The headboard smacks into the wall again and again and again until paint and a little bit of plaster have chipped away.
Pestilence’s eyes glint brightly. And it’s not wholly love that I’m seeing. It’s love and anguish and a possessive desperation and—strangest of all—an apology.
I can’t make much of it now, however. Not with his cock filling me up and rubbing me down in all the right places.
For a second time I tip over the edge. I clench around him, pulling him close to me. With a groan, he comes on the wings of my climax, rocking into me like his very life depends on it.
Once he begins to come down, he kisses me everywhere, his lips brushing over every bit of exposed flesh. All that raw, male energy is converting into something painfully sweet and reverent.
He gathers me to him, cradling my body against his own. There’s nothing like being pressed skin to skin with this man to make me feel utterly at ease with the world. My eyelids begin to lower.
Still haven’t figured out the contraception issue, I think lazily.
Pestilence brushes a kiss along my temple.
He’d make a good dad.
Can’t believe I just had that thought …
I nestle closer to him as I let myself drift off.
One of his fingers traces over my stomach.
His body slides away from mine, and his voice filters in from the edge of sleep. “I’m sorry, Sara. I was waiting for this, and I thought that maybe … maybe you getting better would change my mind, but it hasn’t. It’s only made me surer of what I need to do.”
I grope for his hand, but it’s gone.
Chapter 49
The next morning, I make my way into the kitchen, trying not to let Pestilence see just how fatigued that simple action makes me.
I shouldn’t have bothered. For once the horseman isn’t even paying attention. The television in the living room is on, and Pestilence is standing in front of it, his arms folded, staring at the screen grimly.
I glance at the T.V., just to see what has tied up his attention.
“… Breaking news: virulent outbreak of Messianic Fever along the West Coast and Pacific Northwest, spreading into Mexico. State and local governments are rapidly trying to quarantine infected areas. No known sighting of the horseman yet. Please stay in your homes and avoid city centers. I repeat, please stay in your homes and avoid city centers. To all those affected: our prayers and thoughts are with you.”
My stomach bottoms out.
I stand there for a long time, not talking, not reacting, just … staring at the television dumbly. The report replays itself five different ways, the information regurgitated to fill the empty minutes. They are showing the pictures of Central Park taken after Pestilence passed through the city months ago, with its mass graves filled with bodies. Then images from Toronto and Montreal appear, the few photos anyone has of the Fever. There are even a couple from Vancouver and Seattle, places I saw with my own two eyes.
But now new footage joins the old. A shaky video of a hospital in San Francisco appears, the place filled with the dying. Another from Los Angeles, where people are lying in the streets, their eyes sunken and their faces flushed with the beginnings of fever.
San Francisco, Los Angeles. Those places are states away.
I grow cold.
I manage to rip my eyes away from the screen, and now, now Pestilence is looking at me. There’s still that damn apology in his eyes, but no remorse. None. In its place is a familiar coldness.
My throat works. I don’t want to ask because asking makes it real, and this can’t be real. The words come anyway.
“What did you do?” I whisper.
“My purpose.”
Chapter 50
I can’t breathe.
At this very moment, the entire West Coast of North America is a wasteland.
In my mind’s eye, I see all those dead bodies lying in the hospital’s hallway. I try to imagine a city’s worth, two cities’ worth—hell, entire states’ worth—but I can’t. The scale of that devastation is unimaginable. My mind won’t let me comprehend that sort of loss.
Amongst all those millions are mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, friends, lovers, grandparents, children, babies. People that mean something to one another, innocent, kind people. People deserving of life. Right now, they’re all dying.
Pestilence couldn’t have done this. Pestilence, who questions the morality of his actions. Pestilence, who loves me.
He couldn’t have.
The two of us stare each other down. I expect to see something defensive in Pestilence’s eyes—he always had to explain himself in the past—but there’s nothing there. No guilt, no defensiveness, no stubborn tenacity.
His cool gaze is steady.
Because he did do this. More than that, he planned this. All the signs have been there. His dark moods, the ice in his blue eyes, the half-remembered apology he murmured to me yesterday when he left my side.
“How?” The scale of the devastation is so much larger than ever before. Before, Pestilence had to pass through a town to infect it. Now his reach seems to be boundless, stretching thousands of kilometers away from us.
He must understand what I’m asking because he says, “I’ve always had this reach. I just never felt the urge to exert it before.”
Not until me. Somehow, I’m the spark that ignited this terrible deed.
“Undo it,” I whisper.
“It’s done,” he says, his expression uncompromising.
I’m shaking my head. It can’t be done. I refuse to believe that.
“You cured me of infection, you can undo this,” I insist, my voice cracking.
I can’t be the only one left alive along the West Coast. That’s its own kind of hell.
“But I won’t.”
But I won’t.
“Please.”
He flinches at that word. Please. It started out as a curse spoken between us, a plea voiced only so that it could be denied. But somewhere along the way, please became redemptive.
Only now, Pestilence doesn’t want to be redeemed.
Damnit, I can still feel a part of him between my thighs. I’m sore from all the places his body scoured mine today and yesterday, his lovemaking as intense as it was passionate. He can’t have left my side all those times only to curse a good portion of North America.
“Please, Pestilence. Please … love.”
Names mean so much. A rose may smell the same no matter what name you give it, but how you think of it might change. And I think of Pestilence differently—I have for a while. But to call him by a name of my own choosing, to give him an endearment and show him that he’s more than his namesake, I haven’t been brave enough to do so until now.
But there’s nothing left to fear anymore. Not in the face of this situation.
The horseman stills. I see that coldness crack in his eyes.
“You didn’t expect that, did you?” I say. “Me loving you.” I know I hadn’t. And I don’t know in what quiet hour the realization snuck up on me, but it did. “Maybe I’m a fool and a traitor, but I’m yours,” I’m blinking back tears, “but damnit, you can’t do this.”
He takes a step towards me, then another, his eyes dying a little bit, like he wants to touch me, but knows I won’t let him. Not now, with all this blood on his hands.
Never bothered you before, Burns.
But that was back when I thought I could change him—stop him.
Should’ve known better.
“I could’ve lived with what those men did to me, cruel as it was,” Pestilence says.
My mind flashes to the horseman tied to the phone pole, most of his face gone.
“But when they shot you—” His voice cuts off with emotion, and I realize my fatal error. “You should’ve never shown me love, dear Sara,” he says.
This whole time, I’d assumed that love would redeem the horseman and save us all. I should’ve known it would only ever damn us to our grisly fates.
/> “If you now understand loss,” I say, “then you know what you’re taking from these people.”
His jaw clenches. “It is no more than they deserve.”
“No more than they deserve?” I say, aghast. “Who are you talking about? Rob? Ruth? Me?”
Pestilence’s mouth thins. “You seem to think that arguing about this will change these people’s fate.”
“You and change.” I shake my head bitterly. “I don’t know why you think you’re incapable of it.”
“People change, Sara, but horsemen don’t. It doesn’t matter what you think of me; I am and will always be Pestilence the Conqueror.”
He’s not going to bend. I can see it now. I should’ve seen it before, back when I could’ve protected my heart a little better.
“What happens now?” I ask. Immediately I regret the question, my stomach roiling with dread.
“The world ends.”
“And me?” I say, the desolation already creeping in.
“You will stay with me.”
He doesn’t ask it; he doesn’t even say it as a challenge. It’s spoken with complete authority.
I nod slowly.
Pestilence must sense something is wrong because he takes another step towards me.
“Don’t,” I say.
If he tries to make either of us feel better—I swear it will break the last of me.
And there’s so little left to break.
I glance around.
Can’t be in the same room as him. I’m suffocating on all this tragedy.
I turn on my heel, eager to get away from him.
“Sara,” he calls out before I can escape. His voice is so goddamn patient.
I pause. “You once told me that names don’t matter,” I say, my back to him, “that what I called you doesn’t matter.”
I glance at Pestilence over my shoulder.
Love. I think we can both hear my earlier endearment in the air between us.
His expression is wary when he inclines his head. “I remember.”
“You’re wrong, you know,” I say. “They do matter.”
Pestilence is the very worst of his nature. I glimpsed the very best of his, but that part of him, that future, is no more than a whisper of a possibility, like smoke dissipating into the wind.
I leave him at that.
Chapter 51
I walk away from him long enough to grab my things—what little I have. It’s hardly more than the shirt on my back.
I stare at the master bedroom for a long time, feeling like my heart is unmaking itself one piece at a time.
Why couldn’t you have fallen in love with a normal boy, and then died a normal death alongside him? Why did you have to choose a horseman? Why did you have to insert yourself between him and the world?
All this time has been a deadly tug-of-war between love and loyalty. How I ever deluded myself that it wouldn’t come to this, I don’t know.
I pull on my boots, grab my borrowed coat, and then head for the front door.
Pestilence is still where I left him, still standing guard by the television, still consumed with his own wrath.
I walk right past him, heading for the foyer.
“Where are you going?” he calls out, his voice ringing with his authority. He doesn’t sound scared or lost or uncertain.
Does he seriously have no idea?
Ignoring him, I reach for the front door and slip out.
Outside—fuck, it’s cold. I stagger a little at the temperature. It’s a wet, biting chill that wriggles under your skin and seeps into you. Already my ears are beginning to sting. I bring up the hood of my jacket.
You’ll never survive this, weakened as you are. Ill-equipped as you are.
The door opens behind me. “Where are you going?”
I stop at Pestilence’s voice. Now there’s something to it besides pent up rage. Something that is still too confident to be worry. I think it might be shock and a touch of confusion.
“To rejoin humanity,” I say.
“I haven’t released you.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was your prisoner,” I say.
Clearly he seems to have forgotten this little detail.
“You are mine.”
I pull my jacket closer to me. “I am no one’s,” I say vehemently.
The horseman scowls at that but doesn’t try to argue the point.
I appraise him. “Just say I stayed. What will you do when all the people are gone?”
“I will endure.”
“What will you do when I’m gone?”
“I will keep you alive,” he insists.
I search his face. “Even if you could, even if you could protect me from every attempt on my life—because there will be more so long as I’m with you—you wouldn’t be able to keep me alive forever. Eventually I’d age. I’d age and die and then you’d be alone again, only now, there’d be no more humans, just you.”
“And my brothers,” he adds quietly.
I throw up my hands. “Alright, you and your murderous brothers.” Brothers who have been absent these long years. “But other than them, you’d be alone.”
My body is beginning to tremble from the cold, and Pestilence’s eyes go right to the action. “Cease this foolishness, Sara. Come inside,” he says, gentler. “I will warm you up.”
I give him an incredulous look. “Do you still not get it? You’re killing off everyone. Did you seriously think I would stay with you after something like this?”
“You stayed with me before,” the horseman says heatedly, but I don’t miss the spark of fear at the back of his eyes.
I let out a hollow laugh. “That was when I thought you hated what you were doing to my world.”
Back when I thought you could change.
Isn’t that the most horrible detail of all? I finally got what I wanted—Pestilence did change, just not for the better.
“I’m doing this to avenge you!”
“I never asked for your vengeance,” I say. “I asked for your mercy.”
Pestilence flinches at the word as though I slapped him. It’s the very word that saved my life the night I tried to kill the horseman. The word that’s saved me every night since.
Mercy.
“Did you ever think that maybe your God’s mercy was never meant for me?” I ask. “That maybe it was meant for everyone else?”
No, he hadn’t, if his expression is anything to go by.
I turn, beginning to walk away, only to feel the warm press of Pestilence’s fingers in the crook of my arm.
“If I have to tie you to me, I will,” Pestilence says. “But I will not let you go.”
I swivel to face him. For all his lofty demands, his face is betraying his true feelings. I can see stark panic in his expression.
He hadn’t anticipated this.
“Pestilence,” I say, my voice calming, “you can force me stay with you, but you can’t make me want to be with you.”
“But you do want to be with me,” he insists. “You called me love.”
I look away. “I did.”
“And you love me.”
My heart beats faster. I may not have said the three words, but the horseman speaks the truth.
My eyes move to him. “I do,” I agree. “And it is not enough.”
He staggers back a step. “Not enough?”
I think I might be hurting him worse than any weapon ever did.
“It’s not enough to overcome whatever else lies in your heart,” I say. “You clearly hate humankind more than you care for me.”
Pestilence’s nostrils flare, but he bites back a response.
He doesn’t deny it. Ouch.
“Love is supposed to bring out the best parts of you,” I continue, reminding him of our talk shortly after Ruth and Rob passed. “Not the worst,” I add quietly.
“I did this because I love you,” he says fervently. There’s more fear in his eyes than before.
“Love
doesn’t work like that.”
But of course, there are other things that go hand-in-hand with love—great, terrible things. Things that for the first time ever, Pestilence is beginning to feel.
You let him into the Garden of Eden, you let him taste forbidden fruit. You gave him the knowledge of good and evil and now you are both paying for it.
I take a step back, committing his face to memory.
Need to leave now, before I cave and return to him. I’d never forgive myself then.
My heart, however, feels like it’s being ripped in two at the prospect of leaving.
“Goodbye, Pestilence.”
Rotating around, I force myself to start down the steps leading away from the mansion.
I haven’t taken more than five paces before the horseman is on me. He scoops me up and carries me inside, kicking the front door closed as he goes.
“What are you doing?” I protest, squirming in his arms.
No response.
Now I truly begin to struggle. “Let me go.”
He puts me down in the foyer. The room spins a little once I’m on my feet.
So weak. Too weak.
Can’t stay here though.
I head back to the door, and again he picks me up and bodily moves me away.
Again, as soon as he sets me down I move towards the door.
He cuts me off. “Sara, I cannot let you leave.”
He’s begging me with his eyes, and I know he sees what I feel: I’m not strong enough, healed enough. All those weeks of traveling, all those wounds, even with the rest, my body isn’t ready for more. And still I drive it forward.
“Pestilence, don’t make this worse than it already is,” I practically plead. “I’m leaving, either with your blessing or against your will, but I won’t stay here any longer.”
The look on his face pulverizes the last of me. I can see his heart breaking in front of me. That raw grief lingers for just a moment, and then his features harden.
Without a word, he picks me up again.
“What are you doing?” I struggle in his arms. “Pestilence, put me down!”
Ignoring my demands, he moves me into the master bedroom and deposits me onto the bed.
By the time I scramble off of it—taking an extra few seconds to let the vertigo pass—he’s already made it to the door. With a parting look, he slips out, closing it behind him.