Luke’s exclamation draws the attention of others, who are soon thumping me on the back and pulling me into hugs, Felix among them. They all escaped with their lives, all of them except for …

“Briggs?” I ask, my eyes searching for him.

Could just be his day off.

Someone sobers up. “Didn’t make it.”

“He … didn’t?” My mood plummets. I was supposed to be the one that kicked the bucket, not him.

Surely he had enough time to escape.

“They needed help at the hospital. He came back early to aid the sick.”

And he died for it.

The more I look around, the more I notice other missing men. “Who else?”

“Sean and Rene. Blake. Foster.”

So many.

“All died in the line of duty,” someone else adds.

I should’ve known. First responders will always put their lives on the line for others.

I get that itchy feeling beneath my skin. It should’ve been me. A dozen times over it should’ve.

Pestilence stopped the plague altogether because of you, a quiet voice whispers at the back of my mind. Of course, that thought comes with its own strange pain.

“How did you escape the horseman?” Felix asks.

They’re all looking at me.

I’ve dreaded this question since I realized there would be survivors in Whistler. There’s so much I have to answer for, and I don’t know what to include and how much to say.

So I keep it simple. “The horseman … showed me mercy.”

Surprisingly, life returns to normal. Or at least, as normal as I can expect these days.

I move back into my apartment, though I spend an agonizing few weeks carting my belongings from my parents’ house—where they were brought when I was presumed dead—back to my place.

In the wake of my return, people have questions—so many questions.

How did you survive the horseman?

Where have you been all these months?

Why did it take you so long to come home?

For most people, I get good at non-answers. For those who matter, I give them half-truths. At some point, I can’t not; the truth is suffocating the life out of me.

But even then, I don’t share everything—like how I fell in love with a monster, or how in the end, he saved all our miserable lives. How I recited poetry to him and felt him change from a nightmare to a man.

I can’t shake the loneliness I now feel. I first noticed it on the road home, when I bunked in abandoned houses or trekked over kilometers of unbroken snow. And now that I’m home, it seems to rush in from all sides. I’m drowning in my loneliness and no amount of company can banish the sensation.

Not even this, however, can compare to the horrible feeling of falling back into an old life when everything is now different. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I hate it, but there’s nothing better for me anywhere else, and so I stay here in this drab apartment, and each day I go to the fire station and pretend I’m okay when I’m not.

I’m really not.

Sometimes my mind wanders to what impossibilities might have been if Pestilence were a human man. What it would be like to be with him without the baggage. But then, if he were human, Pestilence wouldn’t be Pestilence, so I guess it doesn’t do to ponder the possibility.

Some things are just not meant to be, I suppose.

Now, glass of homebrewed and very suspect wine in hand, I reread a much loved book of mine. Pre-Pestilence, I might’ve flipped through my collection of Shakespeare or Lord Byron (hardcore lit bitch right here), but the greats are ruined for me. Particularly Poe. His dark soul and macabre heart are too similar to mine.

A knock at the door has me setting my book aside.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Shut up, Poe, no one asked for your commentary.

I might legit be losing my mind.

Standing, I glance from the wine in my hand to the shotgun propped against the edge of the couch. I got two hands, and I need one to open the door, so what will it be—the gun or the wine?

Tough decision. Night visitors are always suspect, and I’m not super trusting these days, but … in the end, wine.

Glass in hand, I open my front door.

“Sara.”

I drop the wine, the sound of shattering glass barely registering.

Pestilence fills the doorway, his golden-blond hair framing his face like a corona. His crown is gone, his bow is gone, his golden armor is gone. Even his clothes are different, not dark and pristine. He wears a flannel shirt and jeans, and on his feet are scuffed human boots.

“Pestilence,” I breathe, my heart thundering.

Can’t be real.

“I am Pestilence no longer,” he says, continuing to stand there, not daring to come any closer.

It’s so unbearably hard, staring at him. He still looks like an angel, even in human clothes. Will he ever not look like a divine thing?

But it’s more than his sheer beauty. It took a long time to admit to myself just how far I fell for him. Too late I realized that I loved everything about him—his heart, his mind, his very essence. But even as I realized it, I mourned it because, by then, he was gone.

And now I don’t know what to do, whether to close the distance between us or keep away from him. I don’t know in what state he’s coming to me.

I left him … a broken thing.

I bite the inside of my cheek. “They said you just disappeared.”

He searches my face, and maybe I’m just imagining it, but he looks like he’s trying to memorize each one of my features.

“I can do many things, Sara, but disappearing isn’t one of them.”

A surge of relief follows that statement. He can’t just vanish and leave me.

I stand aside, opening the door wider. “Want to come in?”

Pestilence’s gaze moves to the apartment beyond me, his eyes sparking with interest and a want so fierce it makes my knees weak.

My horseman came back for me.

Carefully, he steps inside, glass crunching under his boot as he does so. His attention is everywhere, taking in each little piece of my humble life.

“Where are your things?” I ask softly as I close the door, my eyes scouring him again. The bow that’s never more than an arm’s span away from him, the crown that almost always decorates his head, the golden armor that makes him look ever so otherworldly—it’s all gone.

I surrender, he’d said.

He swivels to face me. “My purpose is served.”

What does that even mean? And why does that fill me with dread?

“And Trixie?” Had the creature served his purpose too? That would kill me.

Pestilence jerks his chin over his shoulder. Only now, when I manage to tear my eyes off of the horseman, do I bother to look out my window. In the darkness beyond, I catch the barest shadow of his mount.

Trixie Skillz, the steed whose back I road on all those weeks, snuffles in the darkness, his reins looped about a broken lamp post.

I turn back around only to find Pestilence standing close, his eyes devouring me like a starving man.

“How did you find me?” I ask.

“I never left you.”

My brows furrow.

“Come now, Sara,” he says at my confusion, “I wasn’t just going to let you slip out of my life that easily. I’m far too stubborn and not nearly noble enough.”