I passed him, still looking dumbfounded, and trudged up the road. I held the tears back by force of will, but I stopped when he finally spoke.

“I was your Heaven?” was all he said.

I turned around and faced him, the tears breaking my voice. “You really are an idiot, Daniel. You’ve had my hormones and emotions as an open book for the past few hours and you didn’t even see it. Smell it. Whatever. Why did I have to fall in love with a moron?”

I left him then, his face slack with shock, on the road leading from dog Heaven. I left the thing that loved me more than anything else in the world lying blissfully in a patch of sunshine, and I left the person I loved more than anything else in the world standing slackjawed and stupid in the road.

* * *

The look on Daniel’s face was nearly gratifying in its relief as he approached me at the roundabout. I sat cross-legged in the sand and waited for him, stony-faced.

He didn’t say anything, just came and sat beside me.

I pointed down a narrow dirt path. “I’m pretty sure that’s a path to reincarnation. Tell me everything, or I’m heading down there. I might be a bug or a dog or something, but it’ll be better than following you around like a lovesick puppy when you don’t even tell me what’s going on.”

I knew I was right about the path, just like I knew Daniel was lying. The certainty lay cold and unemotional in my chest, keeping me calm.

Daniel’s voice was flat. He didn’t look at me. “I don’t think I ever told you this, but my sister Megan died when I was ten. She was four. When people find out, I usually tell them it was an accident or something. But it wasn’t. My mother went insane and killed her. I walked in right when she lost it, and tried to stop her. That’s how I got these.” He pushed up his sleeves to show me the long scars on his forearms. He’d always told me they were from a boy scouting accident.

“When I got to Heaven, the first thing I did was look for Megan. I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t imagine a girl that young going to Hell, so I tracked down God and asked him what was going on. He said that some souls had gone missing, and he needed someone to investigate why. I asked him when I could leave.”

He stopped. Although this was all new information for me, I waited. There was more-his face told me that much.

He sighed. “One of the reasons souls are going missing, He said, was that it’s time for the end of the world.”

My mouth went dry. “So Hermes was right.”

Daniel nodded.