Chapter 4: Revelation

"During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them." Revelation 9:6"

* * * * *

She was dying.

She knew it, believed it, could feel it all throughout her familiar and alien body. Clarity, reality, time and space had all been given back to her in a frightening, confusing rush that her mind could barely deal with. The strange detachment was gone, taking with it the defensive wall of disinterest in which her awareness had been enveloped, buried, drowned. It was as if she had been dreaming, drifting in a warm sea of unconsciousness while vague and disjointed paintings flitted across her sleeping mind. Time had blurred, wavered, and then finally disappeared altogether, leaving her in an endless loop of dreams and darkness. And now, she had suddenly been woken up by being flung into an icy sea. An abrupt, shocking, heart-stopping plunge back into reality that nearly killed her with its dual attack on her physical and mental self.

And as she no longer slept, there were no longer the dreams, the nightmares, the visions. Gone...completely, utterly, and abruptly as if the visions had been a physical bond to her son, a cord untied, cut loose, severed.

Severed...

Like her head should be, shouldn't it? She'd seen it happen; she'd seen her death. Her son, her beautiful son, so tall and strong and...and old! How had he gotten so old in the space of a few breaths in which she'd slept and dreamt and slept some more? And why? Why had that gleaming blade been raised and then brought down toward her neck? After so many years of longing for him and yearning for him and calling to him...after she'd summoned him with her frantic, crazed cries and he had destroyed the distance and darkness separating them. After all of that...he had unsheathed his sword and used it to cut off her head.

Lucrecia lay trembling on the ice, drawing in soft, hitching breaths and releasing them in barely audible sobs, tears leaking slowly out of her eyes and making their sluggish way to the floor where they froze, sealing her cheek and hair to the ice drop by drop. She stared at nothing for a while, lost in her madness, lost in her memories, breathing and sobbing and wondering why he'd killed her.

My baby, my child, my son, my son, my son...

Within the cavern, Lucrecia wept and wondered why she'd been killed and felt as if she were dying, and without, the sun rose as it always had and flung pale, watery rays over the land, bringing light and portent of coming warmth. One brave beam darted through a shallow spot in the waterfall crashing over the entrance to Lucrecia's icy prison and let fall across the frozen floor for a brief moment before retreating hastily, never to return. The shadows trapped within the ice shifted and flickered slightly as Lucrecia lay on its surface, as equally bound and chained by her mind as she was entombed within the ice.

Lucrecia's eyes rested on the ice for a while without seeing it, and her mind noted that a certain shadow within the ice was a certain shade of blue without realizing what it was she compared it to. She lay there, breathing and sobbing and wondering and not seeing the ground she was looking at, and who knew how long she lay. Nothing happened between one moment and the next, but suddenly her eyes focused on the ice-ghost trapped underneath the glassy floor and thought to herself, "It's the same color as that thing's eyes."

Deep blue, chilling blue, murky blue. The bottom of a lonely lake, shadows in the corner of a deserted laboratory, eyes that seemed to mock her from behind a curved glass wall. The eyes that she had felt boring into the nape of her neck as she moved about the basement labs, the eyes that she had glimpsed staring at her from the cavern floor, the alien eyes that had replaced her own just as alien cells had replaced much of her skin and flesh.

A sob hitched in Lucrecia's throat, and she blinked rapidly a few times, as if startled from a light doze or deep thought.

Those eyes...those alien eyes were my eyes, and I saw them in the ice. But they're gone...I got my own eyes back because...because the cells were receding or dying or in regression some how...

She glanced at her wrist, which was lying motionless before her face as if it belonged to someone else entirely. The skin that was visible to her was unmarked by the mottled, fleshy ropes that had once spread themselves out from her stitches to cover nearly her entire body. There were faint traces of the former infestation, visible as blue and purple stains, as is of an extra network of veins, but nothing more. Not satisfied with the limited view of her hand, Lucrecia attempted to sit up, but only managed to jerk her upper body so that she could get her right arm underneath, propping herself up slightly. She winced in pain at the incredible stiffness that made even breathing a chore, and at the sharp agony of having several locks of hair ripped out of her scalp, as their ends were anchored into the ice on which she had been sleeping for so long.

How long?

How long had she been lying there, sleeping and waking and dreaming and changing back and forth from human to alien to something in between? Long enough for those alien cells to multiply and spread across her stomach, her breasts, her arms...and then to slowly fade away again. Long enough for her to sleep and wake and cry out because while she had been dreaming, the invading cells had remade her eyes into those of that thing in the tank, and even the faint light in the cave was too bright and painful for her to look at through those alien eyes...

...while she had been dreaming...

...through those alien eyes...

Mad or sane, dreaming or awake, there remained enough of the scientist and the student so that her flickering, seemingly random thoughts were suddenly marshaled into shocking order.

It wasn't possible.

It wasn't possible for her to have lain in this cave, on this ice, for so long, with her wounds and infections and fatigue, and to sleep and dream and wake without dying. It wasn't possible for her to burn with fever and shiver with cold, to never drink nor eat nor feel hunger nor thirst for years upon years. It wasn't possible for her to lay on the ground without moving for decades and then jerk herself up to stare in dawning realization and horror at a hand that was not shriveled nor curled into a claw, the muscles not atrophied and useless underneath skin that was not cracked and leathery from exposure.

It wasn't possible, but it was, wasn't it? Hadn't she spent entire nights lying awake in her bed, unable even to close her eyes because of the brilliant possibilities that lay before her, before her husband, before their careers? Hadn't they witnessed miracles with their very eyes? Hadn't the wonders of creation and re-creation unfolded in the cramped basement of Shinra's mansion?

It wasn't possible, but it had to be. Because the ice had thickened around her hair. Because the stitches had broken down in the freezing cold and were no longer protruding from her flesh. Because the cells had multiplied and crept through and over her body and altered her very structure and form and then retreated to leave her body - the hand she was gazing down at right now - unscarred. Because she had dreamt and looked through those alien eyes and watched her son grow from a toddler to a man.

Could she have been lying here for so long? Thirty years, perhaps, in which her baby had grown to be a man in his prime. Thirty years in which she had allowed her longing for her son to lull her into a dull, listless sleep in which she waited out the years hoping for the next dream, the next vision, the next glimpse of her child. The cells, the infestation, the...connection to that thing, that thing...the cells had invaded her body and that thing had invaded her mind. Oh, but she had embraced it willingly for the sake of those visions. Ignored the significant viewpoint she had of the basement, the watery vision, the strange otherly presence, and a hundred thousand million other signs that she and the Goddess had been one. That every vision of her son had been seen through the murky blue eyes that she had grown to hate during her pregnancy. That when she had yearned and longed and called to her son, he had approached not a brunette woman with her arms outstretched, but an alien specimen in a tank. That her last memory of her son was of him shattering the specimen tank and cutting off the alien's head - why? - and severing her connection to it, to him in the same stroke.

Lucrecia gave a desperate heave and managed to sit mostly upright, her elbows locked and her arms tremblingly bracing her over the ice. An attempt to clinically review her medical status only made her shaking even more violent.

Gone. All gone. No more fever ravaging her body, no more malignant presence obscuring her mind, no more delusions clouding over the passage of time. The alien cells within her lay nearly dormant, giving her back the many layers and strata of pain and sensation. Instead of the one overruling, whole-body pain, there were now myriad aches and strains throughout her being. With every pulse that coursed through her veins, her temples throbbed as if they were an extension of her circulatory system, pumping pain and disorientation through her mind instead of oxygen. She could feel the cold of the ice against her skin, and the sensation itself made her realize that she had not even felt the temperature for too long. Her joints were stiff, her muscles ached, her eyes watered and stung and blurred, and every sense seemed to be overloading with input and impulses long dampened down and deadened by her unnatural sleep. She was not free, however. If her body had somehow been completely cleansed of the infection, surely she would have begun to feel the effects of being wholly human once more. There would be patches of frostbite over her exposed flesh, and surely she would be wracked with hunger pangs and a terrible thirst. Perhaps she would have even shriveled up into a withered husk within a few moments of being freed in some strange, cataclysmic degeneration.

After all, if she was guessing correctly, she hadn't eaten anything in over three decades.

She alternated between sobs and silent, staring wonder for so long that finally she ended up doing neither, thinking nothing, and barely even breathing. She simply sat hunched over the ice, weary mind having given up any pretense of work, and weary body doing the bare minimum of duties necessary for continued existance. Her eyes flickered randomly about the cavern for lack of anything else to do, and then settled upon a distinct brown shape several feet beyond where Lucrecia sat.

The book. Shrouded in stiff, rotten leather, a tome so thick and filled that some might call it a life-work, but Lucrecia knew better. She knew that the crabbed writing and precise diagrams and formulas that filled its crackling pages were only a mockery of life at best...thought processes that spat upon all that was good and wholesome about living, sentences of hatred penned under the guise of science and learning. She knew all this.

But she did not know all.

Before the thoughts could be fully formed in her mind, she was crawling toward the book, the notebook, the journal, the manual of her husband's that she had stolen away with her from the mansion on the night she was to have died. It was a heavy, ragged, real piece of the blessing and curse that they had discovered locked away in the ice. Lucrecia had nothing to do but to turn her mind over and over the staggering puzzle of who and what she might have become, how long she had lain her in this icy cave, and how...her bruised and whimpering mind turned instead to the record of her husband's vengeance as being a far less troublesome matter to pore over.

At the mansion, mere days before her labor had begun, she had stumbled upon this record one night. Sleepless and restless and frustrated, she had roamed the hallways of the mansion, wandering aimlessly and pointlessly. She had picked up whatever her eyes had fallen upon and set them down again without really looking at them, trailed fingers over dusty surfaces, and kicked at various papers and furniture lying about on the floor. And then down to the basement, picking at splinters on the creaking wooden bannister, wrinkling her nose at the damp smell of the tunnels, and shrugging indifferently at the rats that swarmed away from her steps.

In the last, confusing days of her pregnancy, her mind had been indifferent to nearly everything. With the goal of her son so close before her, she had shut out the rest of the world. The worries and fears that had consumed her thoughts became nothing but mist, and she had even paced restlessly before the specimen tank without even a thought to the heavy blue eyes on the other side of the glass. And that night, she had wandered through the back library of the laboratory without a care for her husband's increasingly furious demands that she leave his workspace alone.

It was as if she had been sleepwalking, and sleepwalking, she had walked through her husband's dreams and nightmares. There had been thin journals and notebooks stacked upon each other in a drawer, lab sheets and printouts and schematics piled high on the desk, towers of reference materials and books on the tables, and everywhere, the same cramped writing scrawling notations and notes over every available space.

She had read them all. Some she had glanced at, recognized, and passed over. Some she had skimmed, did not understand, and left. And the rest, she had read, frowned at, and then forgotten. There had been suppositions and daring experiments planned, small notations in margins where he explained things to himself in ink, random lists of things to do, work to delegate, and people...people to do something with. This last list had been written down meticulously on the back of one of his journals. She had run one fingernail down the names, noted her own at the top, most of the laboratory staff in the middle, and the three Turks at the bottom, with Vincent's name written and rewritten at the very end. And going backwards through the pages, she had found more of a diary than a scientific journal, and had read through it with the same uncomprehending, uncaring blankness with which she had perused the list of names. Hopes, fears, suspicions, determination, dread, victory, defeat, doggedness, terror, madness...it had all been written down in pages and pages of rambling and cries and rages, and Lucrecia had felt sadness, compassion, and a vague, hopeless yearning for something she knew she had lost, and could not remember what it was.

The last item she had pored through had been a weighty book, bound in leather and lying hidden underneath many layers of printouts and notes. Pulling it out from underneath the concealing papers, she had read the first few pages, flipped through some of the next sections, and then paled, frowned, bit her lip, and jumped ahead to read the very end. The best of the scientist's mind, driven by the worst of the husband's heart. The book had begun with the usual scientific theory, along with the usual statements, suppositions, and foreshadows. And then it had launched into the planned experiment, detailing all of the preparations and planning in the minutest way, as if pride had demanded that every atom of this glorious idea be displayed. And at the very end, a thin section of blank pages preceded by one quick paragraph, all pretenses at objective, unemotional science discarded.

He has separated me from my wife for the remainder of this short life. Now let me separate him from her forever...through life. Soon, Her son will be born, the vessel will pass away, and he shall enter into eternity through my hands and Her power.

This had pierced even the thick fog of her drug- and horomone-fogged mind, and without stopping to puzzle out every inch of this last paragraph, she had caught up the book to her breast and begun swiftly walking back to the room where she had slept alone these past months. But once in the main lab, the shadowy space lit dimly by the glowing specimen tank, her footsteps had slowed, and the fog had descended once more. Without a single further thought, she had turned, replaced the manual, and plodded woodenly back upstairs to lie in bed until daybreak, when she had fallen into a fitful sleep, haunted by nightmares that she could not remember later on.

And then, less than a week later, she had spied that same book, now marked with bloody fingerprints and fresh notes in the last pages, lying on the gurney where she had given birth, and Vincent had been given a living death. More pain than blood running through her veins, burning with anger and hurt and hatred as well as a high fever, she had caught up the book, and this time, escaped with it up the stairs.

And now here she was, thirty years later, finally turning its pages with a faint, flickering thought that perhaps answers lay within. If not for her, then perhaps for the man on whom these malignant thoughts had been turned. She hadn't ever read through the book in its entirety. She'd only read through the first few chapters, read with growing horror the meticulous planning and diabolical hopes that her husband had penned in its pages. She hadn't had the stomach to continue on through the pages and pages of actual experimentation and surgery and torture. At first, she hadn't even had the ability to wholly believe that he could do such a thing. And when it was too late, when the book had been finished, down to the notation of how many nails had been driven into the coffin, all she had been able to do was to pick it up and spirit it away, in the vague hope that what had been used to capture the details of the destruction of a man might one day be used to restore him.

But she read it now.

She wanted to know, needed to know, had to know. And she now had ability beyond measure to believe in her husband's capacity for evil. Despite outward appearances she knew in her heart that Vincent, of the two of them, had retained the greater share of humanity. What remained of the scientist and woman within her she determined to use for his sake, and in that hopeful resolve lay a last scrap of retribution for her own soul.

She read, and she wept from eyes that should have been dead and dried these three decades. As surprised as she was to grapple with the idea that she had been dreaming and sleeping for so long, and as incredible as it was that she should still be alive, she was even more shocked to find that there was yet human emotion to be found in the midst of her confusion and slowly receding madness. She read and read on, taking as long to run her eyes over the pages as it must have taken her husband to write them so very long ago. And she kept on reading, stopping only to weep, for what was food, and shelter, and sleep to her? Nothing, just as they had been nothing to her all these months and years in which she'd left it to the alien cells within her body to keep up her life. And so she ignored all else in the pursuit of her husband's mind through the leaves of this crumbling book. As she stumbled over the last few pages, the shadows on the floor in front of her wavered suddenly, and she immediately sensed that the flickering pattern that was presented to her was unfamiliar. Years upon years of dreaming and waking on this same ice...she had never cared nor thought of it, but her subconscious had all this time made note of the patterns in the ice, and in all that time, this strange shifting of blues and greys had never presented itself.

Because she had never had any visitors.

As quickly as her stiff and reluctant muscles would allow, Lucrecia twisted and turned her body, letting the heavy book slip out of her lap, so that she could peer tremblingly over one shoulder at the rippling sheets of water that hid the entrance to the cave from the outside world. Through the moving crystal curtain, a dark shadow loomed. As she watched with horrified eyes, though it was strange, that after all she had experienced and what she had just read, that anything should hold the power to further horrify her, the shadow seemed to solidify, to grow even darker and more compact.

Someone was walking through the waterfall.

With her breath coming in fast, shallow gasps, Lucrecia began crawling toward the back of the small cave, scraping and clawing her way over the frozen ground, as if safety awaited her a few feet away, rather than an unmoving wall of ice. Ever keeping her eyes trained on the approaching shadow, she groped her way backwards, accidentally kicking the leather-bound book she had been reading off to the side as she passed it, and then nearly yelped aloud as the usually solid floor slipped and gave way underneath her left elbow. She glanced down, and spied a thin metal tube peeping out from underneath her tattered lab coat.

The Death Penalty.

Stupid, ostentatious trademark of the gunsmith's, to name all of his creations, and the gift she had commissioned for Vincent had been no exception. The Death Penalty, the gunsmith had announced proudly, for all to whom it was chosen to bring down upon, there would be no escape nor rescue. Then, it had appealed to her, that she would be giving such a weapon of power and absoluteness to her lover. And at the time, she had not formed the idea of Vincent actually using it on her husband, but oh, she had thought on it later on...she had thought on it many times later on.

And now, she curled her fingers around the weapon and jammed it into a coat pocket. She'd cried out to God for death more times than she could remember, but suddenly she did not wish to die, and the fragile, undying woman clung to the knowledge of the pistol in her pocket for assurance that she was not entirely without hope of living...or at least, continuing this strange existence for just a while longer.

The shadow rippled and flared behind the last curtain of spray, growing more distinct as the person or creature neared, and fear lent Lucrecia the last burst of strength she needed to reach the altar at the back of the cave. Having gained her objective, she collapsed at the feet of the frozen dais. Her breaths coming in sharp, whispering gasps, she clawed at the jagged back wall of the cavern until she was upright, and then turned to wait for the appearance of her unexpected visitor. The pistol was a dead weight dragging the remains of her tattered lab coat askew, but it was a strange, faint comfort to have it there.

The last curtain of water parted, and the shadow was resolved into a shadowy figure. It was followed by two young people, a man and woman, both of striking appearance, but Lucrecia's eyes remained, then and later on, locked onto the man who walked in first.

She had watched her son grow, and glimpsed him as a man in his prime. She had woken up, and also awoken to the idea that thirty years had passed. And just now, she had been reading all the details of her husband's vengeance against the man who had stolen away his wife's heart, if not her body. But none of this had adequately prepared her mind, reeling from shock after impossible shock, for the sight of Vincent...not as he was now.

Outwardly, she remained standing, pressed up against the back wall of the cavern, her eyes wide and her face stricken with fear. Inwardly, she screamed and fainted and prayed all at once.

Everything was changed, and yet he was immediately recognizable. His hair was long now, and fell in tumbled layers by his face...his youthful face...and past his shoulders, held barely out of his eyes - so bright! - by a blood red bandana. The rest of his lean body was clothed in black, but for his left arm, encased...no, replaced by a gleaming metal claw. A cape that vied with his eyes for sheer bloodiness swirled around him as he began walking toward her, after his first surprised pause at seeing someone...seeing her.

For there was recognition in his eyes...his red, red eyes...surprise and disbelief giving way to grim certainty and a great, dreadful pain that she knew must be reflected in her own expression. His gaze flickered down her body and then returned to her eyes, and she conjured up the vision she must be presenting to him. Her grimy and tattered clothes, the dried blood on her shoes, and overall, the undeniably aged appearance of all about her...except her body. There were traces of bruises and blue veins faintly visible, but it was on firm skin, unwrinkled by age or elements. The hair that straggled down her neck was still brown, and she realized all of a sudden that not only was she still alive...she was as youthful and unchanged in age as Vincent was.

But it was not enough to give her hope that time had not passed her by so quickly as she thought. She and her lover might not have aged, but time had gone by just the same. The cells, her eyes, the visions...there was too much proof piled around her for her to cling to one strange string and hope.

He was nearing...ten more steps and he would be before her. Close enough to touch, to feel flesh and warmth once more instead of ice and more ice, to hear his voice, to...

...close enough for him to see the remains of the alien flesh that had crept over her skin and possessed her.

"Stay back!" she shouted suddenly, her voice hoarse from long disuse and fierce with mingled fear and despair. His steps halted immediately at her cry, and in her words, and in his pause, Lucrecia acknowledge all. It was over. Her past life and this current existence, any ties she had to her husband or her lover, any hope that she might have nurtured, any right she might have claimed to life outside of this icy cave...it was as if it had never existed. There was only one thing left for her, and now, having read the book and seen with her own eyes its results...surely that one thing was all that remained for Vincent as well.

"Lucrecia..."

The voice was a catalyst to her despairing mindset, and she slid her hand into the deep outside pocket of her lab coat, curling her fingers around the pistol that lay within.

Look at him. LOOK at him!

...look at me.

We're dead. We're dead. If we're not dead then we're dying and if we're not dying then we should be.

She would kill him - release him - and then shoot herself as well, and all would be over, as it should have been so long ago. Neither of them should have ever left the basement of that mansion, covered in blood and gore and becoming less and less human with every heartbeat. They should have died, and then none of these years, these nightmarish years would have happened. They would have been at peace...

But there was one thing yet that stayed Lucrecia's hand, and after a long, drawn-out staring contest between the two recreations that had staggered out of Nibelheim, she said, in a small, trembling voice, "Sephiroth..."

The name was all she could get out of the hundred and more questions she wished to ask about him. Was it true? Were her visions really real? Had he truly undergone all of those injections and treatments and hardships while learning to walk and talk? Had he truly grown into that strong, cold man she had glimpsed for just one moment? The last time she had seen him, really seen him, was as an infant.

"I...dream about him so often," she murmured, in a voice that threatened to falter and fade at any moment. Images from her dreams and visions flickered before her eyes, melting and breaking her heart at the same time, and weakening her desperate, deadly resolve of a moment ago. "My baby," Lucrecia whispered brokenly, "I never even got to hold him..."

The pained, glowing red eyes shifted from her gaze, and Vincent turned his head away from, as if he could not bear the sight of her any longer. She continued to stare at him from the back of the cavern, silently entreating him to speak, if he knew anything at all of her son. But he only shook his head, as if he could hear the mental pleas, and then said softly, "Lucrecia...it's been thirty-five years. Sephiroth is dead."

Dead.

But how could that be? Her son, her beautiful, her strong, her perfect son. She had dreamt of him so often, watched him grow...but the last she had seen of him, he had been...a soldier. Dressed and armed for war. And he was human...enhanced, certainly, but human...unlike his mother, his unnatural mother. Humans die...

Her knees trembled and then gave way, sending her crashing to the ice. Sharp footsteps brought her head up immediately, and she saw Vincent - red-eyed, golden-clawed, demon-bringer Vincent - walking swiftly toward her, bending slightly so as to be able to help her to her feet. So helpful, so caring, Vincent. Always so solicitious, never saying a word, but always there to help her stand, help her up, help her live each day. But they weren't in Nibelheim any longer, and they weren't those foolish young lovers any longer. Lucrecia had staggered to her own feet, alone and dying in the mansion, and had clawed her own way out of the basement, and had been living in a nightmare ever since. They weren't in Nibelheim any longer. They were monsters.

"NO!"

Vincent stopped again at the word, delivered with such violence that it seemed more a snarl than a shout. And he did not begin walking forward again, not even when Lucrecia slipped while trying to stand up once more and nearly set off the gun she had leveled at his chest. She shook her head at him, face twisted with grief, and repeated the syllable once more, but in a tearful whisper. It was denial that her son was dead, and acceptance of the same. It was a cry against Fate, and a plea for mercy undeserved.

The pistol trembled and shook in her grasp, and she whispered in a voice no less steady, "Leave."

Pain and pleading shone in those glowing red eyes, but she repeated her command in a stronger voice before he could speak, backing up her order by pulling back the hammer of the weapon she had commissioned for him so long ago. After another long, wordless look, he turned and walked out without a backwards glance, taking with him the two silent watchers who had stayed behind at the entrance. Behind the veil of water, the shadows flared and diminished, and then they disappeared.

Left alone once more, the cave cold and quiet and unchanged as if the past few minutes had been another fever dream, Lucrecia suddenly fell to her knees once more, the pistol and even her body too heavy to hold up. Thirty-five years...thirty-five years. She moaned the words over and over to herself as if chanting the horrible fact would deaden the blow somehow. Such a stupid notion...how could she even begin to grapple with the realization that her dreams and visions had been reality, filtered through the hazy orbs of a creature suspended in a glass tube. She had been lying in an ice-bound cavern for over three decades, kept alive by the same alien cells that had slowly taking her over for a time, and seeing with another creature's eyes through some unholy bond.

A faint glimmer of the scientist she had been marveled at it all, and what remained of the woman only shuddered at the detachment and ignorance contained in that scholar's admiration.

But she was alive. She was still alive. However much she might want to, there was no ignoring the fact that Lucrecia lived and breathed and thought. An old physician's adage that she'd learned to laugh at was that as long as there was life, there was hope. But for her, hope was too uplifted a word. Future, purpose...those too gave the impression that what lay beyond held the potential to be better, to be brighter, to be more.

For Lucrecia, there was life, and therefore possibility.

She looked at the pistol laying by her side. She looked at the book, lying unnoticed near another curve of the cavern's interior. She looked at the waterfall, bright and glittering in the sunlight that danced outside.

Outside.

Outside, where Vincent had gone. Vincent, who had somehow escaped from the mansion. Vincent, who had lived for years upon years while she had slept and dreamed and barely survived even that. Vincent, who had finally found her as she'd prayed so long ago, and whose first impulse had been to reach her, to help her...

Oh, and that look in his eyes! It had taken her back through three decades in an instant. So much had changed, but not all, not all. That look, that hurt, proud, dying, angry, confused, determined look.

I threw myself at him and then threw him away and he went...he went when I told him to go away but he looked at me, he looked at me just like he did just now and it was acquiescence and promise all at once. That he would do as I said, that he would leave and leave at once, but not stay away. That no matter what, there was one thing I couldn't make him do, and that was to stay away from me, to stop watching over me, to give up his place as my guardian. He would walk away from me now but he would be back, to watch, to guard, to protect. He wouldn't stay away. He won't. He'll be back.

But only the book and the gun would be there to meet him.