And … the horseman now looks pissed.
I’m reaching over my shoulder for another arrow when Death storms forward, erasing the last of the distance between us. Before I can fully nock the projectile, he jerks my bow and arrow out of my hand and casts them aside.
“Hey—!” I cry out.
Even as I protest, Thanatos reaches for my quiver strap. The horseman pulls it off my shoulder and tosses it away from me. I wince when I hear it hit the corpse I was trying to rob.
And now I’m empty-handed against the angel of death.
I tilt my head back and look up, up into the horseman’s terrible eyes. He scowls down at me, that muscle in his jaw still ticking.
“Do you really think you are making any difference?” he says, crowding me until his chest brushes mine. “Following me, shooting me?”
He’s clearly angry, which means I’m at least doing something right.
“People are escaping you—surviving you,” I say, “—so yes, I do think I’m making a difference.”
His expression changes, he looks almost amused. “That was a single city—a city I wiped out only hours after I left your side that day. And I’ve eradicated over a dozen other towns since. Your efforts are sincere,” he acknowledges, “but wasted.”
Before I can respond, Thanatos shocks me by cupping my jaw, his eyes scouring my face. “All of creation falls to me, kismet. Kings and beggars, babies and warriors. Whales and flies, redwoods and dandelions. It all ends. And when it does, I am there to claim it.
“You will not stop me today, or tomorrow—you will not stop me ever. But—despite all sense, I think I do enjoy watching you try.”
He releases my jaw then.
I stumble back as he moves away from me.
“The next time we meet, Lazarus, I won’t be so kind to you,” he warns, his wings spreading wide. “But come for me all the same. I will relish our reunion.”
He leaps into the sky, his massive wingbeats further scattering my arrows across the street.
With one final, parting look, he flies away from me.
Chapter 15
Ames, Iowa
December, Year 26 of the Horsemen
I can’t say how long I’ve been crouching on this partially collapsed overpass, waiting for the horseman to trot down the interstate highway beneath me. Nor am I absolutely certain that the horseman will travel this way, or that my half-baked plan will actually work.
All I know is that I’m freezing my ass off and waiting here was most certainly a bad idea.
I breathe on my gloved hands and rub them together. My nose hurts, my ears ache, and my toes feel like they’re frozen. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten frostbite on three separate occasions over the last month, and depending on how long I stick to this miserable task, today might mark four.
But watery sunlight has broken through the clouds, and maybe this day will be a little warmer than the ones that preceded it.
I grab my thermos and take another sip of coffee. I am pretty sure the horseman is coming this way. I know he made it to Minneapolis, and I think the next big city he’s set his sights on is Des Moines.
Just as I set my thermos aside, the wildlife sweeps through. Cats, dogs, chickens, deer, birds, cows, elk—I even see a few bison.
The animals rush down the highway and the fields that border it on either side. As quickly as they come, they’re gone, and that deathly silence sweeps over me, a silence I’ve come to associate with Death.
It takes several minutes, but eventually I catch sight of the horseman, casually riding down the I-35, the highway that runs beneath this overpass.
Before he has a chance to see me, I cut across to the other side of the overpass, nearly tripping over broken bits of asphalt as I do so.
I’ve gotten better at shooting my bow, but my fingers are far too numb to successfully shoot the horseman off his steed.
So today, I’m doing something a little different.
I pull myself onto the low wall of the overpass and, placing a hand on the cold concrete, I crouch there, my gaze locked on the highway below. A portion of the overpass to my left has collapsed, creating a bottleneck of sorts right beneath me, one that the horseman will have to pass through. I’m planning on capitalizing on it.
My breath mists as I wait for the horseman.
It takes a couple minutes, but eventually I hear the steady clop of his steed’s hooves as he gets closer and closer. Quietly, I withdraw my knife as I stare down at the highway beneath me.
Now those hoof beats echo, and I tense as he crosses beneath the overpass. The seconds seem to stretch as I wait.
Finally, I see his horse’s dappled head twenty feet beneath me, then I see the black waves of Death’s hair and his silver armor as he stares ahead, unaware of my presence.
I leap.
For a moment, while I’m airborne, I realize how absolutely stupid and prone to failure this idea is. But by then it’s too late.
Rather than landing in the saddle, as I’d so elegantly pictured, I clobber into the horseman.
He grunts as I knock him off his horse, the two of us tumbling to the road below.
The whole thing is painful and more than a little embarrassing, but before Death can react, I stab him through the neck.
“Lazarus,” he rasps, reaching for his throat. Blood slips between his fingers, and a small sound slips from my lips.
I’ve fought this man before. I’ve hurt and killed him before. But this is … intimate in a grotesque way. Shooting someone from a distance is far more impersonal than this.
Withdrawing the dagger, I release it as though it burned me, my nausea rising.
Regardless, it’s too late for regret. There’s blood everywhere and the wound I’ve inflicted is too deep. Thanatos’s eyelids droop, and then seconds later his body goes limp.
It’s painfully quiet.
There’s nothing to ease the aftermath of this violent moment.
My shoulder and chest hurt from my fall, and I’m still nauseous from my own violence, but I force myself to get up.
Moving like a creaky old man, I head back up to the overpass to grab my things. When I return to the horseman’s side, I finally notice the smell.
Frankincense and myrrh. I glance up and see Death’s horse standing twenty feet away, the horseman’s torch jutting out of one of the saddlebags. Hazy, perfumed smoke wafts through the air, and a chill passes through me.
I know enough about the horseman to know death won’t stop him for long. The only real way to hold the horseman up is to stick around and kill him again before he wakes.
I’ve been confronted with this issue before. I still can’t stomach the thought, particularly not after what I just did.
You could hold him captive.
The thought causes my breath to still.
I could hold him captive.
It would be like trying to rein in a hurricane. You can’t stop a force of nature.
That doesn’t quell my rising excitement. I mean, who knows? Maybe I can rein him in.
There’s really only one way to find out.
Death wakes on the floor of an abandoned barn. The place smells like mildew and wet animals. Oh, and scented smoke—Death’s horse decided to join us in here. And to be fair to the incense, it does cover up the other two odors fairly well.
I sit cross-legged in front of Thanatos, my body still aching from all the effort it took to get this overly large, winged man in here.
As I watch, his eyelids flutter, then he blinks. It’s a strange magic, watching Thanatos come back from the dead. Stranger still to watch his blood vanish from my clothing and his armor—which I discarded near the overpass—reappear on his body.
Immediately, his gaze hones in on me.
“Lazarus.” For a moment, he smiles, like he can’t help himself. The sight is so shocking that my heart flutters at the sight. “To what do I owe this uncommon pleasure?”
The horseman tries to move his arms from where he lays on his side, but I bound him with a length of cord I normally use as a clothing line. It’s not the thickest stuff, but I made up for it by tying it tight.