Pestilence (The Four Horsemen #1)(51)

He doesn’t look at me as he slings on his bow and quiver. Nor as I stow away the items I grabbed from our camp. Nor even as he hoists me onto Trixie.

He won’t acknowledge me just as I didn’t want to acknowledge him when I fled the tent. I’m getting a taste of my own medicine, and it’s driving me insane. There’s so much reassurance and connection in a look. Having him withhold it only makes me want it all the more.

“You’re sure we shouldn’t pack the tent?” I ask, throwing one final look at the thing. It looks so lonely next to the remains of our fire. There’s a chance we’ll still be in the middle of nowhere when we stop later today.

Pestilence follows my gaze, giving it a black look. “We won’t be needing it again. Tonight we’ll find a house to sleep in—or we won’t sleep at all.”

There’s more than one way to hurt a person. This time I didn’t have to shoot the horseman or light him on fire to cause him pain. All I had to do was act like last night was a mistake.

And was it?

I want it to be a mistake, and Lord knows I feel bad right now, but not because I kissed the horseman. Or because I snuggled with him. I feel like crap right now because he’s still giving me the same silent treatment hours later, and it’s freaking working.

Driving me mad.

I’ve already told him random stories from my childhood, like the time I chipped my tooth because I literally tripped over my own shoelace, or about how my friends and I had an annual tradition of jumping into Cheakamus Lake as soon as the ice melted from it. I even admitted to him how I developed stage fright. (I fell in front of my entire middle school class as I walked up to the podium—I couldn’t get a word out after that.)

He didn’t react to a single one, though I know he was listening raptly by the way his hand would tense and relax as it gripped me.

So I try poetry for a change.

“‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, …’” I begin, quoting Poe’s “The Raven.” I recite the whole poem, and again, I can tell just by the way Pestilence holds himself that he’s listening to me.

But like my stories, he says nothing after I finish reciting it.

I move from “The Raven” to Hamlet. “‘To be or not to be, that is the question …’”

I quote the play for as long as I can, but eventually, the lines get jumbled in my mind and I have to abandon the soliloquy.

Still nothing from Pestilence.

I recite Lord Byron (“Darkness”) and Emily Dickinson (“Because I could not stop for Death”) and more Poe (“Annabel Lee”), and the entire time the horseman doesn’t utter one single word. Not even to tell me to shut the hell up.

I give up.

“What are you thinking?” I finally ask.

He doesn’t respond.

I lay my hand over the one that presses against my stomach, securing him to me. “Pestilence?”

His hand flexes.

“Last night I could not decide which you were—a tonic or a toxin,” he says. “Today I’ve discovered you’re both.”

I wince a little at his words.

“You have woken in me things I did not know slumbered,” he continues. “Now that I am aware of them, I cannot ignore their existence. I fear I am becoming … like you. Human and full of want. I need this longing to go away.”

“Longing?” I almost choke the word out.

“Don’t tell me I am mistaken in this too,” he says bitterly. “Love, lust, longing—you cannot refashion my feelings. I know my heart, Sara, even if it’s alien to you.”

What did I walk myself into?

“What do you want from me?” I ask.

“Nothing! Everything! Fuck,” he swears, the profanity shocking coming from his tongue. “This is so confusing.”

I’m about to speak when he cuts in. “I want to taste your lips again. I want to hold you like I did in the tent. I don’t understand why I want these things, only that I do.”

My face heats. Is it wrong to feel flattered when Pestilence is clearly having an existential crisis?

No?

Alright.

“Love, affection, compassion—these are the few redeeming qualities your kind has,” he says, “and now I’m being tempted by them and it is breaking me in two.”

Ever been stuck in a situation you desperately want to get out of, but there’s no escape? That’s this moment, sitting here on Trixie Skillz and listening to Pestilence tell me about all his feels.

“I can sense you drawing away from me,” he says. “The more I want from you, the more reluctant you are to give it. And I don’t know what to do.”

I do. “Stop spreading plague.”

He laughs humorlessly. “I cannot help what I am any more than you can help what you are.”

Is that really true though? He spared me, which means he has at least a tiny bit of control over his lethal ability.

“We are locked into these roles, you and I,” he says, “and I do not know what to make of this misery.”

He sounds so desolate, so hopeless.

I squeeze his hand.

My heart hurts again. This man is so much worse than all the other men I’ve ever known, and yet I feel chafed raw by him.