. .
• • •
“Remy.”
He turned his gaze to a facet of a world in transition, drawn to the sound of a voice with a power as great as the one that now coursed through his body.
In that voice was the power to heal and to transform, to take something once cold and heartless and make it—
Human.
In the world before, that power had belonged to a force of nature called Madeline, whose voice had been silenced by death. But that same power would not—could not—die.
Fighting to remain who he had been, Remy focused his attention on a particular portion of reality in the midst of transition. It was from that area of the maelstrom that he’d heard his name called, brought back from the brink by the power returned.
The power born again in the form of another.
“Linda,” he said from the center of it all.
Searching for his love from within the eye of creation.
• • •
Linda had never believed that she would be around to see the end of the world, never imagined being a part of it.
She had swum out into the turbulent waters as far as she could go, trying to keep her eyes on the spot in the sky where she’d thought she’d seen something.
Seen him.
But it was all chaos now, with the lightning and the thunder and a wind that raked across the water with its claws of air, driving the ocean into spasms of agony.
A small speck upon the vastness, Linda refused to let the elements have her, even though the wind tried to snatch her up from the water, and the great, angry sea tried to swallow her up. She remained afloat, eyes rooted to the spot where she thought the sky would be, and thought about the man she loved and how she had tried so very hard to save him.
And then it was time for it all to end.
There was no difference between the ocean below and the sky above. It had all turned to chaos. Yet still she managed to hold on to her thoughts, refusing to acknowledge the terror that now gripped her as the end of her existence drew near.
She thought of Remy, and how if he had been there he would have taken her in his arms and told her . . .
“Everything is going to be all right.”
She heard him say it, and a smile came to her lips even at the end of her reality. She was brave enough to open her eyes to catch a glimpse of the final death throes of a world, and in her delirium she thought the impossible, that Remy was there, a calmness at the center of the storm.
And then she felt the strength of his arms as he drew her to him, and the beating of his heart as he pulled her so very close, and she had no idea if it was real or the peace of death.
But at that particular moment, either one was fine with her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The bedroom door wasn’t going to hold them back for very long, even though Squire had rammed a dresser from across the room up against it.
“Be sure to add this to the list of things that we’re going to need to reimburse Remy for,” the goblin said with a crooked smile.
“Fuck you,” Mulvehill responded, hauling out the heavy wood drawers of the dresser and stacking them on top to give the obstruction a bit more height. It had grown quiet on the other side, the Bone Masters probably regrouping, trying to figure out how they were going to get through.
Squire stepped out of the closet with some heavy Samsonite suitcases. “Do you think he’s gone?” He grunted as he tossed them on top of the drawers.
“Who, Assiel?” Mulvehill asked. He’d gone to the closet as well, coming back with two smaller cases. “Yeah, I think he is.”
The pair stood back, admiring their work.
“It ain’t the Great Wall, but it’ll have to do,” the goblin said.
Mulvehill went to the bed and stared at the figures upon it, deep in the grip of unconsciousness.
“Maybe we should throw them up onto the barricade,” Squire suggested. “Least that way, they’d be serving some purpose.”
“They’re serving a purpose,” Mulvehill retorted, looking first at Ashley, then at Linda, and finally at Marlowe. “They have to be someplace . . . doing something.”
“They’re doing something, all right,” Squire grumbled. “But it ain’t doing squat for us.”
“They’re doing their thing, and we’re doing ours,” Mulvehill said. “It’s what we