“Now,” Marcus commanded.“If she won’t wield the Cross, she’ll face judgment at our hand!”
The final bolt was different.It took me in the side, punching through ribs.But it didn’t stop there.The angle, the force, the terrible precision—it drove deeper, finding…
…my heart.
The pain transcended physical sensation, becoming something almost metaphysical.This was death as I’d never experienced it—not the gentle draining Mercy had given me, but violent, immediate, final.
My blood pooled beneath me, darker than it should be, thinner, spreading across the scorched earth.
“Do you see?”Marcus’s voice came from very far away, or perhaps I was the one growing distant.“Do you all see?This is what becomes of corruption that wears the mask of holiness.This is justice.”
I tried to speak, to tell him he was wrong, that justice without mercy was just another kind of damnation.But my mouth filled with blood—my own blood, cold and bitter.It spilled from my lips, adding to the spreading pool beneath me.
“You will die here with the rest!”Marcus proclaimed.“This site, once a church that also harbored your kind.We burned it to the ground, with everyone inside.You will join them in your damnation.”
The clearing began to fade at the edges, darkness creeping in like fog from the twisted pines.But it wasn’t the gentle darkness of unconsciousness.This was something else, something final.The true death that vampires whispered about, the one that came when our hearts were destroyed, when whatever force animated us finally gave up its hold.
My companions’ voices reached me—Desiderius roaring something in Dutch, Ruth cursing with more creativity than I’d given her credit for, Rebecca sobbing like the child she’d never gotten to finish being.But even they were fading, becoming echoes of echoes.
The last thing I saw clearly was Father O’Malley’s face.Tears ran down his weathered cheeks, but his lips moved in what I I barely heard as the prayer of Last Rites.Even now, even watching his spiritual daughter die as a monster, he offered what comfort he could.He was commending my soul to God.
But staked vampires only went one place.That’s what they told me.They went to vampire hell.
The darkness rushed in like a tide, and I let it take me.What else was there to do?I’d failed to save Father O’Malley, failed my companions, failed to stop Marcus’s mad crusade.The only thing I’d succeeded in was proving Marcus’s point—that we were dangerous, that we deserved destruction, that his hatred was justified.
Strange, though.As consciousness fled, as my mutilated heart gave its last shuddering attempt at purpose, I felt something unexpected.Peace.Not the peace of resignation or defeat, but something else.As if this too was part of some greater design I couldn’t see, wouldn’t live to understand.
The blood stopped flowing.My eyes, still open, ceased to see.The pain became a memory, then less than that.
Darkness.Complete and absolute.
And then—
Chapter 18
Lightdidn’tbreakthroughthe darkness—it simply was, had always been, would always be, and I found myself within it like a child discovering she’d never actually been an orphan.
The pain vanished so completely that I couldn’t even remember its shape.Not faded or numbed or pushed aside—erased, as if those crossbow bolts had been nothing but a particularly vivid nightmare, as if my pierced heart had been whole all along.Warmth surrounded me, through me, was me.Not the borrowed warmth of consumed blood, but something that belonged to me by right, by birth, by a love I’d forgotten I deserved.
How does one describe the indescribable?How do mortal words—and what was I now but a consciousness wrapped in memory—capture infinity?The poets try with their metaphors of gold and crystal, their songs of endless praise, but they’re painting the ocean with a teaspoon of water.
Heaven wasn’t a place so much as a state of being.Colors existed here that earth had never dreamed of, sounds that would have shattered mortal eardrums with their terrible beauty.Every sense I’d thought I understood revealed itself as a child’s sketch compared to the reality now surrounding me.The air—if it was air—tasted of every good thing I’d ever experienced and a thousand good things I hadn’t known existed.The ground beneath me—if it was ground—felt like standing on solidified joy.
And the presence.God, the presence that permeated everything.Not watching from some distant throne but woven into the very fabric of existence here, intimate as breath, vast as eternity.The theologians had tried to explain it—omnipresence, they called it—but their words were ash compared to this reality.He was here, had always been here, would always be here, and somehow that “here” included me.
“My daughter.”
The voice came before the form, maternal and warm as summer afternoons from my childhood, before consumption took my mother, before I knew what loss meant.She materialized—though that word implies she hadn’t always been there—with the gentleness of dawn.The Blessed Mother, though no earthly artist had ever captured her true appearance.Beautiful, yes, but not in the way of earthly beauty that fades and disappoints.This was a beauty that hurt to perceive and yet healed in the perceiving.
She wore simplicity like a crown, her garments flowing with colors that shifted between blue and white.Her eyes held the sorrow of every mother who’d ever lost a child and the joy of knowing that loss was temporary, that all tears would be dried, that every separation was just a pause before eternal reunion.
“You suffered well, little one,” she said, and took my hand.
Her touch completed something in me I hadn’t known was broken.This was what maternal love was meant to be—not the anxious, imperfect love of earthly mothers doing their best with fallen nature, but the perfect love that all mothers unknowingly echoed.
“Come,” she said, and I realized she’d been leading me all along, that we’d been moving through heaven’s landscape without my awareness.“My Son is waiting for you.”
My Son.Such simple words to contain such magnitude.The One who’d hung on the cross, who’d borne the sins of the world, who’d looked at death and chosen it for love’s sake.
