1

Chapter 

I was standing at the altar in my mother's veil when the priest said, "If anyone here has reason why these two should not be joined," and for one stupid second I actually looked around the church to see if anyone would stand up.

Nobody did.

Emeric squeezed my hand. His palm was cold. I told myself it was nerves.

"Do you, Delphine Winslow, take this man..."

The lights flickered.

Nobody paid attention at first. It was an old building, old wiring.

Somebody laughed nervously behind me. 

My father cleared his throat from the front row like he could fix an electrical problem by sheer disapproval.

Then the stained glass windows went red.

Not colored red, not sunset red. The whole sky outside turned the color of a fresh wound, and the light coming through the glass painted every face in the church the same sick shade.

"What the hell?," someone whispered, close enough that I heard it.

The priest stopped talking. He was looking past me, out the tall window behind the altar, and his mouth was open like he'd forgotten how words worked.

I turned around.

The sky was on fire. Not clouds, not sunset, actual fire, streaks of it falling out of that red sky like something had cracked the whole world open and set the inside of it loose.

Screaming started outside before anyone inside understood what they were looking at.

The old television mounted in the vestibule clicked on by itself. Static, then a woman's face, pale, her hands shaking so hard the microphone kept knocking against her chin.

"...repeat, this is not a drill, please remain calm and locate the nearest secure shelter immediately, do not attempt to travel by..."

The feed cut, static again.

The church exploded into noise, chairs scraping, someone's mother screaming a name, the doors at the back slamming open as people shoved through them into a street that was already burning.

Emeric's hand was still around mine. 

I looked at him, waiting for him to move, to do something, to grab me and run the way a husband was supposed to.

He wasn't looking at the fire.

He was looking at me.

"Emeric." My voice cracked. "We need to go, we need to get out of here..."

"You thought I was actually going to marry you?" he said.

I stared at him. Around us the church was emptying out, guests trampling each other toward the doors, and my new husband, my almost-husband, was standing perfectly still, holding my hand like he had all the time in the world.

"What?"

"I'm not taking you with me," he said. "I want you to understand that clearly, before everything gets loud."

"Taking me where?

Emeric, the sky is on fire, we don't have time for..."

"I have a place," he cuts in.

 "It's stocked, sealed. Good for a year." His thumb moved over my knuckles, almost gentle, and that gentleness made my stomach turn worse than anything else he'd said. "It holds two people, Delphine."

Two.

I heard the number and some part of my brain, some stupid, hopeful, drowning part of me, thought he meant us.

"Then we should already be moving," I said.

"Marisol's waiting outside," he said.

The world tilted sideways, worse than the sky outside ever could.

"My sister?" I said slowly. "You mean my sister is waiting outside?"

"I love her," Emeric said, like it was the easiest sentence he'd ever spoken. "I've loved her for years. Longer than I ever loved you, if I'm being honest, and I think today's the day for that."

"You're lying." My voice came out small and stupid like a child's voice, not mine. "You're lying, this is some sick joke..."

"We have a daughter," he said. "She's two."

I couldn't breathe. The screaming outside, the fire falling from a sky the color of a fresh wound, none of it was as loud as those four words in my own head.

"Two years old," I said. "Emeric, you proposed to me eighteen months ago."

"I know," he said, and had the nerve to look almost apologetic about it.

"Marisol understood, she's patient, she always has been. You were never very good at understanding anything that wasn't handed to you already explained, were you?"

"Fuck you," I whispered.

Something almost like amusement crossed his face.

"There it is," he said. "See, that's the thing, Delphine, you were never even good in bed, not that it matters much now, but I figured you should know before the end of the world, since nobody else was ever going to tell you."

I yanked my hand back so hard I stumbled into the altar rail.

"You absolute motherfucker."

"The shelter only holds two," he said again, calm, like he was repeating a detail I'd simply failed to grasp the first time. "It was never going to be you. It was actually a place I planned for myself and Marisol, I never planned for it to be you at all."

By now the pews had nearly emptied, the last of the guests shoving through the front doors into the burning street, my father's voice somewhere in the chaos calling a name that wasn't mine.

Through the open doors I caught one last look at Marisol, waiting at the bottom of the steps, a toddler on her hip, her face showing no guilt and no triumph, just patience, like a woman who'd been waiting a long time and this was simply the day it paid off.

"You knew," I said. "This whole time. Every dinner, every holiday you sat across from me and you knew."

The ground shook.

Not a tremor. A slam, hard enough to knock two pews sideways and drop a chunk of ceiling plaster into the aisle in a cloud of white dust, and somewhere outside, too close, something hit the earth with a sound like the whole world clearing its throat.

"Emeric." My voice broke completely. "The building's coming apart, we have to go, please..."

"I know," he said.

He let go of my hand.

Then he turned and walked toward the front doors, unhurried, like a man leaving a restaurant, and I understood, one half second too late, that he was leaving me inside.

"Emeric!"

I ran after him. He reached the heavy oak doors first, stepped through them into the red light, and looked back at me once, no triumph in his face, no cruelty even, just a kind of flat, finished calm.

"Goodbye, Delphine."

The doors slammed shut in front of me.

I hit them with both hands, hard enough to bruise, and heard, on the other side, the unmistakable scrape of the old iron bolt sliding home, the one the ushers used to lock up after evening service, the one nobody but the church staff knew still worked.

"Emeric, open this door! Open this fucking door, don't you dare do this to me, don't you dare..."

Nothing answered but the muffled roar of the street outside and my own voice cracking against solid oak.

The sky beyond the stained glass went white.

For one second everything inside the church went silent, my screaming, the crackle of the flickering lights, all of it went quiet and I remember thinking, stupidly, that the light pouring through those old colored windows looked almost beautiful.

Then the sound hit.

It wasn't a bang. It was a wall, a physical wall of noise and pressure that threw me off my feet and sent me sliding across the stone floor into a fallen pew, and every stained glass window in the church exploded inward at once, two hundred years of colored glass raining down through smoke and dust and a heat that had weight to it, it pressed down on my skin.

I couldn't hear anything except a high, flat ring. 

My mouth was full of dust and blood. Above me, the old wooden roof beams groaned, a long, splitting sound, and I understood, somewhere underneath the ringing in my ears, exactly what that sound meant.

I tried to get up. My legs wouldn't answer me.

The first beam came down twenty feet away in an explosion of splinters and stone dust. 

The second one came down closer. I remember reaching one arm up over my head as the ceiling above the altar folded inward with a roar loud enough to drown out even the ringing in my ears, stone and timber and two centuries of history collapsing down all at once, and the last coherent thought I had, strange and distant and almost calm, was that the door had never even needed to open.

The last thing I felt was the weight of the whole church coming down on top of me, and the last thing I heard, underneath the roar and the rin

ging and the world folding in on itself, was my own voice, raw and useless, still calling a name that was never going to answer me again.

Emeric!.