They’d decided not to tell Chloe that just yet. Gwen still wasn’t sure they’d made the right decision. She knew a part of Chloe was still hoping.

“We’ll be coming to Manhattan in a few weeks, Chloe,” Gwen told her, hugging her tightly. They clung to each other for a time, then Chloe tore herself away and practically ran to the security gate, as if she couldn’t get out of Scotland fast enough.

Gwen wept for her as she watched her go.

The Maybe Game, Chloe swiftly came to realize, was the cruelest game of all, far worse than the What-Might-Have-Been Game.

The Maybe Game was parents who left for dinner and a movie and never came home again. The Maybe Game was a closed-casket funeral and a four-year old’s imagination when confronted with sleek, glossy boxes and the attendant, bewildering rituals of death.

The Maybe Game was an empty freaking room full of blood and no answers.

Maybe Dageus had used the power of the Draghar to free her, to kill the sect members, and magically transport their bodies elsewhere so she wouldn’t be confronted with the horror, where he’d then killed himself to make certain the Prophecy would never be fulfilled.

That was what Drustan believed. And deep down inside her heart, that was what Chloe believed as well. In her heart, she knew Dageus would never risk freeing the ancient evil to walk the earth again. Not even for her. It had nothing to do with love. It had everything to do with the fate and future of the entire world.

She’d endlessly replayed in her mind that moment when the knife had whipped away from her neck and gone hurtling through the air.

It had gone in his direction.

But maybe, another insidious little voice kept insisting, he and the sect of the Draghar had vanished one another . . . er, inadvertently, and . . . they would all come back. Eventually. Stranger things could happen. Stranger things happened on Buffy all the time. Maybe they were locked somewhere in mortal combat or something.

Maybe, her mind tortured her, he’s still alive somewhere, somehow. That was the most excruciating maybe of all.

How many years had she believed that her parents would one day walk through the front door again? When Grandda had come to take her to Kansas, she’d been terrified to go. She still remembered shrieking at him that she couldn’t leave because when Mommy and Daddy come home they won’t know where to find me!

For years she’d clung to that agonizing hope, until she’d finally been old enough to understand what death was.

“Oh, Zanders,” she whispered. “You can’t play the Maybe Game. You know what it does to you.”