Pestilence (The Four Horsemen #1)(33)

For one blinding moment the entryway flares bright with light. Then, with a shattering pop, the light disappears just as suddenly as it came.

“Shit.”

I guess I should be thankful the damage isn’t worse. I’ve had to put out more electrical fires than wildfires over the last few years. All these creature comforts are on the fritz.

Pestilence comes in behind me, already unfastening his heavy armor. He drops his bow and quiver on a nearby side table, then each piece of his armor. Lastly, he sets his crown down, running a hand through his hair.

It’s all so very human. I wonder if he knows that.

“Light?” he asks.

“It doesn’t work.” I head over to another switch and flip it on and off. Nothing happens. “Nope, definitely doesn’t.”

I begin to grope around the living room, looking for candles, lamps, wicks, matches—anything that can illuminate this place now that the sun’s gone down. Pestilence heads back outside, leaving me to fumble alone.

He comes in a few minutes later, carrying several items. He passes me, setting his haul in what looks to be the kitchen.

I hear the hiss of a match being struck, and a moment later, he lights a lantern he must’ve picked up at one of the last houses we stayed in.

He hands the lantern to me, then walks down the home’s darkened hallway. I watch him go, listening as he opens and shuts another door. The muffled sound of a garage door being manually lifted drifts in, then the steady sound of hooves clicking against cement as he leads Trixie out of the elements.

I lift the lantern, looking around at the house. Half of the furniture is covered with ratty sheets, and what isn’t covered is blanketed in a thick coat of dust.

I walk over to the fireplace. There are still pictures sitting on the mantle. I pick up one, using my thumb to rub away a coat of dust. Beneath it is a portrait of a woman in her early twenties, her hair permed, frizzed and fluffed within an inch of its life. I choose another photo at random, dusting it off enough to see a group of squinty-eyed kids in bathing suits, floaties pushed high up on their arms.

I set it down as my gooseflesh rises. There’s an entire life here that appears to abruptly have stopped. Whether death or displacement took them, it took them swiftly.

Whole cities will look like this in the future.

It won’t just be Vegas and Dubai. It will be every place Pestilence visits. And in that dystopian future, someone like me will go from house to house, skirting around the decayed corpses that have been left unburied inside.

I shudder at the thought.

The door to the garage opens and shuts, and Pestilence’s heavy footfalls make their way back to the living room. When he appears, he has several dry logs with him. He eyes me before making his way over, beginning to stack the wood in the fireplace.

An hour later, a fire is going, a half a dozen candles are flickering around the living room, and a mattress and a few moth-eaten blankets have been dragged out from one of the closets and laid out in the living room so that I can sleep where it’s warm.

I sit on the mattress, knees pulled up under my chin, sipping water out of an old earthenware mug (the well still works) and staring into the flames. Next to me, Pestilence lounges against the mattress, his legs crossed in front of him.

“Why do you help them?” he asks.

His eyes find mine, the flames dancing in them. Even lit by fire, he looks like an angel.

The devil was also an angel.

“Help who?” I ask.

“That family. And the man before them.”

Is he serious?

I study his features, my heart unwillingly picking up speed because my body is an idiot that cannot discern evil mo-fo from hot male human.

“How can I not help them?” I finally say.

“You know they’re going to die anyway,” he says.

It’s such cold, pragmatic reasoning. Like the means to an end means nothing next to the end itself.

“So?” I glance back at the flames. “If I can ease their discomfort, then I will.”

I can feel his gaze on me, hotter than the fire.

“You don’t just do it to ease their pain, though, do you?” he says. “You also do it to ease your own.”

What a clever little horseman he is.

I press my mouth together, frowning. “You’re right,” I say. “Suffering is for the living, and you have made me suffer.” Watching those children succumb, drowning in their own fluids, having to listen to their cries … “And how I despise you for it.”

“I expect nothing less from the human who burned me alive.”

I turn on him, my anger rising. “So it’s still about your suffering is it? You’ve wiped out entire cities, but at the end of the day you were hurt. You want to know something? I hunted you down like a fucking animal because you deserve it. And I would do it again and again and again.”

Would I though? A small, traitorous part of me isn’t so sure.

Undaunted by that thought, I continue. “You’re killing us all cruelly, and you hate us for it.”

He says nothing to my outburst, just sits there, studying me.

“Part of living,” I say, “is feeling pain, senseless pain.” I could tell him a thousand stories about the sheer unfairness of the world. But why bother? He doesn’t give a shit about our problems.

“I am what I am,” he says, resolute. He sounds almost … defeated. “I came here with a task, and I will see it completed.”