Emory disappeared behind an outcrop of rocks and returned moments later with a blanket and a small box. He smiled at her surprise. “I have been here many times before.” He cleared his throat. “It is a second residence to me.”

She looked around at the small clearing in the grove. “It’s nice,” she said, sarcasm touching her voice. “It’s a wonder you ever leave.”

He smiled as he shook out the blanket and wrapped it around her. “I’ll have the fire going soon.”

She grabbed at his hand. “No, don’t do that now. I want to hear—”

He shook his head. “You had a long, sleepless night. You must be hungry and tired.”

“But not you, right? You won’t be hungry and tired, because you don’t need to eat or sleep?”

He tucked the edges of the blanket around her and then pushed her onto a log. She sat with a disgruntled huff.

“Mere moments,” he promised.

She called after his back, “In a lifetime of moments that, for you, never end?”

He shook his head as he disappeared into a thicket of aspens. “Wrong,” he said, when he reappeared carrying an armful of gathered wood and a leather flask. “My life ended more than two hundred years ago.”

Despite the warmth of the blanket, a chill passed up Petra’s back. “You’re dead?”

“Not exactly.” Emory set aside the flask and used a log to clear a circle where he piled his logs and then broke twigs into kindling.

“You’re either alive or your dead. There’s not an in-between.”

“And you know this how?” He arranged the fallen wood into a teepee and placed twigs beneath. Petra wondered how it would start after the drenching rain, but then he uncorked the flask and poured ale on the wood. “There is an in between. The old people call it the thin place.”

“The old people? Being two hundred years isn’t old?” Petra shivered in the blanket. She’d thought it creepy when Auntie Dee had dated a man twenty years older, even creepier when her forty-something neighbor Mrs. Duncan married her twenty-something gardener. Compared to two hundred, twenty was nothing.

“I’m not so old.” He cleared his throat. “Look at me, Petra. I am the same age as you, stuck in the thin place, between the living and the dead.”

“Not a ghost?” Even in front of the fire, wrapped in a blanket, she shivered with cold and something else. Not dread, not disappointment, more than disbelief—she couldn’t categorize her feelings.

“I cannot die because I have already done so.” Using flint and tinder, Emory lit the wood.

Petra watched the pile of wood burst into flames.

Emory leaned back on his heels, studying the smoke that curled into the sky. “It’s something that can only be done once.”

“How? What was it like?” She wrapped the blanket around her a smidge tighter, her shivering increased. “Maybe I’ve died, too. Maybe that’s why I’m here. This is my in-between.”

Emory sat beside Petra. Wrapping his arm around her, he pulled her against his chest. “No, you are very much alive. There is no mistaking death.”

Pressed against Emory, Petra’s shivering eased slightly. “Are there others like you, trapped in the thin place?”

“Not many.” He held her tight, resting his chin on the top of her head.

She breathed out a sigh. He didn’t feel dead. He felt warm and alive. “Why are you here? Why am I here with you?”

“Those are two different questions.”

“Then I want two answers.”

“Do you know what happens when we die?”

Of course not. No one living did. She wanted to believe that her mother lived on, somewhere, somehow, and that she’d see her again. In her imagination she’d pictured a reunion with her mother and her father in a heaven of sorts, a place without cancer or accidents. She looked at Emory, confused, fearful and hopeful.

“It is one of life’s grand secrets, one all who pass are instructed to keep.”

She smiled. “And you’re going to tell me?”

He nodded. “Heaven is already angry with me.” He turned his lips toward hers and gently kissed her. “Are you willing to be with someone who’s on the wrong side of heaven?”

Petra shivered again. The fire and blanket didn’t help. If she’d been home and someone had told her he was caught in a thin place, on the wrong side of heaven, it wouldn’t matter how hot he was, or how attracted to him she felt, she would have said goodbye and gone on with the rest of her life. But she didn’t have a life here. She had no one, nowhere to go and nothing to do. Turning her back on the one person she knew wasn’t an option.

“Do not worry. I’m not in league with hell, although they have done their best to recruit me.” He kissed her deeply and the earth shook beneath her.

No, really, the earth is shaking. A dark cloud billowed overhead and a mean wind whipped through the trees.

Lifting his lips from hers, he said, “See, they are angry already. Both of them.”

“Them who?”

Lightning crackled, thunder rumbled and Emory laughed. “Heaven and hell. I must keep their secrets although they promise me nothing in return.”

Scattered rain drops, heavy and stinging, fell. The fire quivered and sizzled. “Will they put out your fire?” Petra didn’t know what she believed of heaven or hell, but making either of them angry seemed stupid. She readjusted the blanket. “You shouldn’t tell me, then.”

“Is that what you want?” he asked, his face inches from hers. He pulled the blanket so that it protected her head from the rain. “Moments ago you were willing to stand in the river until your legs turned to ice if I did not tell you my truth.”

Thunder boomed and the rain turned from a few desolate drops to a driving deluge. The fire lost its roar and flames and began to smoke.

“I don’t think you should make heaven or hell angry!” Petra said, raising her voice above the escalating storm’s noise.

“I thought you didn’t believe?”

“Do my beliefs matter?”

He laughed. “Absolutely.” He leaned his forehead against hers. “Your belief is the only thing that matters.” Standing, he drew her up and led her to an outcropping of rocks.

She trailed after him, tripping over sticks and fallen branches. “I don’t even know what that means.”

Emory stopped to grab his clothes off the branches where they’d been hung, and then he led her into a cave so deep and dark that she couldn’t see the end. She blinked in the gloom. Emory lit torches that hung from the wall and the cave sprung to light. An animal fur rug sat on a dirt packed floor. A stack of wooden crates held a variety of supplies including a jug, a bucket, and a knife.

The ultimate man cave.

As if he could read her thoughts, Emory looked sheepish. “I wasn’t expecting company.” He sat down on the bear skin and pulled her beside him.

“In the year 1414, I was…foolish.”

Outside the cave, the wind howled. The tree branches whipped against each other and moaned in their movement. Looking at the raging storm, Petra said, “I think maybe having this conversation is foolish. I really don’t want to make heaven or hell mad.” She paused. “Would it help to whisper? Can they hear us?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Heaven and hell aren’t easily thwarted.”

“And yet, you did it when you were…foolish.”

“I was more foolish than most at seventeen. My friends and I were setting a fire. My family died in the fire. And the entire village.”

Petra gasped and reached out to touch his arm. “I’m sure it was an accident.”

“I’m still responsible. Everyone I knew died, except for my brother who happened to be away. I watched him return,” Emory’s voice choked. “I saw him realize that he had no one and nothing left.”

“But you?”

Emory shook his head and leaned against the stone wall. He pulled her so that she lay against his chest. “Not even me. You see, I had also died.” He took a deep breath. “When you die, you’re gathered up to your people. Do you know what that means?”

A chill shook her and her body turned cold everywhere except for where she and Emory touched.

“When we die we’re gathered to our people,” he repeated. Lifting his face toward the roof of the cave, he addressed it. “I’ve shared nothing that she can’t read in the Bible for herself.” He smiled. “If you can find the King James version, there’ll be no need to learn Latin.”

The storm raging beyond the cave’s opening seemed to subside. The wind stopped howling and the rain slacked off.

He turned back to her. “There are numerous references on the subject. Genesis gives an account of Jacob dying and being gathered to his people, for example. Should you like more, there are many. I’ll admit that at one time I became something of an expert on the subject.”

Petra shrugged. She wanted to say I believe you but she wasn’t sure if that was true.

Emory’s voice turned fierce. “I don’t want to be gathered to my people. And as for the judgment bar of God—”

A laugh rang through the cave, echoing off the walls. Emory bolted upright and Petra struggled to her feet. She imagined the arrival of a host of winged avenging angels, carrying bows, swords and righteous indignation.

“You think you can escape the judgments of God?” a voice boomed.

Whirling, Petra breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Chambers standing at the opening of the cave. At least he was human. Although frightening in the flickering torch light, his shadow, long and lean, across the floor.

After Emory’s conversation, Petra had half expected an angel or a demon from hell. Although,

Chambers didn’t possess unearthly powers, but he did look scary. The wind, whistling through the cave lifted his hair so that it flew about his face. His cloak swirled around him as he lifted his arm, pointed his gun and fired a shot into Emory’s chest.

The cave exploded in a haze of smoke and blood.