Loss

by Jackie Morse Kessler

  He thought of his mom, his grandfather, his absentee dad. He thought of Marianne and her heartbreakingly beautiful smile. He thought of Eddie and Kurt and Joe, of beanpole Sean and the PE instructor and his classmates. He thought of Mita touching his daughter’s cheek as he told her goodbye for the final time. He thought of all of these things, and many more, all in the space of a handful of heartbeats.

  He could do nothing, but then he would never know if he could have done something.

  Billy opened his eyes. “How do I get to the Conqueror?”

  In the darkness, Death smiled. “You ride.”

  Chapter 19

  For the Second Time . . .

  . . . Billy followed the Pale Rider out the front door. He wasn’t exactly dressed for world saving, not in his ripped T-shirt and baggy sweatpants and bare feet, but once he’d made the decision to stop the Conqueror, he hadn’t wanted to stop to change clothing. He might have lost his conviction while rummaging for a hoodie.

  After he shut the door softly behind him, he paused on the front stoop and felt his nerve drain away.

  There, in the dark, the pale horse waited. It seemed bigger than before—which might have been possible, given that it was really a horse/car. And Billy could have sworn it was smiling at him. Before he could ask Death if there was another option for the whole riding thing, the horse snorted and stepped aside to reveal a second horse.

  Billy’s mouth gaped open.

  Spotlighted by the moon, the white steed stood quietly. It was a tall animal, but its neck was bent in a way that made it appear smaller. The body was sleek with muscle, and it would have made another horse seem powerful, even majestic. A tremor worked its way along the white steed’s frame, there and then gone, like a shimmer of heat in the summer. Its nostrils flared and contracted as it blew out a breath. Half hidden beneath its mane, its ears quivered. Its eyes, though, were what made Billy’s breath catch in his throat. Those eyes were pale, leeched of color and hinting of sickness and emptiness. If a cough had a color, it would be the color of those eyes. But as Billy looked deeper, he saw the emotion swirling there, hiding behind the glaze of disease. And as he looked within those eyes, he saw fear, and loneliness, and resignation, as if the horse were waiting for the next betrayal that surely was to come.

  Billy Ballard looked into the eyes of the White Rider’s steed, and he saw himself.

  “Pestilence, meet thy steed,” said Death. And then he neighed. It wasn’t the sound of a human mimicking a horse. It was truly a horse’s neigh, coming from a human mouth. The white steed’s ears flickered in response.

  If Billy hadn’t seen Death’s horse turn into a car, he probably would have been more weirded out by the whole thing. “Um,” he said. “Hi.”

  “It’s a little skittish,” Death said, not quite apologetically.

  It’s a sad thing when a horse wants for a Rider.

  “Abandonment issues,” Billy said softly.

  “Yes.”

  He took a step forward, then stopped. “Um. I’m not sure what to do.”

  “It’s not sure what you’re going to do, either,” said Death, grinning. “You two are meant for each other.”

  Billy took a deep breath, then moved forward again, taking one slow, exaggerated step. He placed his hand out in front of him, palm up, the way he’d approach a dog or a cat. “Hey,” he said, “I’m Billy.” He paused. “And I just introduced myself to a horse.”

  The white horse nickered softly.

  “It said hello,” Death translated. “Actually, it said, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ But you get the idea. It’s trying to be polite.”

  The pale steed snorted, loudly.

  “What?” Death said. “It is. Saying ‘Don’t hurt me’ is considered good manners for many species. Just, apparently, not for transmogrifiers.”

  The pale horse snorted again.

  “Now that,” said Death, “isn’t polite in any language.”

  Billy took another slow step toward the white horse, keeping his hands out and his voice steady. “I’m completely terrified right now,” he said to the steed. “Horses scare me.”

  The white horse blinked its rheumy eyes.

  “I had a bad dream when I was a kid,” said Billy, moving slowly to the horse’s left. “You were in it. Well. A white horse was in it. Maybe it wasn’t you exactly. But it was the Conqueror’s horse.” He was close enough now to reach out and touch the horse’s neck, just slightly, brushing his fingertips along the coat. He felt the steed shiver beneath his hand, and he knew that it was about three seconds away from bolting. So he stopped where he was and kept his hand resting gently on the horse’s neck. “I wanted to ride that horse so badly,” said Billy, “so I made a really stupid deal.”

  The horse still trembled, but the sense of panic slowly diminished.

  “I agreed to wear the Conqueror’s Crown, just so I could get a ride on the white horse. And then everything changed. The Conqueror scared me, and I ran.” Billy sighed. “I never rode the horse. I ran away and didn’t get what I’d bargained for. I was a kid, but I guess that doesn’t matter. And I thought it was all just a dream. But I guess that doesn’t matter, either. Since then, horses have scared me.”

  Beneath his fingers, the trembling slowed.

  “Maybe you’re scared too,” he said. “You’ve been doing everything you’re supposed to do, but your Rider keeps leaving you. Maybe you think you’re doing something wrong. That it’s you. Maybe you think you’re getting what you deserve. That you’re not worth having a Rider who returns to you and trusts you and depends on you. But it’s not you,” said Billy, stroking the steed’s neck. “It’s not your fault that your Rider lost his mind. You’re a good steed.”

  There was one last shiver, and then the white horse stood still as Billy continued to move his hand over its broad neck.

  “Do you have a name?” Billy asked.

  “Horses don’t use names the way that humans do,” said Death. “It’s the white steed. That’s its definition and its purpose.”

  “The good white steed,” Billy murmured. “A very good horse. One that’s worthy of a good Rider.”

  The white horse’s ears quivered, perhaps by way of thanks.

  “I’m still scared,” Billy admitted, patting the horse’s neck. And maybe you are too. Let’s be scared together.”

  The steed blew out a breath through its nostrils and knelt down. Billy hoisted himself up until he was seated on the horse’s back, and as the steed rose to its full height, he threaded his fingers through the white mane and trusted that he wouldn’t fall—and, more important, he trusted that the steed wouldn’t let him fall.

  “We can do this,” he whispered.

  “Return to the White Rider,” said Death, punctuating the words with a whinny.

  The white horse snorted, or maybe coughed, and then it leapt into the sky and rocketed away, with Billy clinging to it like a tick.

  ***

  Billy held on, white-knuckled, his mouth clamped firmly shut so there wouldn’t be any chance of him freaking out—or, loosely translated, screaming in terror. He wasn’t one for roller coasters on his best day. Riding atop a flying horse that left jet planes in its wake? Gah. He was about three minutes away from leaning over and vomiting into the nighttime sky. How’s that for an excuse to stay home from school? Billy couldn’t make it today because he puked his guts out over the Appalachians. He swallowed thickly and tried not to look down as the white steed soared over the mountains.

  Breathe in, breathe out. Just like that. Breathe in, breathe out.

  At least the air quality was nice. A bit cold, but he wasn’t about to complain. The last thing he wanted to do was upset the horse. Actually, the last thing he wanted to do was plummet to his death, but at the moment, that went hand in hand with him not upsetting the horse. And that meant he had to be calm. He had a feeling—or maybe it was a nudge from the White—that the horse could pick up on his emotions; if he panicked, the horse would too
. And that wouldn’t be good for him or the horse—but especially not for him, here above the clouds. So he breathed in and breathed out, and he pressed his legs against the horse’s sides and forced himself to slightly—slightly—loosen his death grip on the steed’s mane.

  They flew on. Or, more accurately, the horse flew, and Billy hung on.

  He closed his eyes and hummed Green Day songs, his voice lost in the wind. At one point, he thought the horse was harmonizing, but that would have been crazy. And then he remembered that he was on a flying horse, on the way to stop the Horseman of all disease from destroying the world, and he decided that crazy was relative.

  They cruised in the wind, buffered by songs and slowly learning to trust each other, until they hit a bump. Specifically, Billy suddenly jerked, and the horse floundered. For a heart-stopping moment, the two plummeted in free fall until the white steed shook its head and began to gallop in the air once more, and they quickly steadied. Billy, sweating and breathless, patted the horse’s neck. “Good horse,” he croaked. “Good horse.”

  The thing that had tugged at Billy’s consciousness hooked him again, but this time, he was ready for it and didn’t flinch. Despite his fear of heights, he looked down at the world below and saw a massive area of greenish yellow—a sickly color, like infected mucus. The landscape stretched out, leading in one direction to a palette of sandy browns and in the other to a mountain range. They were too high up for him to make out any living things on the surface. That didn’t include a glimpse of red whisking past the mountaintops—fire dancing with the wind, flaring brilliantly then winking down to nothing.

  And he knew, without knowing how he knew, that he’d just witnessed the path of War.

  In his head, he felt the White . . . shift. Billy understood that it was a reaction to the Red Rider, but he had no idea what it meant. And he also didn’t have time to puzzle over it. Maybe, once he stopped the Conqueror from infecting the entire world with plague, he’d go into therapy and figure out the relationship between disease and destruction.

  Okay, maybe not.

  He leaned into the steed and pressed his legs a little tighter, but not so tight as to spook the animal. The horse obliged by pouring on the speed. In a blink, the landmass and the Red Rider were behind them, nothing but memories.

  We are the Riders of the Apocalypse, and we herald the end of everything!

  Billy gritted his teeth. No, that War, the War from Mita’s past, wanted to see the end of the world, eagerly awaited the final battle that would annihilate every living thing. That War reveled in the thought of the Apocalypse. But the girl in the alleyway, the one who’d helped Billy up after Eddie Glass had jumped him, that girl in red was not the same War. Riders changed over time. He thought briefly of the Black Rider, first of the exotic woman by the docks of Alexandria and then of the pale, proper woman in the depths of the Greenwood, and he remembered how she’d called him King White.

  “You have no right to use that name with me,” snarled the man who would be Robert Hode.

  “But I do,” said Famine. “The spirit of the Black Rider dwells within me, and through it I’ve seen how she—how I—used to be with you.”

  The people who were Horsemen changed over the years, but the thing that made them Horsemen—the spirit, according to Famine—remained the same. So was the girl in red who’d helped him just a different version of the brutal woman in armor who enjoyed causing pain?

  Billy felt the White crawling in his head, and he forced himself not to shiver. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He was going to stop the Conqueror and make him take back the Bow, and then he’d be done with all of this. White and red and black would go back to being only colors.

  Under him, the horse flew on, and Billy felt a stab of guilt. Maybe the White Rider would return to his senses and take care of the horse. Yes, maybe.

  Wishes and horses, said Gramps.

  The white steed will be all right, he wished, he hoped—no, he insisted. The horse would be all right. They would save the world, and the white horse would have a Rider it could depend on.

  Wishes and horses.

  All too soon, Billy felt his stomach drop, signaling that they had begun their descent. To keep himself from worrying over what would happen once they landed, he risked looking down.

  Floating on the wide-open ocean was a vast expanse of green-tinged white, filled with cracks of dark blue that threaded the surface like veins. As they circled down, he saw that the ground was littered with ridges and bumps, and he thought of the White Rider’s melting face. Closer now, Billy was able to make out ponds of turquoise and aquamarine, the colors a brilliant contrast to the surrounding bed of white. There was a splash of ink against the snow-capped ice, and as the white steed glided down, the darkness pulled into the shape of a horse.

  A black horse.

  They touched down, and the steed of Famine met them as they landed. The horse twined its neck around the white’s in an equine hug, and the two animals exchanged blows of breath that sounded almost intimate.

  Over the horses’ greetings, Billy heard a woman’s voice rising and falling, imploring. Begging.

  As if in response, the White scratched at Billy’s mind, urging him to hurry.

  Right, he thought. I’m hurrying. And not at all panicking.

  He pulled himself off the white horse’s back, and his bare feet landed in snow that he couldn’t feel. He was breathing too fast, and he was fairly certain he was a candidate for cardiac arrest based on how his heart was pounding, but at least he was standing on his own two feet. Around him was a land of white on white, a place of eternal winter. Snow drifts piled on top of a sheet of ice, stretching as far as he could see. His breath frosted, and he wondered why he wasn’t cold.

  As if Death would let him come all this way just to die from hypothermia. That would be completely lame.

  He peered up a slope that was splotched with hoof prints. Clearly, the black horse had made its way down the incline the traditional equestrian way. Maybe it had been too tired to fly. There was a question his math teacher would love: How many calories does an Apocalyptic steed burn when it flies across the Western Hemisphere in ten minutes? Answer: lots.

  The woman’s voice rose once more, and now Billy could make out a word: Please. And then he heard nothing at all.

  No time for fear.

  He set off at a run, crunching through the snow fast enough that his PE instructor would have been impressed. Yet another thing for him to consider, should he survive the upcoming encounter: try out for the varsity track team. He grinned madly as he worked his way up the slope. Save the world in under two minutes—go!

  His mouth set in a rictus, he loped over a swell of ice and snow at the top of the hill . . . and came to a stumbling halt.

  There, on a flat expanse of snow framed by icy knolls, stood the Ice Cream Man, caught in profile. An arctic gust snatched his long hair and the ends of his coat, slapping at him furiously. His head was thrown back as if in ecstasy, and his arms stretched high above as if he were orchestrating the movement of the wind. A nimbus of filth surrounded him in an aura of frozen dust, and he stood in the center of a cesspool of disease, disease that was invisible to Billy’s eyes but strong enough to make his skin crawl.

  The White pulled at him, demanded that he move forward, but the sight of the shadow at the Conqueror’s feet rooted him to the spot. A woman in black sprawled on the ground, unconscious or worse. Billy stared at her, transfixed by the spill of black-clad limbs against the snow, and he thought of Marianne, his Marianne, telling him that he was a hero, and imagined her crushed by the madness of the White Rider.

  A surge of fury, white hot and blinding, burned away any vestiges of panic. “Stop!” he shouted, his voice echoing across the frozen wasteland.

  The White Rider paused, then pivoted to face him. Beneath strands of greasy black hair, the silver Crown gleamed on his pockmarked brow. The Conqueror grinned, a thing of stillborn dreams and bloody nightmares.
“Come here,” he said with a bubbling laugh. “Come here and see the end of the world.”

  And then, still grinning madly, he unleashed the White upon Billy Ballard.

  Chapter 20

  Billy Saw the Flare of White . . .

  . . . around the Conqueror’s hands, saw those hands come together and aim right at him, and for a moment he was tempted to take it, to roll with the punches because that’s what he always did—just tense up for the punch in the gut, the kick when you’re down; let the worst happen because soon enough, it will pass.

  (It won’t last, a man’s voice insisted.)

  And then Billy’s survival instinct kicked into overdrive. With a yelp, he threw himself to the snowy ground just before something careened over him. He sensed it as it zoomed by, understood with still-unfamiliar senses that it was a bolt of pure White, a thing of disease given form as it soared past. His arm had gone up automatically to shield his head, and now, down on the ground with his face in the snow, he felt something settle over the bare skin of his arm, brushing against him like ashes.

  Five-year-old Billy sang, Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!

  Fifteen-year-old Billy ignored the playful singsong and scrambled to his feet—just in time to see the White Rider take aim. He dove to the right, barely avoiding another blast.

  “The end of the world,” said the Conqueror, his voice thick with laughter and menace. “The end of everything.”

  His arm stinging, his heart pounding, Billy desperately wished he were anywhere but there. Wishes and horses, Gramps would have said. Wishes and horses.

  ***

  The white steed danced in place, eager to move. Even the closeness of Famine’s horse couldn’t soothe it; the black steed nickered softly and tried to nuzzle against it, but the white horse moved out of reach. It didn’t want to be soothed. It sensed its Rider—both of its Riders, the man and the boy—somewhere above, somewhere amid all the White.

  Two Riders.

  The notion made the horse giddy. Two! Two Riders to carry; two Riders to belong to. It wanted to canter in a circle and give voice to its joy. Two Riders meant the steed would not be left alone anymore, would not be overlooked or ignored—would not be left waiting as the seasons came and went and the world grew ever older, waiting for a Rider to pat its neck and climb atop its back, ready to be borne across the sky in a wave of White. Two Riders meant that the horse was still needed.