You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Sixty-One

He knew he was dead because of the light at the end of the tunnel, the tunnel, and the voices.

"Was it worth it?"

"Oh, welcome. First time?"

It was funny, because he had never believed those out-of-body stories. To him, death was simply oblivion, quite different from the stories of purgatory and hell that the sisters had warned him about. There wasn't any evidence to prove otherwise.

Besides, they'd have to make a special hell for werebeasts, wouldn't they? And so he'd dismissed it with his teenage wisdom, convinced of his own intelligence in his sarcastic, unintellectual, normal-guy way.

Now, I'm just your average, everyday person with no pretensions to intelligence, but even I know that there's no evidence for life after death.

It only occurred to him now, here at this point of absolute nothingness, that he had absolutely no proof for the oblivion thing, either, and that his faith in rationality was exactly the type of wishful thinking that he had been trying to avoid.

"First time," he said, surprised to hear his own voice, because he had no body and no hands and no idea where he was. It was less blackness and more the sense of blackness, like the feeling of falling turned into a mode of existence.

The light did a little sashay, pleased at its own performance, like it was doing its very best to be an unattainable goal.

So he was dead, surely, or at least dying, and the afterlife had assumed that he would be perfectly all right with the most banal version of death imaginable.

Oh well. It wasn't like it mattered. He wasn't sure anyone would miss him. It was becoming a bit of a haze. He knew he had some sort of relationship with someone on the outside, but according to his own memory, he didn't have anyone who would particularly miss him.

Why had he died, anyway? Was it to protect someone?

He had a curse of some sort, right?

What was his na...

"ROB!"

A voice called him, pulling him up and out with inexorable power, a keening thrum of irresistible will that felt like gravity.

The only thing that struck him as he returned in reverse to consciousness was how annoying it was to not be dead.