"Like another five minutes would kill you?"

"Please. You start down that road with your female and I'll be here until summer."

"Are you-"

V frowned and looked at the condo next to Jane's. The garage door was jammed halfway up, the glow of brake lights revealed. There was a slam of a car door then on the breeze the faintest scent of sweetness drifted over, like powdered sugar had been sprinkled in the cold wind.

"Oh… God, no."

At that very moment Jane threw open her front door and came running out, his leather jacket in her hand, his shirt flowing behind her. "You forgot this!"

It was a hideous hole in one, a revelation of all the pieces he'd seen only fragments of: The dream had arrived in real life.

"No!" he screamed.

The sequence played out in a series of seconds that lasted centuries: Rhage looking at him as if he were crazy. Jane running over the grass. Him dropping the mhis as fear overwhelmed him.

A lesser ducking out from under the garage door with gun drawn.

The shot made no sound on account of the silencer that was in place. V lunged for Jane, trying to shield her body with his. He failed. She was hit in the back, and the bullet came out the other side, busting through her sternum, going into his arm. He caught her as she fell, his own chest blazing with pain.

As they crumpled to the ground, Rhage tore off after the slayer, not that V really noticed. All he knew was his nightmare: Blood on his shirt. His heart screaming in agony. Death coming… but not for him. For Jane.

"Two minutes," she said between gasps as her hand flopped onto her chest. "Got less than two… minutes."

She must have been hit in an artery and knew it. "I'm going to-"

She shook her head and grabbed his arm. "Stay. Shit… not going… to…"

Make it… were the words she was going to say. "Fuck that!"

"Vishous…" Her eyes watered, her color draining fast. "Hold my hand. Don't leave me. You can't… Don't let me go alone."

"You're going to be fine!" He started to pick her up. "I'm taking you to Havers's."

"Vishous. Can't fix this. Hold my hand. I'm leaving… oh, fuck…" She started to weep while gasping. "I love you."

"No!"

"I love…"

"No!"

Chapter Forty-eight

The Scribe Virgin looked up from the bird in her hand, sudden dread startling her.

Oh… wretched happenstance. Oh, horrid destiny.

It had come. The thing she had sensed and feared long ago, the breakdown in the structure of her reality had arrived. Her punishment was now manifest.

That human… that human woman her son loved was dying at this very moment. She was in his arms and bleeding on him and dying.

With an unsteady arm the Scribe Virgin put the chickadee back on the white-blooming tree and stumbled over to the fountain. Sitting down on its marble edge, she felt the light weight of her robing as if it were heavy chains drawn around her.

The fault of her son's loss was hers. Verily, she had brought this ruination upon him: She had broken the rules. Three hundred years ago she had broken the rules.

At the inception of time she had been granted one act of creation, and accordingly, after her maturity had been reached, one act of creation she had effected. But then she'd done it again. She had borne what she should not have, and in doing so had cursed her begotten. Her son's destiny-the whole of it, from his treatment under his father to the hard, coldhearted male Vishous had matured into to this, his mortal agony-was in fact her castigation. For as he was in pain, so she suffered a thousandfold.

She wanted to cry out for her Father, but knew she could not. Choices that had been made by her were naught of His concern, and the consequences were hers alone to bear.

As she reached through the dimensions and saw what was transpiring unto her son, she knew Vishous's agony as her own, felt the numbing of his cold shock, the fire of his denial, the gut wrenching twist of his horror. She felt, too, the death of his beloved, the gradual chill coming upon the human as her blood leaked into her chest cavity and her heart began to flutter. And then, yes, then, too, she heard her son's mumbling words of love and smelled the rank, fetid fear that poured out of him.

There was naught she could do. She, who had power beyond measure over so many, was in this moment impotent because fate and the consequence of free will were her Father's sole domain. He alone knew the absolute map of eternity, the compendium of all choices taken and untaken, of paths known and unknown. He was the Book and the Page and the indelible Ink.

She was not.

And He would not come to her now for that reason. This was her destiny: to suffer because an innocent born of a body she should never have assumed would be ever in pain, her son walking the earth as a dead male for the choices she had made.

With a wail the Scribe Virgin let herself lose her form and slipped out of the robes she wore, the black folds falling to the marble floor. She entered the water of the fountain as a light wave, traveling in between and among the hydrogen and oxygen molecules, her misery energizing them, bringing them to a boil, evaporating them. As the transfer of energy continued, the liquid rose up as a cloud, coalesced above the courtyard, and fell back down as tears she was incapable of crying.

Over on the white tree, her birds craned their necks to the falling water droplets as if considering this new occurrence. And then as a flock they left their perch for the first time and flew to the fountain. Lining up around the edge, they faced outward from the glowing, seething water she inhabited.

They guarded her in her sorrow and regrets, guarded her as though each were big as an eagle and just as fierce.

They were, as always, her only solace and friendship.

Jane was aware that she was dead.

She knew it because she was in the midst of a fog, and someone who looked like her dead sister was standing in front of her.

So she was pretty damn sure she'd kicked it. Except… shouldn't she be upset or something? Shouldn't she be worried about Vishous? Shouldn't she be thrilled about reuniting with her little sister?

"Hannah?" she said, because she wanted to be sure she knew what she was looking at. "That you?"

"Kinda." The image of her sister shrugged, her pretty red hair moving with her shoulders. "I'm really just a messenger."

"Well, you look like her."

"Of course I do. What you see now is what's in your mind when you think of her."

"Okay… this is a little Twilight Zone. Or, wait, am I just dreaming?" Because that would be great fucking news, considering what she thought had just happened to her.

"No, you've passed on. You're just in the middle right now."

"In the middle of where?"

"You're in between. Neither here nor there."

"Can you be a little more specific?"

"Not really," The Hannah-vision smiled her precious smile, the angelic one that had brought even Richard the nasty cook around. "But here's my message. You're going to have to let go of him, Jane. If you want to find peace, you're going to have to let go of him."

If the him was Vishous, that just wasn't happening. "I can't do that."

"You have to. Otherwise you'll be lost here. You only have so much time you can be neither here nor there."

"And then what happens?"

"You are lost forever." The Hannah-vision got serious. "Let him go, Jane."

"How?"

"You know how. And if you do, you can see the real me on the other side. Let. Him. Go." The messenger or whatever it was evaporated.

Left on her own, Jane looked around. The fog was pervasive, as dense as a rain cloud and as infinite as the horizon.