What is he saying? That the entire time I made my way back here, he shadowed me?

“Besides,” he continues, “you were still recovering, and I didn’t trust your fragile body to make the journey back.”

I can’t take in enough air.

He cared. Even when he thought I didn’t, he never gave up.

“So you followed me?”

He nods.

And I never knew.

“Why didn’t you ever show yourself?”

Pestilence glances down at his boots. “You had made your decision. I wanted to respect that.” He laughs self-deprecatingly, toeing a stray piece of broken glass. “But I couldn’t, in the end.”

And I’m so glad for it.

“You stopped the plague,” I say.

He meets my gaze, his expression turning guarded. “I did.”

“Why?” I ask, searching his face.

Pestilence’s eyes are deep and true. “Because love brings out the best in you.”

I swallow thickly. If the last couple months have been a nightmare, this is some wonderful dream, one where I get everything I want.

I don’t trust it. I’ve come to expect that things that appear too good to be true often are. Why should the one thing I want more than any other follow different logic?

“Back at that last house, why didn’t you tell me you cured the sick?” I ask. That would’ve saved months of this agony.

Pestilence’s gaze is agonized. “My mind was a mess at the time. I … had not committed to my actions, not even after I set them in motion. Nor after I let you go. It took weeks of contemplation for me to come to terms with my decision. My heart spoke first; my mind had to follow.”

His expression turns fierce. “I should never have let you go. I should have listened to you, spoke with you, fought for you. I’m only now learning how very complex humans are.”

My heart beats madly at his words. Hope is beginning to surge through my veins, and that scares the crap out of me because all hope does is prime you for a letdown, and I’m not sure I can take another letdown.

“And the plague—it’s gone for good?” I ask.

Pestilence gives me a sad smile. “Sara, there will always be sickness and disease—that I cannot change. But my divinely-wrought plague will never infect another. I have … served my purpose,” he says again.

And again, that one sentence fills me with a strange sort of dread.

I tug on the sleeves of my shirt. “What happens to you now that you’ve served your purpose?” I’m proud that my voice doesn’t tremble like the rest of my body is beginning to.

It shouldn’t be possible to feel this much. Excitement and anxiety and fear are all churning inside me. But mostly fear, fear for my horseman. I never asked him what would happen if he simply stopped spreading the Fever.

I probably should’ve.

Pestilence’s blue eyes pierce mine. “Come with me and find out.”

That ache in my chest expands, but now it hurts with something that is halfway between pain and pleasure.

“There are so many things between us,” I say. So many insurmountable things. I want him so badly it hurts, but I swear it feels like he’s the one thing I can’t have, even after all his wrongs have been righted.

Pestilence closes the last of the distance between us. Gently he takes my hands, staring down at my knuckles. “I may no longer be Pestilence the Conqueror, but I will fight for what I want, and I want you.” His eyes rise to mine. “Tell me you want me too.”

I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. All I have to do is take one single step, and then everything can change. Everything will change.

He squeezes my hands. “Come back to me,” he says. “Quote me Poe and Byron, Dickinson and Shakespeare. Tell me your human histories, share with me your memories. Let me taste your food and let me drink your wine. Let me make love to you and hold you in my arms until dawn. Share your life with me.”

I stand there, still frozen, still sure he’s some vision made to haunt my days. Sure I’m going to wake.

Pestilence’s hands move to cup my face. “I was wrong—about humanity. And I was wrong so many times when it came to you. Forgive me.”

I press my eyes closed, then open them. He’s still there, still gazing at me with his sad eyes.

“Come back to me, Sara,” he repeats. “Please.”

That damn word.

The world distorts beyond my watery eyes.

“I’m still going to die someday,” I whisper.

He nods solemnly. “I know.”

“You’re okay with that?”

His thumb strokes my cheek. “Sara, I don’t know how many minutes you get or I get, but I do know I want to spend them all with you.”

My heart hammers in my chest.

I look at his face, his angelic face with those sad, solemn eyes. He really could be an angel—maybe he is an angel, if such things exist. I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything, except that joy is a strange thing, and I feel it now with him just as I have felt a hundred times before in a hundred different little moments between us.

I reach up and wrap a hand around his wrist. “If you are no longer Pestilence the Conqueror, then what would you like me to call you?” I ask, leaning a little into his touch.

He gives me a shy, vulnerable smile. “‘Love’ had a nice ring to it.”

“Alright, love,” I say, noticing his whisper of a smile at the endearment, “what minutes I have left—they are yours. I am yours.”

There is a moment where it doesn’t compute. My horseman’s eyes are still haunted, and he looks like hope utterly abandoned him somewhere back in Washington. But then it does register, and his whole face transforms.

First his gaze brightens, his eyebrows hiking up, and then a smile that could outpace the sun spreads across his face.

He leans down and takes my lips, and the kiss is an end and a beginning all at once.

Chapter 54

I’d like to say that everything from that minute on was some beautiful, breathtaking fairytale. I’d like to say that I didn’t drag Pestilence’s inhuman ass back to my bedroom and sully the shit out of my sheets like the dirty freak I am.

I’d like to say a thousand things to airbrush the crap out of the night, but then, that’s some other broad’s story.

The kiss has only barely begun when it goes from sweet to wild and desperate. He’s my oxygen and I haven’t been able to breathe for months.

My fingers moves to the buttons of his flannel shirt, but my hands shake so badly from need and want and allthisgoddamnadrenaline that I can’t seem to undo a single one.

Pestilence pushes me up against the wall, his pelvis grinding into mine.

“Missed you so much,” he says between kisses. “Love is unendurable when it spoils.”

But, miracle of miracles, this love didn’t spoil. It might’ve carved us up from the inside out, but in the end it didn’t twist us into monsters. It stopped Pestilence from killing the world, and it made me strong enough to walk away from him when he wasn’t worthy.

And, in the end, it brought him back to me.

I go at Pestilence’s buttons again while the horseman peels my shirt off. The rest of our clothes quickly follow as I lead Pestilence to my bedroom.