Pestilence (The Four Horsemen Book 1)

  Then I hope it hurts to watch her die.

  The words have my stomach knotting up.

  Had a doctor said that? It seemed like it from the bits I remember of the conversation. And we are in a hospital. It would make sense that Pestilence spoke with a doctor … a doctor who wanted Pestilence to understand a thing or two about loss.

  That’s about when the screams began. I thought maybe they’d been in my head, those screams, but now I look around again. These people have blood coming out their ears and their eyes, their noses and their mouths. Plague victims don’t look like that.

  “What happened?” I repeat, staring at the bodies.

  Something is not right here.

  “They would not heal you.” Pestilence’s voice is cold, so cold.

  My eyes sweep the hallway before returning to him. “All of them?”

  “Enough.”

  My eyes linger on what used to be a nurse, her eyes, ears, and nose bloody. These deaths weren’t from plague. They were revenge killings.

  I’m beginning to shake, and I think it’s from horror.

  “If they all died, then who did heal me?” I ask.

  “There were a handful whom I found, and I kept them alive long enough to tend to you.”

  Long enough.

  “Come,” he says, cutting off the rest of my questions so that he can help me onto the cart.

  He helps lay me down, and I have to pinch my eyes shut because he’s being so gentle, so careful. Even though he recently mass exterminated a hospital, he handles me like I’m delicate.

  “Don’t do that, Sara,” he says quietly.

  He’s not going to spare humanity, just me.

  “Do what?” I force my eyes open.

  “Don’t act like I’m the monster. They were going to let you die.” His gaze burns, like he’s still trapped in the flames.

  “Not all of them,” I whisper.

  “Enough.”

  I glance away from the horseman.

  “This is what I was created to do!” he says hotly. “They died fast. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  It does. And they would’ve died regardless. It’s just that I saw all those bodies, and that is a sight I can never unsee.

  It’s one thing to watch a family die in their homes, to talk to them and care for them and witness their deaths. It’s another to see a building full of rotting corpses, their faces awash with terror. I can’t see them for the people they once were, and that makes them all the more grotesque.

  I don’t respond. Honestly, I’m too damn tired to argue with Pestilence right now.

  “So be it,” he says.

  So be it. That’s also what he said right before he pressed his will on a room full of doctors and nurses and sick people.

  I shiver again, ignoring the frustrated growl that leaves his throat. He stalks back to his horse and swings himself into the saddle. Even the click of his tongue sounds irritated.

  The cart bumps as it rolls over the bodies. I grimace as it jostles my injuries, the pain so intense it closes my throat up, but it’s the thought of all those bodies that causes me to dry heave.

  He gave those people a quick death; I shouldn’t be upset. It’s just that this time, he was angry when he killed them.

  And I’m to blame for that.

  For the first time, a dark, insidious realization creeps up on me—

  Pestilence’s love for me might not save human lives. It might end them all the faster.

  Chapter 48

  The more kilometers we put between us and the hospital, the more my horror fades.

  Now what I’m remembering most viscerally are Pestilence’s cries as he was tortured, and the way those people had enjoyed his pain. I can still see the charred husk of the horseman moving towards me, calling to me from the wasteland of his body.

  What unimaginable pain he must’ve been in, and still he clawed his way to me. But he did more than that. I can remember Pestilence’s broken body as he carried me in his arms. Arms that were undoubtedly burnt away completely in places.

  He endured all of that to save me.

  By the time Pestilence pulls Trixie to a stop—in front of a mansion no less—I’m feeling sorrowful, penitent.

  When he makes his way to the back of the cart, I can tell he’s expecting another argument. His shoulders are rigid, and his mouth is pressed shut. I can almost hear all the arguments and counter arguments he’s spent the ride thinking about.

  But I don’t fight him.

  Instead I open my arms.

  He hesitates, clearly bewildered and unsure where I’m going with this. At last, he kneels and takes me into his arms, embracing me like I’m life itself. I hold him close, even though my chest feels like it’s getting shot all over again.

  “I’ve never been more scared in my life,” I whisper.

  He nods against me.

  “For you, I mean.”

  He pulls away to meet my eyes.

  “I never want to see that happen to you again,” I say hoarsely.

  Pestilence touches my cheek. “Nor I you.” Softer, he says, “I thought you were dead.” His voice breaks upon the last word.

  I might’ve been, I think, remembering the strange vision I had of Thanatos.

  He searches my face. “Never have I felt such … fear. It’s a horrible emotion.”

  It is.

  “And never have I felt such hate.”

  I don’t blame him—what those people did was sickening—and yet I quake at his words.

  The horseman closes his eyes, leaning his forehead against mine. When he opens them, they’re pained. “This saving and dying business is becoming a disturbing pattern between us.”

  “It is.” But I don’t want to dwell on that. I move my hand so that I can stroke his pretty lips. “Say it again,” I whisper.

  His brows pull together. “Say what?”

  “Tell me how you feel about me.”

  His face seems to come alive with realization, his lips curling into a rakish grin before he becomes solemn once more.

  “I love you,” he says. “Before I even understood the term, I loved you. I love your laughter and your bawdy humor. I love your compassion and your vivacity, your fierceness and your loyalty.

  “I meant to make you suffer, and look at me now—desperate to keep you in this land.”

  The soft look on his face makes my stomach flip.

  A gust of blustery wind tears through my clothes, forcing a shiver out of me, and that’s enough to break the spell.

  “Let’s get you inside,” Pestilence says.

  “Only if you continue to tell me everything you feel,” I say, greedy to hear it all.

  “Gladly, dear Sara. There are many, many things I have yet to share. I wish for you to know them all.”

  He begins to slide his arms under my body, clearly meaning to carry me.

  I put a hand on his chest. “I can stand,” I insist.

  Pestilence appears dubious, but backs off.

  Gingerly, I swing my legs out over the side of the cart, hissing a little as I do so. Black spots dance at the edge of my vision.

  Push through it, Burns.

  I force myself to my feet, my body screaming in protest, those black spots spreading.

  Wasn’t this bad at the hospital.

  Pestilence stands in front of me, all his earlier tenderness gone, a disapproving frown growing on his face.

  I take a step towards him and collapse in his arms.

  Trying to walk was a mistake. I see that in hindsight.

  Pestilence keeps me bedridden in the (evacuated) mansion while he plays nursemaid. At first I assume the whole situation is a temporary one. But then one day turns into two, then three, then four, then five—six—seven—nine—thirteen … ?

  The days tick by as my wound heals, and time begins to bleed together until I can’t remember how long we’ve been here. Long enough for me to discover that Pestilence can be bossy and overprotective,
particularly when I try to do anything that remotely resembles living.

  “I don’t remember you being like this when you came close to killing me,” I say testily, throwing back my covers on day fifteen? sixteen? Twenty?

  “Am I to be punished for caring too much?” Pestilence asks from where he stands next to the bed. “Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  Damn him for twisting my words.

  “I am not staying in this shitty bed another hour.” It’s really not a shitty bed. Pain and idleness have just made me testy, that’s all.

  “By God you are, and if I have to hold you down in it, so help me, Sara, I will.”

  Pushy horsemen also make me testy.

  “I’m healed!”

  “I fight infection off your body even now! You are not.”

  “Just let me walk around!”

  “So that you collapse on me again? I think not!”

  “That was weeks ago.”

  It feels even longer. I need to move around.

  “You’re hardly better now than you were then! Your feeble body is still badly injured.”

  Feeble body?

  “You’re being a fucking bully!” I seethe.

  “I’m your fucking savior at the moment.” Pestilence looks utterly done with me.

  I don’t remember being this combustible with him before.

  He’s scared of you dying, and you’re scared of letting him in the way you want to.

  He runs a hand through his hair, then glances over his shoulder at the door.

  His body seems to deflate. “I will not argue with you,” he says. Gone is the heat from his voice. He begins to back up, then turns on his heel, making a hasty retreat for the exit.

  “Wait,” I call when he’s nearly to the door of the master suite.

  I don’t want to fight.

  The horseman pauses.

  “I’m sorry, come back.”

  And he does, his imposing frame sitting down on the mattress. All it takes is for me to show a tiny bit of vulnerability, and Pestilence caves, trading in his tirade for soft touches and even softer kisses. He won’t go further than that, but it doesn’t matter. Right now all I want to feel is the breath of his love.

  His love.

  He gives it to me freely, and it feels like the warmth of the sun on my skin.

  Our days go on and on like that, spiced with our little dramas and soothed by whispered confessions and touches that never quite go far enough. At the back of my mind, I keep waiting for the home’s owners to return, but they never do, and so our stay goes on and on, falling into a pattern of sorts.

  My bullet holes go from open wounds to raspberry colored scars, the skin cratered and shiny. I now look like a creature of the apocalypse, my body a map of old wounds. I will never be like Pestilence, whose perfect form has recovered from savage brutalities without so much as a scar. A petty part of me mourns the sweet smoothness of my skin, but the tougher part of me, the Sara-motherfucking-Burns who fought fires and shot a horseman from his steed to protect her town, is simply happy to have escaped death.

  I shouldn’t have. Several times over I shouldn’t have. And now I’m honest enough with myself to admit that Pestilence has always been the reason why. He’s saved my life over and over again. And right now, his one reason for being here—to spread plague—has been put on hold.

  All so that Pestilence can care for me.

  Love has a funny way of rearranging priorities. It’s begun to rearrange mine.

  And yet … I feel uneasy about this temporary respite. For as doting and infuriating and caring as Pestilence is, that hardness I first saw in the hospital still lingers in each one of his features.

  We stay in that abandoned mansion for so long that the world thinks he’s gone. I happen to know this because, among other things, the house has a functioning television.

  Even more shocking than news of the horseman’s “disappearance” is just how much reporters know about me. There are a couple blurry photos of me and the horseman, one from when I was still officially his captive, my wrists cuffed, and another later one taken while I sat astride his horse.

  The reporters don’t know what to make of me. They don’t know whether I am his prisoner or his lover (“C”, all of the above), or what happened to us. The whole thing appears terribly confusing for them—should they laud me or condemn me? They’ve settled on pity.

  Pestilence comes into the master bedroom where I’m cooped up—still in fucking bed—his large frame filling the doorway. He removes his bow and quiver and sets them down next to the doorway. Then off goes his armor. He leaves his crown on his head, his hair beneath it windswept.

  I know without asking that he’s been patrolling the grounds. Not that he needs to. Anyone who comes remotely close to this place will fall ill. I think he does it more because he’s restless. The need to move through all the lands of man and spread disease must eat away at him.

  He is not a patient man. Except, of course, when it comes to me and my oh-so-feeble human body.

  He sits on the edge of the bed, the look in his eye raising my gooseflesh. There’s love there, but beneath it, there’s that same coldness. I don’t know what to make of it.

  Pestilence lifts up the edge of my shirt and runs a finger over the uneven flesh.

  He leans forward and kisses one of the scars.

  “To think that if just one of these projectiles hit somewhere else, it could’ve killed you.”

  I notice the very slight shiver that courses through his body at the mention.

  “How do you feel?” he asks.

  “Healed.”

  Pestilence narrows his eyes at me. It’s the same answer I’ve been giving him every day for weeks.

  And it’s been true for a while, but try talking sense into a being who cannot die and does not intuitively know when a human is completely healed.

  I grab his hand and tug him down next to me. For the first week or so that I was healing, he took to laying in bed with me, holding me close, his hand resting over my heart, just so he could feel the steady beat of it. Even once he assured himself that I was going to pull through, he still would come into bed with me, pressing his body close and falling asleep when he let himself.

  But sleeping and cuddling was all he dared to do with me.

  Now I roll onto him.

  “Sara,” he protests.

  “I’m not a porcelain doll,” I say, moving to straddle his hips. “I won’t break that easily.”

  “You and I both know that’s not tr—”

  I silence him with a long, slow kiss. I think he wants to resist, but Pestilence is still so shaken by the mysteries of the flesh (as he calls it) that he doesn’t do much to stop this.

  His hands come up to cradle my face as my lips part his. I spend a few seconds simply breathing him in before my tongue presses against his. The moment it does so, his hands slide to my upper arms, gripping me tightly.

  My own hands delve into his hair, knocking his crown askew. He has enough sense to set it on the bedside table.

  I roll my hips against him, and he lets out a groan. “Sara, you are still heal—”

  “Do I look like I’m in pain?” I ask.

  He frowns at me, but doesn’t argue. Nor does he fight me when I remove first his shirt, then the rest of his clothes. But he doesn’t exactly help me either.

  At some point, however, his tune changes. He begins to meet me, touch for touch, kiss for kiss, until he’s leading the charge. His hands rush over me, and there’s just not enough skin for his rough palms to cover.

  He hooks his arm around me, and then he flips us, leaving me to gaze up at him.

  So damn beautiful. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the sight of him.

  Expertly, Pestilence removes my own clothes, tossing them carelessly aside.

  Once I’m naked, his gaze rakes over my body, halting at the juncture between my thighs. He dips down, pressing his lips to my core. Reflexively, I buck up agai
nst him. He spreads my legs apart and continues to kiss me right—between—my—thighs.

  Christ.

  “Wh-what are you doing?” I ask, breathless.

  I begin to sit up, only for him to push me back down to the bed.

  “I assume it’s obvious,” he says. He nips at me, and oh Jesus, he is so fucking dirty. Where did he learn to be this dirty?

  His tongue comes out, and he tastes me.

  I moan, my back arching off the bed.

  “This is how you kill me,” I murmur.

  He pulls away instantly. The moment he takes in my flushed cheeks and dazed look, his worried expression morphs into one of male satisfaction.

  I’m pretty sure no one has given Pestilence anatomy lessons (aside from me), but he’s figured out pretty quick that my clit is the source of all goodness and wonder in the world.

  The horseman returns to his ministrations, and his clever tongue has me bucking and writhing beneath him. His warm breath puffs against me as he laughs. Pestilence might’ve once been a newb at this, but the pupil is definitely surpassing the master in record time.

  “Ughn,” I moan. “Ssss—stop. Too much. Stop.”

  Fucker doesn’t stop.

  He keeps going and going and—

  I let out a cry, my hips rising off the bed, as sensation rips through me, blinding in its intensity.

  Pestilence doesn’t give me time to fully come down. He moves up my body. “You’ve convinced me.”

  “Huh?”

  He wraps my legs around his waist. I feel his cock right at my opening, hard and insistent.

  “You’re healed.”

  And then he drives himself inside.

  Another moan slips out of me as his thickness stretches me. It’s been lifetimes since we did this. Pestilence has been so careful not to hurt me or jostle my wounds that it’s a shock that he’s now suddenly in me.

  It’s an even bigger surprise to feel his frenetic energy. His movements are not slow and reverent, or even playful and exploratory. He pistons into me like he can’t drive himself deep enough, and he gathers me up to him like he can’t hold me tight enough. His mouth sears my skin as he kisses my shoulder, one of my bullet wounds, my throat, my lips.

  His hands grip my legs, pulling me closer.

  Thump—thump—thump!