if she broke the first law?
“Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
“You really need to do something about your language, Death.”
She froze, gaze flicking around the whiteness. Her heart smashed against her breastbone. Was that who she thought it was?
“Yes. It is. Now, tell me, why do you want to return to Patrick Watkins?”
Her mouth went dry. Should she really answer that question?
“Yes. You should.”
“I love him.”
It was the simple truth.
“Is that the only reason?”
She frowned. The thought of all humankind—children, babies, the innocent, the guilty—destroyed by Pestilence’s ego, by his hunger for power and glory rolled through her. She thought of them all. She thought of Patrick…and shook her head.
“Does there have to be any other?”
Silence answered her.
“Does there?”
Silence. And the sense of a low, wise chuckle.
“Well?”
No reply.
Fred frowned. “Well?”
Again. Nothing.
She threw up her hands, shaking her head as she stormed around in…circles.
Circles. Large circles. Circles bigger than a toilet cubicle.
Holy shit, she could move!
“Just you and me now, lifeguard.” Pestilence’s voice rose above the wailing wind, his eyes ablaze. “Your pitiful brother has finally exerted all his energy. Not even the power of a Sentinel can defeat starvation. Especially when their own blood flows so freely from their body.” He laughed, the sound cold. Inhuman. “As the last Fate foretold, it has come to pass. The Cure and the Disease.”
He laughed again, and as Patrick scrambled to his feet, tiny grains of sand lashing at his face, slicing into his eyes, he saw the First Horseman walk toward him.
No, Patrick. Limp toward you. He’s limping.
Cold hope surged through him and he bared his teeth in a dead smile. Good.
He straightened, glaring at Pestilence. Ven’s lifeless body cut into the corner of his vision but he refused to look at it. He had to end this. Now. “As the last Fate foretold,” he growled, “The Cure shall face the Disease on the shifting dunes and the end shall begin and the beginning shall end.”
The words of the prophesy boomed across the empty stretch of beach, their volume impossibly loud. Pestilence reeled backward, eyes wide. “How do you know those words?”
Patrick gave him a dark grin. “Someone much more powerful than you told me.” Without thought, he threw the beach at the Horseman. Sand, rocks, metal trash cans, the needles cast aside by junkies. Everything he could reach with his mind, he hurled at the First Horseman.
Pestilence stumbled, arms pinwheeling. His eyes erupted in yellow hate, and suddenly Patrick’s gut cramped.
Every pore in his body seemed to piss acid, every joint screamed as though crushed in a vise. He staggered, stomach surging up through his throat, hot bile and vomit flooding his mouth.
“The Disease!” Pestilence screamed, and another wrecking ball of illness smashed into him. “The Disease!”
Patrick spat, swiped at his mouth, and sent a red and yellow safe-to-swim flag straight for Pestilence’s head.
The sand-crusted steel point pierced the First Horseman’s forehead, sank into his head and burst through the other side.
Pestilence screeched. And his human form vanished in a shimmer.
Long, skeletal arms reached up, claw-tipped fingers wrapping around the metal spike. “You think that will stop me, lifeguard?” The sound of metal on bone sliced the air as he pulled the flagpole from his skull. A soft, liquidy pop filled the air and blood, thick and black and stinking of decay, gushed from the hole in his forehead—followed by an equally thick, equally black fog.
It shot across the beach, engulfing Patrick before he could move, turning the dusk to midnight and the air to a suffocating shroud.
He lashed out, but to no effect. The blackness invaded his nose, his mouth. It seeped into his eyes, pooling at the corners, ice cold and scalding at once.
“Did you really think a pathetic human such as yourself could stop me?”
The black fog trickled into Patrick’s ears.
“Did you really think a lowly mortal could stop the First Horseman?”
It threaded down his throat.
“I am the Disease.”
Into his lungs.
“Pestilence.”
Choking him. Suffocating him.
“He who destroys life in the world of man.”
An image of his lifeless brother’s body flashed through Patrick’s air-starved mind.
“He who brings the end with the beginning.”
Damn, I’m really getting sick of his voice.
The thought wasn’t Patrick’s, but he grabbed a hold of its familiar sardonic wit. Ven. Forever alive in his heart. A golden heat radiated through him and swelled into a tangible, potent force, almost an entity in itself. He threw back his arms and head, drawing the blackness into his being, devouring it, letting it permeate his core.
A heatless world of illness