He stood—though standing implies effort, and there was none—beneath trees that bore fruit I recognized from Eden’s memory, though I’d never seen Eden.Or perhaps I had, and this was it, not lost but waiting, preserved for those who found their way home through the narrow gate.
Christ looked nothing like the paintings and everything like them all at once.Every artist who’d ever tried to capture Him had seen truly but partially, like viewing the sun through colored glass.He was Jewish, as He’d been in life, but also somehow every race, every face, every person who’d ever lived reflecting in His features.Young and ancient, powerful and gentle, king and servant all at once.
But it was His eyes that undid me.They held love—not the word we use so carelessly on earth, worn smooth by overuse, but the reality that created the universe, that held atoms together, that drove Him to the cross.Love that knew every moment of my existence, every thought, every failing, every small victory, and counted them all as precious.
“Alice,” He said, and in my name on His lips I heard who I really was, who I’d always been beneath the vampirism, beneath the fear, beneath the guilt.“My brave daughter.”
I fell to my knees, not from command or protocol but because standing in the presence of such perfect love was impossible.He knelt with me—the Lord of Creation kneeling to meet me where I was.His hands, still bearing the marks of nails—scars He’d chosen to keep—took mine, covering the wounds the crossbow bolts had left.
“Your sacrifice honors Me,” He said, and His voice held the sound of every good thing—thunder and whispers, laughter and tears, first cries and last breaths.“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.You understand now what that means.”
“But I failed,” I whispered, though whispering seemed absurd here where every thought was known.“Father O’Malley, Desiderius, Rebecca, Ruth, even Gabriel—I couldn’t save them.”
His smile held infinite patience, infinite understanding.“Salvation was never yours to give, child.Only love.And love you gave in abundance.”He paused, His thumbs tracing the wounds in my palms.“Which is why you must return.”
The words should have devastated me.To leave this place, this presence, this perfect love—how could He ask it?But somehow, in the way He said it, I understood it wasn’t cruelty but commission.Not exile but mission.
“The world believes some people are damned beyond redemption,” He continued.“My enemies built their entire theology on this belief.They’ve forgotten that I came not for the righteous but for sinners, not for the healthy but for the sick.They’ve forgotten that My blood was shed for all.”
“Even vampires?”The question escaped before I could stop it, though nothing needed stopping here.
“Even Mercy Brown,” He said, and I gasped at the specificity.“Yes, child.Even the one who turned you.She wanders still, lost in darkness she believes is permanent.You will find her.You will show her what you’ve learned—that love is stronger than death, that redemption exists even for those the world calls monsters.”
“How?”I asked, though I suspected the answer.
“By continuing what you’ve begun.By showing the Order that their hatred cannot stand in the light of love.By saving those they would destroy.”He stood, drawing me up with Him, and suddenly I could see it all—not the future in detail, but the shape of it.Years of struggle, yes.Pain and rejection and loneliness.But also purpose, meaning, the slow transformation of other vampires who’d believed themselves beyond hope.
“It will be long,” He warned, though warning seemed too harsh a word for His gentle honesty.“Decades of work, of suffering, of patient endurance.But at the end—“ His smile held promises I couldn’t fully grasp.“At the end, true love waits for you.Not just when you finally rejoin me here.You’ll find love on earth—and when you do, let it be a love in sacrifice, a love that connects you to me.”
“After my mission is complete?”
“After you’ve shown the world what you showed my dearest Marcus.That no evil, not even death, can conquer my love.”He touched my forehead, and knowledge flooded in—not omniscience, but understanding.Not answers, but direction.
“You’re sending me back to the clearing,” I said, understanding arriving like dawn.“To the pain, the stakes, Marcus’s hatred.”
“You’ll bear My wounds now, child.They will fade on account of yourgift.They will become visible every time you eat my flesh and drink my blood.Not as punishment but as testimony.You will show them the depth of my love, of my sacrifice, for my suffering is yours, and your suffering is forever mine.”
The Blessed Mother took my hand again, and I felt heaven beginning to recede—not moving away but releasing me, like a mother reluctantly letting her child leave home for the first time.
“Remember,” Christ said as everything began to fade, not into darkness but into a different kind of light, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.When the burden seems too great, when loneliness threatens to overwhelm, when the world insists you’re damned—remember this moment.Remember that you stood in heaven and were loved, are loved, will always be loved.”
The warmth began to change, not disappearing but condensing, focusing into five specific points—hands, feet, side.The wounds that would mark me forever, that would return every Eucharist, that would proclaim to every creature of darkness and light that I’d died and returned, that love was greater than even the true death.
“Thank you,” I whispered, though words were insufficient.
He smiled once more, and in that smile was every sunrise, every act of forgiveness, every moment when hope conquered despair.
Then heaven released me, and I fell—not down but back, toward pain and purpose and a mission I finally understood.
Chapter 19
Painreturnedlikeanold friend bearing gifts I didn’t want—not the absolute agony of before, but something transformed, purposeful, almost sacred in its persistence.
My eyes opened to find the clearing exactly as I’d left it, though everything had changed.The crossbow bolts remained buried in my flesh—through palms and feet, through my side into my heart that somehow beat slowly again, irregular and wrong but undeniably present.The blood pool beneath me had stopped spreading, but I lay in its cold embrace like a tragic baptism, the scorched earth drinking what it could of my impossible life.
“Impossible,” someone whispered, and I turned my head—carefully, each movement sending new songs of pain through my pierced body—to see Timothy backing away from his position behind Father O’Malley.The knife in his hand trembled so badly I feared he’d cut the priest by accident.“She was dead.The heart shot—no monster survives that.”
Marcus stood frozen at his makeshift altar, his face cycling through expressions too quickly to track.Disbelief, rage, fear, and something else—uncertainty, perhaps the first he’d felt in years.His elaborate ceremony, his grand demonstration of divine justice, had been interrupted by something he couldn’t explain within his rigid theology.
