A/N: Just a little thing. I loved the visual of the scene so I wrote this. Please R&R


The heat of the fire mingled with the salty bite of the sea air that rose invisible over the lip of the cliff, drying wet eyes that regarded the body on the funeral pyre. The towering flames reached skyward as if to singe the clouds, but as Van Helsing stood before the fiery pillar he saw a white mist, not smoke, but a nearly invisible vapor that whispered, undisturbed by the ocean wind, over the dry grass. It flowed around him, and the cool sensation of water on flesh bathed his senses. Against the scarlet and gold of the fire, a brief, opaque shape materialized like a ghostly reflection in the air.

A woman's smiling face.

Van Helsing could no longer see the body where it lay in the fire's embrace, but he turned away, suddenly aware that Anna had left that earthly form behind. Beyond the cliffs the sun was slipping downward in a blurred explosion of golden, bloody sky where it met the lapping shelf of the ocean. The clouds above had dulled, charcoal and gray as their silver edges shone with dying luster. Van Helsing stood in wondrous amazement. In the midst of the grey void the clouds had suddenly parted, but instead of allowing the violent rays of the sunset to stream through, a cool, white light suffused the grey, and in that paling door, Annie's features appeared. She smiled down at Van Helsing, and around her the silver, shining forms and faces of many others became visible. Though he could not hear them, the black-clad figure knew that nine generations of the family Valerios were greeting each other in the light of heaven's gates.

Anna's eyes glowed, and as she watched Van Helsing a single tear slid down and rested with the brilliance of a star on her cheek for the lonely man on the cliff, the monster, the holy man, the murderer, the angel who had sent her from the world to a place beyond death and beyond sorrow. The clouds started to draw back together, and the light began to recede. Anna smiled, and her eyes seemed to speak a promise as she was drawn, a soul made new in the light of an everlasting Sun, through the gates into paradise.