Feeling the weight of my gaze on him, he glances up at me, his blue eyes piercing. He straightens a little when he takes in my expression. “What is it, Sara?”
Sara. He says my name like it’s a piece of a prayer.
“Nothing,” I say, rubbing my arms, where beneath my layers of clothing, goosebumps pucker along my skin.
He notices the action, his brow furrowing. “It’s not nothing.” Pestilence stands, glancing around. “What are you frightened of?”
I’m not having this conversation. I’m not.
I brush my hair away from my face. “I just … thought I heard something.”
Pestilence frowns. “Anyone who tries to get close to us is doomed. You are safe, Sara.”
But I’m not. Not from him, and not from my own heart.
Chapter 25
I pull my coat closer as I stare at the sputtering flames between me and Pestilence. The night brought with it a biting chill that not even a halfway decent campfire could ward off.
And this is no halfway decent campfire.
The rain steadily falls, but it’s not yet bad enough to drive me into the Tent of Doom.
The last of our meal sits comfortably in my stomach.
Not our meal, I correct. Your meal.
Pestilence hadn’t been willing to eat any of the food we were carrying, nor to drink any of the water.
I do not need it, Sara, he said when I offered it to him. You do.
He may not have needed it, but his eyes still lingered on the food the same way they’d been coming back to my lips again and again.
He may not need these things, but he’s developed a taste for them.
I hold my tin mug tightly between my hands, the tea keeping the cold from my fingers.
Across the fire, Pestilence’s gaze is like the stroke of a lover. I can feel it as though it were soft fingers brushing along my bare skin.
My eyes move up to his.
The hazy smoke distorts the horseman’s features, but I can still make out his sharp jaw and wavy golden hair. One leg is sprawled out in front of him, the other drawn up to his chest.
If the cold is affecting him at all, he doesn’t let on.
He stares at me, the look in his eyes both familiar and strange. It’s the kind of look that has me ducking my head and tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, like I’m some coquettish thing. It’s the kind of look that reminds me that regardless of his intentions, Pestilence is still a man, and a damn good-looking one at that.
“What?” I ask, swirling my tea around and around in my dented mug.
It’s not fucking wine, Burns. You don’t need to aerate it.
“I don’t understand your question,” he says.
Of course he doesn’t.
“You’re staring at me,” I explain. “I want to know why.”
“Can I not stare at you without having to explain myself?”
“It’s rude to stare at someone.” I still won’t look at him.
“Are you offended?” he asks, curious.
I’m flattered. And that offends me.
“Unsettled,” I say. “I feel unsettled by it.”
“Why am I not surprised?” he mutters to himself. “You want me to understand your kind, and yet when I show any interest, you condemn my curiosity.”
I literally have nothing to say to that. I don’t even know whether he’s right or if he just strung enough pretty words together that he appears right.
Not going to psychoanalyze that one.
“Fine,” I say, taking a sip of my tea and meeting his gaze. “Look your fill.”
His eyes stare unwaveringly back at me. “I will.”
I’m about to look away because it does feel horribly weird to have someone openly appraising you, but then—fuck that. If he’s going to stare, then so am I.
I take him in, from the arched tips of his golden crown to his dark shirt and soft leather boots. My gaze shifts to his hands—he has oddly attractive hands for a man.
Of course he does, Sara. Everything about him is attractive. It’s you who’s only starting to notice the fine details.
Pestilence smiles as my eyes rove over him, and I swear he presses his shoulders back just a little at my inspection.
“Are you enjoying what you’re looking at?” I ask, even as I drink him in. The comment is supposed to be snarky, but it comes off more like bait for a compliment.
“Your form is oddly pleasing to me.”
Like just about everything else Pestilence says, his words bring out two opposing emotions. My blood heats, and yet … pleasing? A painting is pleasing. And oddly so?
A woman should not be oddly pleasing. She should be a ball-busting, skull-crushing, badass motherfucker who is impossible to forget.
A line forms between Pestilence’s brows. “I hadn’t expected that—to enjoy the sight of you—just as I hadn’t expected food to entice me, or your liquor to enthrall me.”
I take another sip of my tea. “What had you expected?”
“To be unmoved and unaffected by all human ways.”
It should fill me with hope that Pestilence is affected by those things, and it does, but … I chew on my lower lip. The thing is, it goes both ways. As much as I’m affecting his view of humans, he’s affecting my view of horsemen.
“You haven’t mentioned God yet,” I say.
Pestilence looks at me quizzically.
“You keep mentioning how much you hate humans, how it’s your job to end them, and how shocking it is to like the same things they do, but in all of our conversations, you haven’t really mentioned God.”
A crease forms between his brows. “Why would I?”
I lift a shoulder. “Isn’t that what this is all about? God’s wrath?”
“This isn’t about God,” Pestilence says evenly. “It’s about humans and their poisonous nature.”
I grab a nearby stick and distractedly poke the logs, causing the fire to jump and spark. “I just figured He was behind your existence,” I say.
The horseman stares at me, eyes narrowed. “It is not for me to discuss with you the reasons I’m here.”
“So God does unequivocally exist?” I prod. “And he’s a man? And he put you up to this?” It’s not like he said these things, but he didn’t deny them either when I mentioned them.
“Sara,” Pestilence says with some exasperation, “surely you know by now that something beyond this mortal world exists. Am I not proof enough?”
Well, yeah, but he could at least confirm it for the record and all.
“As far as gender goes,” he continues, “only the feeble human mind could imagine a superior being, then have the audacity to shape that being in their own image—and to give it a gender.”
Pestilence continues. “God isn’t a man or a woman. He’s something else entirely.”
“Then why do you keep using male pronouns?” I ask.
“Because you do.”
I give him a quizzical look.
“How do I know English?” he says. “Or wield a bow and arrow? Why do I wear breeches and a breastplate and look like a human? I, like God, have been fashioned into something you can understand.
“But this,” he gestures to his body, “is not what I really am.”
“It’s … not?” Having trouble with this one.
“I am pestilence, Sara,” he says softly. “Not a man. I have a body and a voice and a sentience not for my own benefit, but for yours.”
Not going to lie, this might be the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had.
“So …” I say, to bring this full circle, “God isn’t a man.”
His tilts his head. “You seem surprised.”
Do I?
I shift uncomfortably. “I’m not surprised. It’s just …”
“It’s just what?” Pestilence asks when I don’t finish the sentence. For once he’s actually being halfway open with me.
“I don’t know,” I say. I prod at the fire with the stick I still hold. “Is He—or She, or It—even Christian?” The Four Horsemen, after all, were mentioned in the Bible.
Pestilence gives me a disparaging look. “You humans and your hang ups with names and labels. God isn’t Christian—just as he isn’t Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or any other denomination. God is God.”
An answer that will appease pretty much no one.
The horseman leans back and appraises me. “What do you believe, Sara?”
I drop the stick and take a sip of my cooling tea. “Before you came to earth, I didn’t believe in anything.”
“You believed in nothing?” Pestilence is looking at me like he wants an explanation.