For a moment, she wondered if she hadn’t lost her mind… if maybe her lack of sleep wasn’t causing olfactory hallucinations. But after having been at the rooming house for so long, she was well familiar with all kinds of food smells, whether they be rot or a case of over-roasting. And this was different. This was… not food.

Going over to her door, she put her hand on the panels, even as she felt like a paranoid fool. Just because part of her life was melting down, and she was taking her doomed romance far too seriously, did not meant her building was doing the same—and what do you know, the flimsy wood was room temperature under her palm. It was fine.

“Come on, now,” she muttered to herself. “You’re losing it.”

A fresh round of shouting across the hall made her refocus and breathe in through her nose again. The strange odor was stronger, and there was a sweet undertone to it, something—

Alarms began to go off, the shrill sounds firing from both ends of the outer corridor. Alarmed—natch—Therese opened things and leaned out. Across the way, black smoke was seeping from the gaps around a closed door.

“What’s going on?” someone said.

Therese looked to the right. A woman with a lit cigarette and sleep in her eyes had come out of the apartment next to the smoke.

“I don’t know,” Therese answered.

All around, other tenants emerged from their units, many of them similarly confused, although whether that was from a disturbance in sleep or an inconclusive assessment as to whether this was real or a drug-induced hallucination, Therese did not know.

“Has someone called nine-one-one?” she asked.

Without warning, an explosion blew open the door across the hall, the impact of the shock waves pitching Therese off her feet and throwing her back into her flat. As she landed, her breath was knocked out of her lungs, but she stayed conscious.

So she saw the fireball that expanded like a great beast, its breadth extending down the corridor in both directions.

And bursting into her apartment.

* * *

From the depths of Trez’s painful delirium, his brain coughed up a memory that made the agony of the migraine seem like a paper cut. He was back to the night he had sent Selena’s remains unto the sky, her physical body set ablaze on the funeral pyre that had been built by his community of friends. He was standing as close as he could get to the flames, the heat so great that the skin on his face tightened and the front of his body roasted to the point of cracking. The blaze, which had caught quickly, burned brightly in the dense darkness of the night, the white smoke curling into the heavens—

It was as he brushed at his eyes to clear the tears of his soul that he realized… this wasn’t a memory.

He was present at the actual scene, returned to the past through some kind of alchemy—no, not magic. This was a dream. This was one of those dreams when you found consciousness within your mind’s subconscious, freedom of choice seeming to present itself in a reality that wasn’t real except for the way it felt.

Why couldn’t he have gone back to a happy time? To when he had rented out Storytown just for him and his queen, when they had danced between the headlights of his car, when he had been able to hold her against him once more?

If he could pretend to be in any scene from their relationship, pretend to feel anything, see anything, be anything, why was it the heat of Selena’s funeral pyre upon his aching body, the sight of her remains being consumed, the mourning cranked up to an acute suffering that took his breath away?

Was this never going to end, this cycle of sadness, loss and pain.

Trez stared at the curling orange and yellow fire, the pyrotechnic monster devouring the food it was provided, the wood, the body, breaking down, becoming the smoke that rose and the ashes that fell. And as the consumption continued, rage and anger became a blaze within his own body, burning him, destroying him, as his beloved was likewise alit, the two of them united for this one last time, both of them in flames.

Unable to hold the emotion in, he started to scream, an explosion of sound propelled out of his lungs by the constriction of his rib cage, the force so great he felt the veins in his neck and his forehead bulge, his arms and his shoulders turn into cords of twisted steel, his legs threaten to propel him into the pyre. He screamed until he was out of oxygen, and then he dragged in the night air. As soon as he had breath in his lungs, he screamed again. And again. And again—

It was during an inhale that he sensed a figure standing off to the side, and he wheeled around, panting. When he recognized who it was, he was confused.

“Lassiter?” he said hoarsely.

The angel’s body was nothing but an outline, only the glimmering wings that rose over his torso seeming to have weight and substance. As wind came up from all four directions, ghostly tendrils of the male’s blond and black hair swirled around.

Catching his breath, Trez wiped his mouth. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

The angel didn’t answer. Didn’t seem to hear him. Lassiter was focused on the pyre, a holy silver light radiating out of his eye sockets.

A feeling of disassociation compelled Trez’s own stare back to the roiling flames and his heart began to pound. The strange wind that swirled around the blaze changed the pattern of the fire, the flashes of yellow and orange coalescing—

From out of the pyre’s pulsing heat and flaring light, Selena’s white-wrapped body rose, the resurrection happening with an inexorable elevation that had Trez trembling from fear and love combined. This wasn’t right. This dream…

It wasn’t a dream, either.

He didn’t know what this was—but he didn’t care.

Selena was risen from both the cold embrace of death and the inferno of the funeral pyre, her arms lifting from out of the wraps he himself had wound round her lifeless body, her torso straightening, her legs standing strong. And now came her hair, the long, dark locks spooling free of the confines that abruptly loosened and fell away into the inferno beneath her feet, revealing her face and her shoulders.

She was of flesh and flame combined, an apparition that called to him without saying his name, that captured him without chains or bars, that held him without laying a hand upon him.

“Selena?” he said desperately. “Selena…”

In the midst of the violent glow, he could see that her mouth was moving. She was speaking to him.

“I can’t hear you,” he called out. “What are you saying?”

In a panic, he tried to close the distance, but the heat was too great, a barrier even his love and need for her could not help him cross.

“What are you saying?” he yelled again.

When he couldn’t hear her, he turned to Lassiter, but the angel was gone. Maybe he’d never been?

Wheeling back toward the blaze, Trez was terrified Selena, too, might have disappeared. But no, she was there, still yelling for him, still trying to get her message across the pyre and through the strange wind, her growing frustration and fear killing him.

Just as he had the thought that he would jump in there with her and join her in the flames, even if he was destroyed, she stopped, crouched, and held her arms up as if to protect herself from something that was falling on her. Then the funeral pyre seemed to explode, sparks and heat pushing out at him so that he had to cover his head and bow away also, even with his desire to get in there with her—