Dark Destiny (Dark Sentinel #1) - Lexxie Couper Page 0,7

bones, just as the bed, but unlike the bed and candelabra, the bones of the throne were stark white. Each humerus, femur, tibia, and skull still ripe with living marrow and tissue. The throne was older than time, but he made certain it defied time as well. It didn’t take much to infuse each bone in its construction with an incantation to preserve its rawness. To touch each one was to touch a bone freshly torn from a living being’s body, still slick and sticky with blood and fluid, still thrumming with that on which he fed the most—dying life. Whenever he sat on the throne, which he did often, the pain of the personally selected humans whose lives were forfeited for its creation seeped into his being, making him stronger.

Whenever he fucked on the throne, his seed destroyed the female impaled on his shaft and his orgasm decimated an entire region on the surface of man’s world, striking every living creature down with disease, swarms of insects destroying all plant life and crops. Whenever he fucked on the throne it was as though he and he alone wielded the force of the Apocalypse itself.

The Deities had commanded he cease such activities, ordering him to toe the line. His impatience and contempt grew. Fuck them and their timeline and their preordained hierarchy. Who were they to decide what he did and when he did it? Did they forget who he was? What he would bring about?

He was Pestilence.

Returning his stare to the mirror, he studied his reflection, pursing his lips as he did so.

He was short for an entity, he knew that. Short and thin, without the typical ostentatious tail and horns and over-developed muscles so favored by other first-order entities. No one would ever accuse him of using steroids, that was for certain. His blue eyes were pale and watery, his dark hair lank, his flesh pale and dull. “Sallow” was a word he’d heard muttered often by his brethren to describe him. “Sickly” and “weedy” two more adjectives used loudly and without secrecy by one of his number in particular.

His eyes narrowed as he let his thoughts turn to the last Horseman.

Death.

He drew her image into his mind, remembering all too easily her condescending rebuke of the proposal he’d suggested. A partnership of greatness. Not just a sexual one, but one to undo the very Fabric, to destroy the Order of Actuality completely. A magnificent, malevolent duo to bring about the very end of existence. A duo, not a quartet.

Two Riders, not four.

She’d laughed. At both his sexual advances and his proposition. Laughed in his face and told him to grow up and get a life. “Seriously, you don’t still believe in that old wives’ tale, do you? Do you see my black horse anywhere? Or my pale one, for that matter? Do you see me strutting around in a pair of chaps getting ready for the big assault?”

Curling his fingers into fists, he thought of Death and the Deities and how all would suffer from his wrath.

“I am Pestilence,” he murmured, smoothing his left palm over his hair as he stared at his reflection in the giant mirror. The flames of the candles flared brighter at the utterance of his name and the organ between his thighs grew stiff with dark anticipation. “I am the First Horseman of the Apocalypse. The one who brings disease and suffering incarnate. The one who destroys the world of man’s crops and stock, their weak and young and feeble. I am the one who will bring the end, the one who will bask in the glory of the Apocalypse. Me and me alone.” He gazed at his reflected form, cock hard, blood thick and fast in his veins. “And nothing or no one can stop me.”

His reflection stared back at him, human façade just the way he wanted it to be: deceptive, misleading. “No one,” he repeated, hot impatience eating at him, cold confidence feeding its hunger as he stared into his own eyes.

His reflection stared back at him. And, with barely a shimmer, turned into that of the lifeguard’s.

“No,” he sneered, turning away. “Not even him.”

2

Patrick threw his keys on the sideboard and swung the door closed behind him. Jesus, what a day.

Dragging his hands through his hair, he pushed the persistent image of the dead man—Richard Peabody—from his mind.

Again.

For what felt like the hundredth time since he’d left Bondi.

As with all drowning deaths on Bondi Beach, the police had