dropped into one of the chairs and crossed her legs, trying to look nonchalant.

He emerged from the back room with his black booklet of CDs in one hand, his jacket in the other. He set the CD case aside and pulled on the worn hunter green jacket, the one with the silhouette of the dead bird safety- pinned onto the back. Stopping at the table, he stuffed his wallet into his back pocket and, turning halfway away, lifted his shirt to hook the chains through a front belt loop.

Isobel stole a glance.

A black silver-studded belt encircled his narrow hips. Beneath the baggy T-shirt, he was thin and pale but strong-looking. She tried not to go pink in the face when she suddenly caught herself wondering if his skin felt warm