demon mean? Ven was obviously more than he once was and if it wasn’t for the fact they both were now targets for the First Horseman, Patrick would have a wonderful time giving his brother all sorts of hell.
He grinned. If he survived this, he was going to pay back thirty-six years of nagging and lecturing.
If you survive this? What if Ven doesn’t survive this?
The black thought sent a shard of numb unease into Patrick’s chest and he ground his teeth. Ven was a target now. The attack from the q’thulu wasn’t just a random incident. Shit.
A desperate sense of helplessness began to build in his chest. Trying like hell to ignore it, he searched the room again, looking for an exit.
What? The one you know isn’t there?
Shit.
He needed to get to Ven. He wasn’t safe. He was—
Stop it.
Pulling in a deep breath, Patrick force himself to calm down. Ven was fine. He was no doubt at this very moment with Amy, sating his long-denied hunger and, knowing his brother, probably sating his other more carnal appetites as well.
He chuckled, dropping back into the armchair and crossing his ankles on the low table before him. “Good onya, brother,” he murmured, settling himself in to wait for Fred’s return. “Enjoy yourself.”
“Amy!” Ven roared. Just as bleached-white talons sank into her pale, bowed neck. The Horseman shrieked again and a swarm of black locusts spewed from its maw, engulfing Amy in a second.
“This is the power of the First Horseman,” Pestilence screeched, gaunt face a white mask of insane fury and rapture. “This is the might of the Disease, of Pestilence.”
The swarm of locusts turned into a frenzied black cloud, whipping around and around Amy, their wings slicing the air like razors. They raged over her, Pestilence’s arms disappearing into their writhing mass, his hold on Amy hidden by their massive number. “This is the fate of the Cure.” His skeletal shoulders bunched, his arms snapped wide and the wet sound of tearing flesh filled Ven’s ears. Amy’s scream pitched higher, and then died on a thick gurgle. Pestilence grinned, eyes burning with vile yellow flames. “And mankind and all its world will suffer in my wake.”
He turned to Ven. The locusts rose above him, swirling above his head before streaming back into his body through his laughing mouth, his flaring nostrils. Revealing the decimated corpse they’d left behind.
Amy dropped to the floor with a hollow thud, her neck torn open, her face—the face Ven had kissed a hundred times, a thousand times—lacerated and shredded to nothing but a bloody mask of flesh and bone.
Pestilence smiled at him, once again wearing his deceptive human shape. “And so ends the first act of the First Horseman. Now, call…your…brother.”
“No.”
Ven’s cry rent the very air, a tortured wail of absolute grief. His mind cracked, his soul shrieked. The human he’d once been and the Sentinel he’d only so recently become screamed with agonized horror…and then, fell silent.
Destroyed completely by the engulfing blackness of absolute sorrow and guilt.
Patrick froze, the overwhelming, undeniable knowledge his brother was dying flooding through him.
No words. No images. No sounds. Just a terrible knowledge Steven was dying.
“Ven?”
His brother’s anguish smashed through him, a force of unending grief and hate and guilt.
Oh, Jesus, Ven.
He looked about himself, frantic. Fred’s study offered him no answers and no exit. He had no way of leaving, no way of calling her and no way of knowing when she’d return. Damn it, he was useless.
Another wall of concentrated anguish hit him, claimed him like a devouring shroud. A snarl burst from his lips. Fuck this, his brother was in trouble. He had to leave.
Where is he?
Without knowing exactly what he was doing, Patrick drew the memory of Ven’s essence into his mind and core.
Nothingness.
Emptiness.
A cold fist reached into his chest and he let out a strangled scream.
Fuck. He had to find Ven. He had to find his brother and save him. Like Ven had saved him, protected him all these years. He had to return…
“Home.”
The word formed on Patrick’s lips, a second before his body became molecules of existential dust, moving through space and time, from one dimension to another. From the Realm to the…beach.
Patrick stared at the empty expanse of Bondi Beach, the late dusk sky the deep, wounded purple of a fresh bruise, stretching on forever, the shifting grains of sand swirling about his feet in the hot, gustless wind.
His throat grew thick. Tight.
The beach from his nightmares.
The beach of the beginning and the