he could not feel.
He tried to stay with her, but his eyes had grown so heavy, and he could no longer hold them open. Maybe if I close them for just a moment.
To rest.
Marlowe howled, his cries reverberating through the room, and Remy thought it was the saddest sound he had ever heard.
Darkness surrounded him, but there was fire in the midst of shadow, a flame struggling to stay alight within the encroaching gloom.
But the flame grew smaller with each passing moment until it was but a faintly glowing ember, and it could fight no more and gave in to the dark.
Is this what it’s like to die?
• • •
Remy opened his eyes to look upon an eternal expanse of ocean, the color of copper and fire in the light of the sun hanging over the horizon.
He felt a sense of calm as he realized he had been to this place before.
“Is this it?” he asked, shifting in the beach chair so he could see the person sitting beside him, still as beautiful as she had been in life.
Madeline stared out at the ocean, her attention unwavering.
“Do you want it to be?” she asked.
“I . . . ,” he began, then hesitated, letting his wife’s question reverberate through his mind, surprised that he couldn’t answer right away.
“Did you finish?”
He watched her as she continued her study of the ocean.
“What do you mean?” he finally asked.
Madeline turned her gaze to Remy, her dark sunglasses showing the twin reflections of the setting sun in their center as if they were her eyes. “Did you finish everything that you started?”
Again, he had to think about her question, the memories of what he’d left behind already starting to fade. It would have been so easy to just say yes, but he knew he would be telling another lie.
“I doubt it,” he said sadly.
She nodded, smiling the way she always had, and he felt a love for her that was so great he was surprised his mortal form could contain it.
And then he remembered another woman who had managed to capture his heart after Madeline’s devastating loss.
“Linda,” he said quietly, fearing that speaking the name of another would somehow take away from the love he had shared with the woman sitting beside him.
“I bet you two would have told a wonderful story,” Madeline said.
Remy held on to the memory of Linda, refusing to let it diminish—refusing to let her go. “Yeah” was all he could say.
“Yeah?” Madeline repeated, reaching out to let her fingertips caress his biceps.
“Yeah,” Remy said again. “I’d like to tell that story.”
Madeline smiled, and he knew that she was truly happy for him.
A sudden breeze came off the ocean then, a cold sharpness to the air that made him wince as he pulled his bare legs up from the sand. Remy gazed down and saw that he was bleeding. He’d forgotten that he had been hurt.
The sky above the ocean had grown dark, thick, roiling clouds blotting out the warmth of the sun.
“That’s going to be a problem,” Madeline said, her fingers still gently caressing the skin of his arm, which had now gone cold.
“It looks bad, doesn’t it?” Remy said, staring at his wound, not quite remembering exactly what had happened.
“It’s even worse on the inside,” Madeline told him.
“Do I have a chance?” Remy asked, a sudden despondency washing over him.
Madeline returned her gaze to the ocean. The water was receding, exposing an ocean floor that resembled the surface of some alien world.
“That’s not for me to say.”
“Something’s happening,” he said, his body racked with pain as he too watched the sea pull away from the shore.
“He’s coming.”
There was a sound, far off in the distance, like the blast of a trumpet heralding the arrival of something great, but as Remy listened more closely he realized it was the sound of a giant wave as the ocean rushed back to meet the shore.
The wall of water came toward them with incredible speed, and he reached out, searching for his wife’s hand, before—
The wave froze in place as his fingers wrapped around hers.
“What’s happening?” Remy asked, eyes fixed on the wall of bluish green water before them.
“I told you He was coming,” she whispered as she leaned in to kiss him warmly on the lips. “Your Father.”
The water parted like a curtain, and an old man stepped out.
Remy gazed quickly to where his wife should have been but found that she had left him alone on the beach with a petrified