His curse shattered the air, bounced off the walls and came back to him. Empty and hollow. He dragged his hands through his hair, trying to calm himself. So the nikor failed. All plans of greatness had hurdles to cross.
And you have had so many.
The thought made Pestilence scowl and he dug his nails, growing longer and more hooked with each passing second, into the humerus bone. He had spent thirty-six years trying to end the lifeguard’s life.
Thirty-six years of failure.
It irked him. Considerably.
The problem was he was trapped here in the Realm, while Patrick Watkins was free to move around in the world of man.
Until the dawn of the Apocalypse, he was confined to the Realm. That was the way of the Order of Actuality. Any attempt he made to end the lifeguard’s life was determined entirely on rare, brief windows of opportunity when the veil between the Realm of the Riders and the human world thinned. So far, during those moments, he had sent a fatal wave of typhoid to the region the boy lived, he had arranged a succubus to infiltrate the lifeguard’s school and seduce the adolescent, he had commanded a vampire to end the young male’s life on the verge of adulthood, and he had ordered a swarm of locusts to attack the cursed boy’s parents’ car, forcing it off the road, among other things.
All attempts had failed. All.
Even the one moment three human years ago, when the veil had been at its thinnest and he had managed to all but transubstantiate to the human world, finding the lifeguard alone and unprotected by his cursed vampire brother, the chance to kill him had failed. Somehow, somehow, the human had taken him by surprise and he had been flung back into the bowels of the Realm before he could prevent it from happening. It was as if the fucking Deities watched over the lifeguard and protected him.
They did not, though. Pestilence knew that for a fact. The lifeguard’s existence and importance in the upcoming end battle was known only to him. Sheer luck had brought him such knowledge. Sheer luck he’d been screwing the last Fate during one of her increasingly rare moments of insight during which she had screamed out the lifeguard’s name and destiny.
Pestilence grinned, the action both bitter and cold. The last Fate had been a pathetic fuck—she had known all his moves before he had the chance to use them, but she had been fantastic at pillow talk. The words had just spewed from her mouth, unstoppable and feverish.
She screamed of the one who would be the Cure. Who would challenge the First Horseman. She had moaned and gibbered about the weakness of Death coming when the Disease finds the Cure. Of Death’s end at the hands of the First. It was all gobbledegook, and yet it all made perfect sense. Most of it, at least. The sun walker will feed of his own and live still left him confused, but that mattered little when everything else said so much.
He had listened to her carry on, taking it all in. Watching her as the spittle on her lips turned to frantic foam, studying her without a sound as the foam became drool. The words continued, faster, faster, until, with a final scream—The Cure will rethread the Fabric—she’d collapsed in a shaking heap on his bed, eyes closed, face flushed.
It was during that brief moment of silence, he formulated his plan.
He slid up beside her, the last Fate, placed his fingertips to her throat and waited.
What felt like hours but was really a fraction of a second later, she opened her eyes, giving Pestilence a small, shy smile. “Did I zone out?”
He had nodded.
The last Fate’s eyes grew worried. “I’m sorry. It’s been an eon since that happened. Did I say anything important?”
Pestilence had nodded again. “You could say that.”
The last Fate smiled. “I’m glad you were here to hear it. My memory’s not the best these days. It’ll make it easier for me to report to the…”
The rest of the old hag’s sentence had turned into an ear-piercing screech of pain and terror as Pestilence had plunged his fingers into her mouth and poured every disease and pest in his arsenal into her being at the same time. Essentially, filling her up to the suddenly bulging, bleeding eyeballs with more sickness and, well, pestilence than the entire human world had ever experienced.
Disposing of her body had been fun. Creative, even.
He chuckled at