Dark Destiny (Principatus) (33 page)

Patrick froze, every fiber of his being feeling his brother’s pain. He stared at Ven’s slumped frame, the sight of his once-pale-but-healthy flesh now sallow and covered in weeping sores, filling him with agony. The sight of his brother’s once-unassailable strength beaten beyond death filling him with misery.

His throat slammed shut. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t let his brother suffer. Not the one soul who’d spent his life, his
death
, doing everything in his power to protect him. The one person who always knew when he was sad, angry, scared. The one person who sacrificed it all to make sure Patrick lived.

Patrick choked back a sob. He couldn’t do this. Not to his brother. Not to Steven.

He turned from Ven’s shuddering, broken body and fixed Pestilence with a flat stare. “My brother’s life for mine.”

The wind picked up his words. Whipped them from his lips.

Pestilence smiled. Gleeful. Smug. “Of course.”

Driving his fingers into the soft center of his palms, Patrick drew a deep breath. What was to come would hurt, but for his brother he would face it all.

I’m sorry, Fred, but I can’t let Steven suffer for me anymore.

He began to drop to his knees, Pestilence’s stretching grin burning into his brain.

“Yes,” Pestilence whispered, his voice ringing with supreme elation. “Yes.
The Cure shall surrender to the Disease and the Disease shall destroy the Cure.
”

“Don’t you bloody dare!” Ven’s growl shattered the silence of the beach. A ripple distorted the very air around them and he surged to his feet, arms flinging wide, body transforming into a creature of immense size and might.

“The Principatus!” Pestilence screeched.

Ven spun, massive black wings unfolding from his impossibly wide back, long, muscled arms reaching out to snare the vampire around the neck. His skin, blacker than midnight pitch, shimmered in the dusk, his eyes twin balls of burning white light. “For Amy,” he said, lifting the gibbering, squealing vampire up to his unrecognizable face. “For the heinous creature you are, for the heinous acts you performed.” His voice rumbled, thunder in a storm. “By the decree of the Order of the Agents, by the power of the Principatus, I hereby declare you punished.”

He sank talons the size of daggers into the vampire’s ribcage, just below his armpit and, with barely a shift in muscle, tore the squealing demon in two.

The two parts spurted blood, bright red arching showers that drenched Ven’s black flesh crimson. And then, as the Principatus threw back his head and roared, arms wide, wings spread, both parts fell to dust and were scattered to nothing by the gusting wind.

Patrick stared at his brother, his pulse pounding in his ears.
Jesus, is that Ven?

The Principatus turned to look at him, eyes white fire, lips curled away from needle-tipped teeth in a sardonic, cheeky grin. A grin Patrick had seen many, many times before. “Was that too melodramatic?”

Patrick’s laugh took him by surprise. “Well, you always were one for the—”

A shudder wracked Ven’s giant frame, once, twice and he pitched forward, collapsing face first into the sand, changing back into human form before his body came to rest.

“Ven!”
Patrick screamed. He sprinted forward, stare locked on Ven’s motionless form, on the blood pouring from his slack mouth and nose and ears, staining the sand around him a dull red. Like a shadow of blood on the beach.

He ran, desperate to reach his brother. To save him.

And was picked up and flung backward by a savage blow of invisible force.

Fred fumed. She stormed around the tiny “space” the Powers had afforded her, an area in the whiteness no bigger than the average public toilet cubicle. What the fuck did she do now? She couldn’t leave, she couldn’t return to Patrick, she couldn’t even track down Pestilence and beat the crap out of him. Shit, with the Powers’ ridiculous confinement she could barely scratch herself.

She stomped her foot. “Aarrggh!”

Well, that was entirely childish, wasn’t it, Fred.

Huffing into her fringe, she glared at the ubiquitous white. Yes, it was childish, but it was better than just standing around accepting her fate.

She narrowed her eyes. Fate? Was that who had blabbed about what she was doing with Patrick? The last Fate? Before she’d mysteriously up and vanished from the Realm, had the last Fate gone all soothsayerish and revealed what role Death was planning to play in the confrontation between Pestilence and the Cure?

And what role was that exactly, Fred? Coach? Umpire? Cheerleader for the Cure? You know you cannot directly wage war on your own brethren, even if Pestilence
is
a megalomaniacal piece of shit that needs to have his skinny ass kicked from one side of the Realm to the other. The Horsemen cannot attack each other, no matter how much you wished you could. To do so would rend the Weave asunder. So, what role
were
you planning to play? Wingman?

A numb coldness unfurled in her belly. She hadn’t allowed herself to think that far ahead. Once she’d discovered Pestilence’s plan, once she’d discovered all the players involved, she’d been so focused on preparing Patrick, she hadn’t stopped to question what she was going to do once the “battle” had began.

Preparing Patrick? Is that what you’ve been so focused on? Really? Are you sure?

The cold numbness growing in her gut grew icy. Shit. Preparing him had
not
been her sole focus, even though it
should
have been. Making love to him had been her primary focus, feeling his body move over hers, feeling his body move
in
hers… Shit. Instead of trying to equip him for what he had to face, she’d been thinking only of the way he made her feel—alive, wonderful, gloriously amazing. Her own selfish greed may have delivered to Patrick the very thing she was created to do. Death.

Standing motionless, she closed her eyes. By the Powers, what if she never saw him again?

No. She wouldn’t let that happen. Time was irrelevant to her. If need be she’d go back to Patrick in a moment of history…

The rebellious thought trailed away and she let out a sigh. The Powers would prevent her doing so. Of that she had little doubt, and if imprisoning her in the whiteness was their reaction to her falling in love with Patrick, what would they do to her if she broke the first law?

“Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

“You really need to do something about your language, Death.”

She froze, gaze flicking around the whiteness. Her heart smashed against her breastbone. Was that who she thought it was?

“Yes. It is. Now, tell me, Death. Why do you want to return to Patrick Watkins?”

Fred’s mouth went dry. Should she really answer that question?

“Yes. You should.”

“I love him.”

It was the simple truth.

“Is that the only reason?”

She frowned. The thought of all mankind—children, babies, the innocent, the guilty—destroyed by Pestilence’s ego, by his hunger for power and glory rolled through her. She thought of them all. She thought of Patrick…and shook her head.

“Does there have to be any other?”

Silence answered her.

“Does there?”

Silence. And the sense of a low, wise chuckle.

“Well?”

No reply.

Fred frowned. “Well?”

Again. Nothing.

She threw up her hands, shaking her head as she stormed around in…circles.

Circles. Large circles. Circles bigger than a toilet cubicle.

Holy shit, she could move!

“Just you and me now, lifeguard.” Pestilence’s voice rose above the wailing wind, his eyes ablaze. “Your pitiful brother has finally exerted all his energy. Not even the power of a Principatus can defeat starvation. Especially when their own blood flows so freely from their body.” He laughed, the sound cold. Inhuman. “As the last Fate foretold, it has come to pass. The Cure and the Disease.”

He laughed again, and as Patrick scrambled to his feet, tiny grains of sand lashing at his face, slicing into his eyes, he saw the First Horseman walk toward him.

No, Patrick. Limp toward you. He’s limping.

Cold hope surged through him and he bared his teeth in a dead smile. Good.

He straightened, glaring at Pestilence. Ven’s lifeless body cut into the corner of his vision but he refused to look at him. He had to end this. Now. “As the last Fate foretold,” he growled,
“The Cure shall face the Disease on the shifting dunes and the end shall begin and the beginning shall end
.”

The words of the prophesy boomed across the empty stretch of beach, their volume impossibly loud. Pestilence reeled backward, eyes wide. “How do you know those words?”

Patrick gave him a dark grin. “Someone much more powerful than you told me.” Without thought, he threw the beach at the demon. Sand, rocks, metal trash cans, the needles cast aside by junkies. Everything he could reach with his mind, he hurled at the First Horseman.

Pestilence stumbled, arms pinwheeling. His eyes erupted in yellow hate, and suddenly Patrick’s gut cramped.

Every pore in his body seemed to piss acid, every joint screamed as though crushed in a vice. He staggered, stomach surging up through his throat, hot bile and vomit flooding his mouth.

“The Disease!” Pestilence screamed, and another wrecking ball of illness smashed into him. “The Disease!”

Patrick spat, swiped at his mouth and sent a red and yellow safe-to-swim flag straight for Pestilence’s head.

The sand-crusted steel point pierced the First Horseman’s forehead, sank into his head and burst through the other side.

Pestilence screeched. And his human form vanished in a shimmer.

Long, skeletal arms reached up, claw-tipped fingers wrapping around the metal spike. “You think that will stop me, lifeguard?” The sound of metal on bone sliced the air as he pulled the flagpole from his skull. A soft, liquidy pop filled the air and blood, thick and black and stinking of decay, gushed from the hole in his forehead—followed by an equally thick, equally black fog.

It shot across the beach, engulfing Patrick before he could move, turning the dusk to midnight and the air to a suffocating shroud.

He lashed out, but to no effect. The blackness invaded his nose, his mouth. It seeped into his eyes, pooling at the corners, ice cold and scalding at once.

“Did you really think a pathetic human such as yourself could stop me?”

The black fog trickled into Patrick’s ears.

“Did you really think a lowly mortal could stop the First Horseman?”

It threaded down his throat.

“I am the Disease.”

Into his lungs.

“Pestilence.”

Choking him. Suffocating him.

“He who destroys life in the world of man.”

An image of his lifeless brother’s body flashed through Patrick’s air-starved mind.

“He who brings the end with the beginning.”

Damn, I’m really getting sick of his voice.

The thought wasn’t Patrick’s, but he grabbed a hold of its familiar sardonic wit. Ven. Forever alive in his heart. A golden heat radiated through him and swelled into a tangible, potent force, almost an entity in itself. He threw back his arms and head, drawing the blackness into his being, devouring it, letting it permeate his core.

A heatless world of illness and pain and abject misery consumed him. Tried to possess him. It turned his bones to chalk and his blood to water. It squeezed his heart still and turned his stomach inside out. But before it could render him empty, before it could undo him completely, he purged it from his being.

In a blinding wall of light and warmth.

The dark beach bleached white.

Pestilence squealed. His arms whipped up to protect his face, his feet scurried backward. The flesh on his bones began to flay, as if scoured away by the golden heat pouring from Patrick’s being. His demonic form convulsed, twitched. He fell backward, thrashing in the pure light on the wind-whipped sand, eyes bulging, tongue bloating.

That’ll teach the skinny bastard to mess with my brother.

Again, the thought didn’t belong to Patrick. He jerked his stare from the convulsing First Horseman to Ven, expecting to see him sitting up, grinning at him with that same old sarcasm he’d counted on his entire life.

His brother still lay prone on the sand. Lifeless. As still as a corpse.

Aching hollowness exploded in Patrick’s core. The light flooding from his existence guttered and he collapsed to his knees. Drained. Exhausted. Sapped of all energy.

Get up.

He stared at Ven.

Get up.

“As…I suspected.” Pestilence’s hoarse snarl sliced into his desperate sorrow. He jerked his stare from his brother’s body, cold horror twisting around his heart as the First Horseman slowly rose to his feet. “The…Cure’s weakness…will be…his…end.”