Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
The Fade awaited on the other side of it.
Yes, it was time. Yet he had had to straddle the divide to communicate directly to his daughter just one time. Only once. And thanks to the Virgin Scribe, Elizabeth had known it was him, and she had responded in the way he had always hoped she would if they stole a moment together.
She loved him. Even though she had never known him.
So now… he could go in peace. All he had to do was reach out and open things.
Still, he hesitated at the door that had come for him.
Staring at the mystical portal, memories flickered through his mind, the images of the past from as long ago as over twenty years to as recent as the night before. As he watched the slideshow, he wondered dimly if he were dying now for real, if the whole life-passing-before-your-eyes thing was turning out to be the final truism he learned on earth.
Except no, he had died in actuality a couple of years ago. On a rainy night. When a second sun had consumed his mortal body.
Vishous’s vision from over two decades before had proven to be correct. A car bomb and its brilliant blast of light and heat had blown him and his newest BMW to high heaven, and he had died. Then again, V was never wrong, was he—although in this case, the brother hadn’t been completely right, either. Or maybe he just hadn’t been shown what came next: the Scribe Virgin coming to Darius and offering him a deal, a token of faculty traded for the chance to be with his daughter, to make sure she was safe.
To live up to his role as father, and his vow to the female he loved.
Of course he’d taken the bargain.
And so he had stared out from behind another’s eyes and watched over his young.
Until now.
Focusing on the door, he told his hand to reach out. When his arm didn’t move, he repeated the command.
But he was too afraid of what was on the other side. If Anne wasn’t there—or if she was, and she didn’t want him—then eternity was just going to be an infinite suffering, all the worse for being never-ending—
Click.
The sound seemed both utterly foreign and entirely prosaic, the kind of thing that happened countless times in a night, the inner workings of a door unlatching.
His thought, as the portal opened before him, was that this wasn’t how it was supposed to work. He was supposed to open the—
“Anne?” he choked out.
From out of a swirl of fog a figure appeared unto him, and for a moment, he worried that he was wrong, that it wasn’t her, that—
“Hi.”
The familiar voice was just as good as the smile he had seen only in his memories and his dreams: Sure enough, yes, yes, it was her, it was his beautiful, dark-haired female.
Anne was standing on the other side of the threshold, a white robe draping her, her body whole and healthy, her face radiant and shining with something that he had mourned as he had never thought he would see it again.
Love. Pure, abiding, soul-deep… love.
As she held her arms out to him, Darius exploded into action, leaping over the divide, jumping at her.
Their embrace was solid, even though she seemed to be part of the ether, and as he held her tight, and felt the warmth of her, and smelled her scent, he closed his eyes to savor the way her arms wrapped around him.
They stayed like that for an eternity, and if this was all that the Fade provided? He was soooooo good with the way the Scribe Virgin had set up the world.
So good.
Except Anne pulled back.
And as he opened his mouth to tell her something, emotions ramrodded him as he looked into her eyes. From out of a choked throat, he asked the one thing that mattered most:
“Did I do a good job?” he said in a guttural voice as he started to choke up. “God, did I take care of her well enough—”
Anne captured his face in her hands. “Oh, yes, Darius. You did a perfect job. You did just what I asked and more than I could have hoped for. You were a magnificent father and protector. Thank you—thank you.”
His breakdown was over twenty years in coming, and as he collapsed into her arms and wept—for her, for him, for their Elizabeth—his one true love smoothed his back with her hand. It was all he’d wanted to hear, the confirmation that he hadn’t let her down, not in this one job she had given him.
Not in what had been his most important mission.
“You did just what I asked,” she repeated, over and over again. “You loved her as no other father could possibly have done better.”
When he finally calmed down, he lifted his head and scrubbed his face. Then he focused on his Anne.