For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) by Guy Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

receiving it.”
    “What a sweet little man you are.” She stood up, wiped her bloodied hands on her dress and took him by the arm. “And an utter wet blanket.”
    He sighed. “She certainly thought so,” he admitted. “Say what you like about Zeke, he was never boring.”
    “He is now,” she laughed, “though I’ll admit he entertained for a while. Come on, let’s go out and find some sun to push away all this gloom.”
    They returned to the garden, having had their fill of dreaming for a while.
    For some time, they just sat in silence, Arno pleased that Veronica now appeared happy to be in his company. He didn’t know how many hours they had been in The Junction, the passage of time was slippery here in the afterlife, but the reticence she had shown earlier had completely evaporated.
    He looked at his watch. It claimed to be twenty past eight but the second hand was frozen and he knew that it showed the time of his death, that final second when time still mattered. What business did hours and minutes have here in Heaven? You couldn’t break an eternity down on a clock. Or could you? The horizon showed signs of darkening, so even the everafter knew the passage of day and night.
    “It does get dark here then?” he asked.
    “Oh yes,” she said. “What would paradise be without a cool evening or a midnight full of stars? God knows the beauty of a sunset or a dawn and is happy to share them.”
    One thought led to another as the sky continued to darken.
    “Where do we sleep?” he asked.
    “Wherever we like,” she said. “You can imagine whatever you like in The Junction, dream up a bed or a warm hearth.”
    “Is that what you do?”
    “No,” she admitted, taking hold of his hand. “I like to sleep beneath the stars.”
    They appeared above them, as if summoned, and perhaps they were; after all, if Arno had learned anything about Heaven he had learned it was a place that shifted with the desires of its inhabitants.
    She pulled him down next to her and guided his awkward fingers as to the way of her dress. As he stripped her of it, he was pleased to note it no longer bore her bloodied handprints from earlier. If their crimes were so transient that their evidence vanished so quickly, they couldn’t be mortal sins. The thought led him to consider other acts that might once have shamed him and he busied himself with them as the forest glowed around them, the trees filled with starlight.
    Two lovers in a garden in Paradise. Naked. Unburdened.
    To Hell with serpents.
     
     
    3.
     
    F OR THE FIRST few days, Arno managed to mark the passage of time but eventually he stopped bothering. It hardly mattered.
    He and Veronica split their time between the garden and The Junction, sleeping together under the open sky.
    For the first couple of nights, Arno found sleep hard. He didn’t feel tiredness so profoundly now, he supposed you had to be alive to really grow tired. But, as Veronica explained, sleep was a pleasure in and of itself. How blissful was it to open one’s eyes as the warmth of the sun heated your cheeks, gazing out onto a fresh day? Why give up on any pleasures now they were your life? Soon, he caught the trick of it, the earth a better mattress than any other his back had known.
    It didn’t take him long to realise that Veronica had been as happy to meet him as he her. For all her bravado and insistence that she had been happy on her own, she never left his side now and he recognised a soul retrieved from loneliness.
    It was a strange Heaven, he decided, that contained so few of the blessed. Of all the questions that had been on his mind during that first day in the afterlife, that was the only one that clung. Where was everyone?
    “It’s a big place,” Veronica said, “bigger than we could ever really conceive of. Is it so strange that we don’t bump into others?”
    And perhaps that was the truth of it. If the acreage of Heaven was as vast as God could imagine, a place unbound from the