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Alice gasped and screamed as she came to a stop. She held her free hand up to her mouth. Her eyes, her emerald green eyes, focused on him. Her purple hair. Her black witch’s hat. Her modern Victorian tailcoat. Her boots. It was like something out of a dream.

Still . . . he had seen a false visage before during the trials. Maybe it was a trick. Yet another test to convert him back to the ghoul he was becoming. He held the hockey stick above his head.

“Are you real?” Hugo shouted.

She lowered her hands and moved toward Hugo. “Of course I’m real.”

He held the stick higher. “Prove it. What’s the last thing I said to you before I died?”

Alice stopped. “Hugo, I’m running from an army of ghouls. Of course I’m real.”

Tears formed in his eyes. “I need to hear it. I need to know this wasn’t another test.”

“What test? Hugo, it’s me.”

“Tell me.”

Alice stood there. Her eyes welled with tears. “You told me to lie to you. To tell you it would be okay. You called me a terrible liar and said you loved me. And you know what? I was a liar because I haven’t been okay.”

A tear drifted down both of their checks.

Hugo lowered his hockey stick. “Neither have I.”

“Hugo, I could really use a hug,” Alice said.

“Me too.”

They rushed toward each other. They dropped their respective weapons and held each other in an embrace. Their arms wrapped around each other’s bodies. They held tight as if trying to become one.

Their eyes closed, yet their lips still found each other in the darkness, renewed in their relationship once again. A familiar acquaintance once thought lost forever. Their bodies yearned for each other as they rekindled their forgotten connection. The nightmarish landscape ceased to exist. Time was meaningless. There was only them. Nothing else.

Soft tender kisses became passionate, like a starved flame lit ablaze with renewed kindling. It was a kiss of renewed love, the deep, personal connection of true love. It was healing and renewal and promise of a strong future. The two souls became one. An unbreakable bond undefined by the boundaries of the mortal. The promise of hope in a land of despair.

Hugo moved his hand up Alice’s back and toward her head. His fingers intertwined with her purple hair. He massaged the back of her head before slightly tugging. She let out a soft moanin between the kisses as they released their hold on each other for a breath of air.

They stopped, opening and meeting their eyes once more. His icy blues lost themselves in her emerald greens. Their chests were weary from running, and a renewed passion heaved up and down as they both struggled to catch their breath. They touched forehead to forehead to maintain their connection. Hugo didn’t want to let go. Not again.

“I can’t believe I found you,” Alice said in a low whisper. “I can’t believe you found me.”

“Always. I would find you in the depths of the shadows of the darkest realms. I’ll always find you. That’s how much I love you.”

“I crossed a river of the dead and took on a whole ghoulish army, armed only with a broomstick to find you. That’s how much I love you,” Alice replied.

Hugo glanced at the broomstick on the ground. “What happened to Guinevere?”

“Only I could make the trip. I found this in one of the houses. It only seemed fitting.”

They laughed, a joyous laugh neither had uttered since their last dreaded night together.

They moved to kiss once more, but the wails of the ghouls grew closer. Hugo scanned the area. They hadn’t spotted them yet.

“We have to go. We can’t stay here. How did you get here?”

“By boat,” Alice said. “The ferryman brought me.”

“Then we have to go back to him to get out.”

Hugo picked up his hockey stick with one hand and took her hand with the other. Alice bent down and picked up her broomstick.