I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. All I have to do is take one single step, and then everything can change. Everything will change.
He squeezes my hands. “Come back to me,” he says. “Quote me Poe and Byron, Dickinson and Shakespeare. Tell me your human histories, share with me your memories. Let me taste your food and let me drink your wine. Let me make love to you and hold you in my arms until dawn. Share your life with me.”
I stand there, still frozen, still sure he’s some vision made to haunt my days. Sure I’m going to wake.
Pestilence’s hands move to cup my face. “I was wrong—about humanity. And I was wrong so many times when it came to you. Forgive me.”
I press my eyes closed, then open them. He’s still there, still gazing at me with his sad eyes.
“Come back to me, Sara,” he repeats. “Please.”
That damn word.
The world distorts beyond my watery eyes.
“I’m still going to die someday,” I whisper.
He nods solemnly. “I know.”
“You’re okay with that?”
His thumb strokes my cheek. “Sara, I don’t know how many minutes you get or I get, but I do know I want to spend them all with you.”
My heart hammers in my chest.
I look at his face, his angelic face with those sad, solemn eyes. He really could be an angel—maybe he is an angel, if such things exist. I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything, except that joy is a strange thing, and I feel it now with him just as I have felt a hundred times before in a hundred different little moments between us.
I reach up and wrap a hand around his wrist. “If you are no longer Pestilence the Conqueror, then what would you like me to call you?” I ask, leaning a little into his touch.
He gives me a shy, vulnerable smile. “‘Love’ had a nice ring to it.”
“Alright, love,” I say, noticing his whisper of a smile at the endearment, “what minutes I have left—they are yours. I am yours.”
There is a moment where it doesn’t compute. My horseman’s eyes are still haunted, and he looks like hope utterly abandoned him somewhere back in Washington. But then it does register, and his whole face transforms.
First his gaze brightens, his eyebrows hiking up, and then a smile that could outpace the sun spreads across his face.
He leans down and takes my lips, and the kiss is an end and a beginning all at once.
Chapter 54
I’d like to say that everything from that minute on was some beautiful, breathtaking fairytale. I’d like to say that I didn’t drag Pestilence’s inhuman ass back to my bedroom and sully the shit out of my sheets like the dirty freak I am.
I’d like to say a thousand things to airbrush the crap out of the night, but then, that’s some other broad’s story.
The kiss has only barely begun when it goes from sweet to wild and desperate. He’s my oxygen and I haven’t been able to breathe for months.
My fingers moves to the buttons of his flannel shirt, but my hands shake so badly from need and want and allthisgoddamnadrenaline that I can’t seem to undo a single one.
Pestilence pushes me up against the wall, his pelvis grinding into mine.
“Missed you so much,” he says between kisses. “Love is unendurable when it spoils.”
But, miracle of miracles, this love didn’t spoil. It might’ve carved us up from the inside out, but in the end it didn’t twist us into monsters. It stopped Pestilence from killing the world, and it made me strong enough to walk away from him when he wasn’t worthy.
And, in the end, it brought him back to me.
I go at Pestilence’s buttons again while the horseman peels my shirt off. The rest of our clothes quickly follow as I lead Pestilence to my bedroom.
Only a faint oil lamp flickers in the darkness here—well, it and my horseman’s strange markings, the latter which haven’t dimmed in the least.
I touch them reverently as he lays me down on the bed. “They’re still here,” I say.
He trails kisses from my mouth, up my cheek, to my ear. “Of course they are, Sara. They can’t just walk off of me.”
I turn and laugh into his lips. “Earth has given you a smart mouth.”
“Earth has given me a smart woman and she has given me a smart mouth.”
His hand goes to my breast, and I gasp at his touch as it kneads the soft flesh.
Pestilence was right to call love unendurable. I can’t fathom how I managed to go this long without him touching me.
I wrap my legs around him, wanting more—needing more.
“It’s been so long,” I whisper, and my eyes prick.
Oh God, I’m going to cry. We’re about to bone, and I’m going to cry.
But then Pestilence is there, his lips pressing first to the corner of one eye, then the corner of the other.
“Far too long,” he agrees. “But that’s all over now. There’s no need for sadness anymore, Sara. Your people are safe, and you are in my arms.”
His mouth moves lower, now too busy tasting my flesh to tell me all sorts of pretty things. Which is probably for the best because my core is throbbing something fierce.
He kisses my breasts, taking first one peak, then the other, into his mouth. I writhe against him as his ministrations light me on fire.
All the while, Pestilence’s cock burns against my thigh. How he has patience for foreplay right now is beyond me. Then again, I was always the kid who peeked at my Christmas presents before they were wrapped, so … maybe when it comes to fun shit, I’m just overzealous.
Pestilence draws away long enough to line us up. For one instant he looks backlit, his golden hair luminous, his body glimmering in the darkness. And in that instant, he’s a heavenly thing. Then the moment passes, and he’s a man once more.
He pushes into me, his cock thick, the pressure of it exquisite. I can feel him everywhere.
My horseman let’s out a breath, staring down at me with beautiful, terrible eyes. “God Almighty,” he whispers.
If I weren’t feeling so damn emotional right now, I might’ve made some quip about not taking the Lord’s name in vain (he learned that bad habit from me). I might’ve even laughed as I reveled in the intense connection being the two of us.
Instead, I take his face, his glorious face, in my hands.
“I love you,” I whisper. He needs to hear it. I need to say it. Those words have been trapped beneath my sternum for so long.
He moves in me, his eyes riveted to mine. “I love you too, Sara Burns.”
And then he shows me just how much he means it.
Afterwards, the two of us lay in a tangle of sheets, and I could stay right here forever, my ear pressed against his chest, his heart pounding beneath me.
He strokes my naked back. “There is one thing I kept,” he says. “One thing my crown and armor were still good for. Would you like to see it?”
I nod against him, though I don’t really have any idea what he’s talking about. I’m just too unbearably happy to think about anything else except for the fact that Pestilence is here in my arms.
Gently, Pestilence moves me aside so he can slip off the bed and pad into the living room. I can’t imagine what’s coming.
I gather up the sheets to my body and sit up as Pestilence comes back into the room. He kneels next to the bed and lifts his hand, his fist tightly closed. One by one his fingers uncurl, and in his palm rests a small gold band.
His eye glint. “Marry me, Sara. Please.”
My breath hitches as I stare at the ring, which looks impossibly perfect.
Made from the last of his golden trappings.
That’s what he meant when he said he’d kept one thing from his crown and armor.
My gaze rises to him. And then I smile. “Yes.”
I’m going to marry a horseman of the apocalypse.
I extend my hand and let him slide the band onto my trembling finger.
I’m going to marry Pestilence.
“Wait,” I say sharply.
My horseman raises his eyebrows. “Wait?” he repeats, looking incredulous. “Are you having … doubts?”
I can tell he has a hard time getting the last part of that sentence out.
“No, but … I want to call you something other than Pestilence. Not just an endearment but an actual name.”
For better or for worse, he’s a man. He needs a proper name.
“You mean, like Tricksy?” he asks, completely serious.