"Pages of it," she replied after the millisecond pause it took to remember--of course he heard that. She realized then, too, that Issac must not have remembered that he was the one who said it. But she remembered. Bleeding vines crawled across pages of her dream book; Issac was there in the middle of most of them, curled up just as she'd seen him, consumed by voices--I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry--that she carved inside the black room until the words bled white ink. The tunnel. The victrola. Silver that bubbled up around him, sunk their claws into his flesh and seeped into his veins. The gashes on his back. The void. You cannot save him.
Marlow closed the book shut and met the pitiful look on his face with an amused smile.
Carefully, she began working through his tangled head of hair, fingers gently working around the comb and the knots caught on it. She listened just as patiently, used to Issac's tangents. "It seems that way," she said, unraveling threads of hair off one tooth of the comb. Then, with a small shrug, she added, "My mom was a witch." Marlow didn't talk about her much, but she was another example of how two people could share the same gift and, somehow, be quite different. That she knew of. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, a thin frown line formed between her brows.
"Anyway, the whole hunt thing is daunting to me. Please don't get hurt." She stopped with his hair momentarily to look him in the eye, her amber gaze bright with apprehension. "I don't know if you remember, but I was in a nightmare you had, and I saw that...I don't know what to call it. But Cat's seen it too, right?" Her voice grew quiet. "The darkness that torments you?"