Dark Destiny (Principatus) (14 page)

Pestilence raised an eyebrow before moving to his throne, lowering himself onto the disgusting piece of excessive furniture with slow flourish. “’Tis a pity. I am sure you would more than enjoy what I can do.”

“Guess we’ll never know, will we, sicko.”

His eyes flared vomit yellow. “Do not call me that.”

Fred let out a sigh. She needed to get a grip. Antagonizing Pestilence would get her nowhere. “I saw some of your handiwork in the world of man today,” she commented, trying to keep her voice light. “I’m just wondering why you thought it acceptable to send an aqueous demon after a human not slated for death?”

She didn’t mention Patrick’s name, wanting to see Pestilence’s reaction first.

It was not what she’d expected.

He laughed.

“Did I?” His thin chest rose up and down with his deep guffaws. “Oh, that was not my intention.” He wiped at his eyes, his lips stretched in a wide smile. “I sent the
nikor
to deal with a water sprite who has been stepping outside her place. It must have got its orders wrong.” He chuckled again, fingering the knucklebone of the throne’s armrest. He slid his gaze to his bed before returning it to her, giving her a pointed look. “I was a bit distracted while giving them.”

Fred narrowed her eyes. She didn’t believe him.

“Hmmm.” Turning her back on him, she crossed his room, trailing her fingers over the edge of one elaborate bone candelabra. “Tell me, Pestilence,” she said, knowing he studied the sway of her hips. “What do you know of the Cure?”

Silence answered her question. Heavy silence, followed by a soft rasp as he shifted in his seat. “The human band? Not much, I am afraid. Their music is not to my taste.”

Fred rolled her eyes. He was hiding something. She could hear the delaying tactics in his lame joke and the deception in his voice.

She turned, fixing him with a level gaze. “Really? I thought they’d be just your cup of tea. All dark and gloomy and pessimistic.”

The comment drew a hiss from the First Horseman. His eyes flickered yellow again, his nails gouging into the throne’s armrest. “You think you are so much better than me, don’t you, Death?”

Fred gave him a cold grin. “Of course I do. Now, tell me why you sent a
nikor
after a human today?”

In a blur of diseased air, Pestilence left his throne and stood before her, his thighs brushing hers, his breath fanning her face. He stared up into her eyes, his body trembling with what she guessed was suppressed rage.

“Call it an exercise, shall we? I was flexing my puny muscles.” He leaned in closer to her, and she choked back the overwhelming urge to gag.

“Why?” he went on, face twisting with contempt. “What does it matter to the great Fourth Horseman? What does the pathetic human mean to you?”

A tight knot of tension formed in Fred’s stomach at Pestilence’s snarled question and she faltered. What
did
Patrick mean to her? What
did
it matter? Since when had she become so concerned about the fate of one mere mortal?

Since you first saw that mere mortal on the beach, Fred. Fighting to keep Peabody alive. Doing everything in his power, everything in his soul, to defy you.

A wave of warmth flowed through her and she grit her teeth in dismay. Damn it, she was falling for Patrick Watkins.

“What exactly do you want, Death?” Pestilence snapped, jerking her from the sudden, unnerving realization. “I am growing bored with this visit. Either strip and climb onto my bed or remove yourself from my presence.”

Fred snorted, a cold, powerful rage building in the pit of her belly. “Strip and climb onto the bed? I would rather let the hounds of hell mount me than be touched by you.”

“You should not say such things, Death.” Pestilence’s eyes burned. “Not to your equal.”

A laugh burst from Fred’s throat. Sharp and contemptuous. “You are not my equal, Pestilence. You will never be my equal. No matter how many eternities pass, you will always be a piss-weak little demon with delusions of grandeur.”

Pestilence’s nostrils flared. He stared at her, eyes bulging, lips compressed to a thin, white line. His hands moved in a blur, curling around her neck. “Your time is over, Death,” he stated, the fury in his voice laced with smug confidence. “It is
my
time now.”

Thick rows of diseased lice scurried up her throat, over her jaw line. Thick, swarming rows of sickness seeking her mouth.

She felt them pour over her flesh. Felt them slip into the tiny dips at the corners of her lips. Felt them stroke her tongue.

And she laughed, destroying each tiny instrument of Pestilence’s disease with a thought. “Is that it?”

She lashed out with her own hands, sinking her fingers into his throat and lifting him from the floor. “You are the
First
Horseman, Pestilence.
Everything
you are,
everything
that makes you what you are,
I
already am.”

His mouth dropped open, his shocked expression almost comical. Not funny enough however, to stop her teaching him a lesson.

She released the cold.

Every atom of every molecule of Pestilence’s corporeal existence became ice. Instantly and immediately. Bereft of heat and anima. Deprived of vitality and life. The air froze in his lungs, the blood stilled in his veins. He gaped at her, fear erupting in his eyes.

Fred held him off the floor, watching him. She could not kill him. It was impossible for the Horsemen to kill their own, but they could inflict untold pain and suffering upon their fellow entities if they had the strength. Well,
she
could. She was Death. The Fourth and final Horseman. Everything—including her fellow entities—came before her.
Nothing
came after.

She drew the life from Pestilence’s being. Pulled it from his form until he wavered on a blade’s edge of expiration, letting him feel the unending, inescapable power of her force.

She held him in a lifeless stasis of icy agony, until the fear in his eyes turned to surrender. And then she released her grip on his neck and dropped him to the floor. “Remember who you are, Pestilence. Remember who
I
am. When
my
time is over, so is
yours
.”

And, before she could do something she would regret, before she broke the cardinal rule of the Realm and rendered her colleague null and void, she transubstantiated from Pestilence’s space.

Glad to be rid of the stench and sight of him.

Without any answers at all.

Damn it.

Chapter Six

Ven paced his brother’s living room, glaring at the floor, the blank television, the clock on the wall…the morning sun streaming in through the wide, open window. He approached the diffused edge of light and stood still, studying the dust motes dancing on the air.

Sunlight.

He hadn’t seen sunlight for over eighteen years. He’d avoided it like the plague, scurrying indoors at the first hint of dawn, hiding from its warmth. Missing it like mad.

This morning he’d not only seen it, he’d stood in it. Felt it.

Survived it.

Great. How the bloody hell am I going to go surfing now?

The irritated question came back to him in a sudden memory of sight and sound. They were the very first words he’d uttered the second he’d realized he was no longer human but a monster of mythology. He’d been sitting in his mother’s living room, a cooling piece of toast in one hand, two bloody big fangs suddenly in his mouth and the shock had been almost too much to bear.

He had little memory of the actual transformation from man to demon. Just flashes of images, really. Sensations. The stunned look on his parents’ faces, the absolute horror on Patrick’s the minute he’d walked into the living room.

They’d still been in mourning over his death a mere six hours earlier. His mum was openly sobbing in his father’s arms, his dad’s eyes red and dry with unshed tears, his kid brother silently staring at nothing.

It wasn’t until the first bite of toast and subsequent discovery of his fangs that it hit him. What he now was. And with that bite came the images, crashing over him, dumping on him like a killer wave. Taking him under, pummeling him about and leaving him gasping and shell-shocked. Images of fangs flashing, blood gushing. Images of a hideous creature attacking his kid brother. Images of his own struggle with the vile thing, trying to save Pat from certain death. Images of being held down, mauled. Bitten.

Images of the creature fleeing into the night, a broken beer bottle jutting from the back of its neck, its squeals both furious and scared.

Images of Patrick leaning over him, tears and blood streaming down his face, screaming at him. “Hold on, Steven, hold on.”

Images of a woman with pale skin and long dark hair walking towards him down the alley, regarding him with ice-blue eyes as she leant over Patrick to touch his chest with a lingering, gentle caress.

Images of the world fading, of Patrick fading. Everything turning dark, darker.

Those terrible, vivid images dragged him under and he’d stared at his parents and brother in horror, his hand going to his neck, his fingers finding the twin puncture wounds below his right ear.

“Great,” he’d muttered. “How the bloody hell am I going to go surfing now?”

The sarcastic, bitter thought had undone him. Something he loved more than life, robbed of him. Taken from him. He was a vampire. No longer able to walk in the sunlight. No longer able to consume regular food. Needing to feed on blood to survive. He’d stared at the toast in his hand, the Vegemite smeared all over its warm, crusty surface filling him with such a bitter surge of nostalgic anger he’d thrown it against his mother’s wallpapered wall and stormed from the room, a new, indefinable hunger growing in his gut. An undeniable hunger.

An unspeakable hunger.

Pat had caught up with him, as fast as always, faster than a teenage kid should be able to move, just as he was about to sprint down his parents’ driveway.

“Hey!” His brother had grabbed his arm, spun him about.

“Go away, Pat,” Ven had growled, trying to shrug him off. “You don’t want to be near me now.”

“What’s the big deal?” Pat had asked with a shrug, his eighteen-year-old face open and completely without guile, his green eyes somehow luminous in the dark night. Glowing with an emotion Ven recognized so very well. Love. “So we just hit the waves at night, that’s all.”

That had been the end of the discussion. Neither he nor Pat had raised his transformation again, not in a serious way, at least. And his parents, God love them, hadn’t either. His mum had come to visit to his home the second night of his new existence, hefting a big bag of black-out curtains she’d made on her ancient Janome, hanging them over his windows as she chatted about the research she’d been doing on the differences between A negative and B positive. And his dad… Well, Steven Patrick Watkins had continued on as he always did. Not speaking two words when one would do, letting his first born son settle into his new “life” with nothing more than a nod and a refusal to stock garlic on the pantry shelves. Oh, and a perverse insistence of shoving any corny B-grade vampire movie he could find in the VCR whenever Ven dropped around.

And that had been the way of things for many years. Ven soon discovered the joys of his newfound physical prowess and made full use of them, feeding only from Sydney’s many women eager to become a vampire’s feed source, enjoying the other “perks” that came with the willingly offered dinner. One night he’d met Amy Mathieson at a particularly rowdy game of beach volleyball and three years later, he was pretty much a monogamous feeder.

He’d never questioned the “rules”, those unexplained, completely annoying rules dictated to him by Hollywood. Don’t go out in the daylight—there went the day job. Don’t go near garlic—even though garlic prawns had been his favorite meal. Don’t try to imbibe human food—again with the garlic prawns. Avoid crucifixes and holy water—okay, no real problem there. Don’t get yourself stabbed in the heart by a wooden stake—splinters on steroids to be avoided at all cost. Gotcha. He just accepted those rules as he had his new existence. With a wry grin and dry sarcasm.

Fortunately, being staked to dust had never been a problem. The city’s small number of, quite frankly, laughable demon hunters never bothered with him. And as for the rest of the “rules”, well, he kept to them, crucifixes and holy water the least of his concerns. His family had never been much for religion and they weren’t likely to start any day soon. He didn’t think his folks even kept a Bible in the house.

But the images of his transformation refused to leave him, haunting him when he “slept”, forcing him to relive the moment over and over again. The fear, the pain, the fury, the bliss of Death’s icy touch…and an empty longing for the life stolen from him. A life of light and warmth and sun—surfing or jogging with Pat, fishing from the rocks at North Bondi, sitting on the beach watching the waves make love to the sand.

A life he thought lost to him forever. Until an hour ago.

He studied the sunlight spilling into Patrick’s living room through the open window and stepped forward. Directly into it, feeling its warmth paint his body.

He sighed. For some reason he could not explain, he felt disconnected. What did it mean that he could withstand sunlight? He knew it wasn’t normal. The way Death had stared at him back on the beach, as if she’d seen a ghost, told him what he could do was not right. So what did it mean?