Too much information, she thought shakily, too much to take in. “The Sorceress?”
“I asked her to reunite us, and in return I must face the monster Neptune and help her to capture him.”
Suddenly it was all too real. Izzy shook her head.
He was moving closer, and there was no humour in his dark eye, only love and longing. “I have been waiting to see you again.”
“I’ve been waiting too,” she said. “I’m so glad ... so glad you’re here at last.”
Emotion overwhelmed her, and she pushed herself away from the door and ran on trembling legs into his arms. He was wiry and strong, his body hard from years of physical work, but he held her as if she were something very precious, and his breath against her cheek was warm and alive. Just as it always was in her dreams.
“You’re mine,” he said, “and I am yours.”
She believed him. As fantastical as his words were, she felt their truth at her very core.
Izzy turned her face, her lips brushing his. He cupped the back of her head in his palm and began to kiss her. Deep, passionate, longing kisses.
“All the years alone,” he murmured, pressing his face to her hair, kissing her temples, her cheeks. “Lying sleeping in the between-worlds, and waiting. And now I’ve found you again, Isabel.”
Izzy lifted his face in her hands, feeling the rough stubble. As much as she wanted to lose herself in this remarkable moment she knew it couldn’t be that simple. There was something poignant in his smile, a tragic edge.
“I remember . . . last time you faced Neptune you died. I stood safe in the lighthouse and saw it all. Please, I beg you, don’t risk your life again.”
Suddenly a squall hit the lighthouse, seeming to rock the very structure with its violence. Wind moaned up the stairs and rain lashed the porthole windows. It felt as if they were on a ship and under siege from the elements.
“He’s coming,” Zek said bleakly.
The memory was sharp in her brain - the cold blue skin rising from the sea, the dark predatory eyes that didn’t blink, the dorsal fin stretching sharp along its spine. How could anyone fight such a creature and survive?
“We need to leave,” she gasped, urgently pulling at his hand. “We must go. Now.”
His face was calm, his gaze tender. “It’s too late, Isabel. I’ve given my word and I can’t go back on it.”
“No.” Izzy heard him but she refused to believe. She spun around towards the door and wrenched at the handle, tugging hard. To her surprise this time it came open a foot, and she squeezed through the narrow gap, shouting for him to follow.
Immediately her hair was tossed into her face, the salty air stinging her eyes. She took one step towards the paved path that led through the ticket office and into the restored keeper’s residence.
And froze.
Her heart beat hard, the blood rushed in her ears, but she could hear neither above the whining of the wind and the crashing of the surf against the rocks below the lighthouse. The paved path was gone and in its place was a muddy track between tufts of grass. The residence was different too and, when she looked down over the wild waters of the bay, the town was not the one she knew at all. The houses were smaller, older, and smoke rose from the chimneys before being whipped into a frenzy by the gale.
She had been transported to another world: Zek Cole’s world.
Izzy spun back towards the lighthouse, angry and frightened, and found the door shut against her. She began to pound her fists against the rough wood until it opened. He stood there. His chest was rising a
nd falling quickly, his face coloured by the eerie light from the storm outside. A crackle of lightning tore through the sky, striking the ground behind her, and she screamed. He grabbed her and dragged her inside, and let the wild wind close the door behind them.
“Make it stop,” Izzy shrieked. “Make it all go away.”
“I can’t stop it,” he growled. “Not until it’s finished. I told you. I have sworn to the Sorceress - I give her Neptune and she gives me you. I have to do what she wants. Only then can we be free to be together. I know last time Neptune won, but this time things will be different.”
Izzy wiped the dripping rain from her eyes. “I can’t remember everything that happened last time. My dreams are fragments . . . bits and pieces. Sometimes I think it’s as if I can’t bear to remember it all.”
He gave her a long look. “Come with me,” he said, “and I will tell you.”
She didn’t want to go; she didn’t want to be here. Zek Cole was a man who’d been dead for over a century and a half, a man vilified by history, and yet he said she was his wife and he loved her. Madness, it was madness, she thought wildly, as for a brief moment commonsense reasserted itself.
And then he turned and looked at her and held out his hand. “Isabel?”