Ezekiel turned just slightly enough to draw Julio's attention back to where Theda was sitting on the couch.
It took a long drawn out moment, but realization eventually found its way onto his face. "Holy fuck, it's you," he blurted.
Ezekiel's tone almost sounded proud, as though he was showing off something remarkable. "Councilman Prusser was about to chop off young Anne's head."
"Prusser's snuff girl is the girl on the promo?"
"The same."
Julio fell into the chair again. Shaking his head. "Well this truly is a fucked up mess then."
The boy chewed his fingernail as he regarded Ezekiel. "Prusser went on Promo to say they had a lead on Henrik's killer, on the woman who murdered the Mayor--that she's a spitter, holed up in one of Sasha's boutiques."
Sasha had more than one boutique? That was disquieting. It took Theda a few moments to process how true the accusation actually was--at least how true it had been for a short while, before the boy spoke again.
"They'd let you rot in there and get what's coming to you," Julio said, pulling his fingers from his mouth and crossing his arms over his knees. "Except they want to make an example of you."
That gave her chills. She licked her lips nervously.
Ezekiel's arms crossed in a way that made Theda shiver. He looked threatening; entirely capable of violence as he faced Julio. "And what has that got to do with Eddie?" He asked, and his tone matched his stance.
Julio ignored the imminent warning. "Well, Eddie recruits, doesn't he? And he sells the leftover organs from the snuff action on the black market. Well, if there's anything usable left, that is," he said as an afterthought and Theda found herself wincing as she imagined what her fate could have been if Ezekiel hadn't found her in time.
"You know that's what he does for a living, and it doesn't bother you?" She asked Julio, unable to keep the accusation from her tone.
"It's how I get to live in such luxury." Julio spread his arms wide to indicate the small apartment with a twisted grin on his face. "Eddie knows how to keep his men happy."
Julio didn't sound happy; in fact, he sounded pretty damned sour.
"That's disgusting," she said.
"Judge not," Julio said, eyeing the way her thighs peeked out from beneath the lamé skirt. "Besides, working in that place helps him keep a low profile."
"Still, I wouldn't think a little thing like black market organ sales would be such big deal," Ezekiel said.
Julio shrugged, pouting. "Maybe not. At least not until someone recognizes him."
"Who would care?" Ezekiel seemed to grow bored at the information even as Theda kept having to swallow down her own bile with each new tidbit. She couldn't stop pressing her fingers into her belly, feeling for her liver.
"He's a lover," the boy said. "As if you didn't know that. One of Henrik's harem. That's what makes this such a mess. They sent the horsemen in," he said. "Into spitters'dens all over the city."
"Sweet Fuck," Ezekiel murmured.
"Yeah," Julio said chuckling darkly. "You see the trouble. The horsemen will know him on sight."
Ezekiel swung away from them both, facing the wall, his hands clenched at his sides. Theda watched his hands curl and uncurl into fists. She had heard of the horsemen; everyone knew who they were. An elite army of soldiers set to do the Beast's bidding much like the SS had in Nazi Germany. All ruthless, led by four equally ruthless generals. Not so much to keep the peace, but to keep the mandate of anti-theistical life in the Beast's new Earth.
She wasn't sure why this bothered him so. She thought of Bridget, dark-haired, full-bodied Bridget who, according to Ezekiel, had also been a lover--a movement of people from Henrik's harem, safe now despite her safe house being raided.
"Surely they won't bother with Eddie," Theda said. "If they're looking for me, maybe they'll be too busy--"
"They'll make the time," Ezekiel said, turning. The muscles in his throat worked as he tried to control what Theda interpreted as panic. And if Ezekiel could panic, then maybe Julio was right to call it a mess.
"Damn right they'll make the time," Julio said. "They're re-educating every one of the harem when they find them. All of the lovers."
"What does that mean?" She looked at Ezekiel for an explanation, hoping it wasn't as threatening a concept as Julio made it sound.
"It means," he said. "Electroshock therapy. Torture. Lobotomies for those who refuse to be re-educated. Death if that doesn't work."
The look on his face, the almost vacant stare that told Theda he was struggling to focus made her believe he had lied to her earlier.
"Bridget," she guessed.
He nodded miserably. "If the horsemen find anyone from the harem during their search for you they'll take them to the sanatoriums."
"I thought you said she was safe. I thought you said she got away."
He swallowed hard. She watched the Adam's apple Bob up and down for several moments before he would answer. "I gave her enough money to buy a week in one of Sasha's rooms." "
"And they're looking for me there," Theda said. "So they'll find her."
"And Eddie," Julio collapsed onto the chair. "Poor Eddie."
"We need to get back in there," Ezekiel said. Almost absently, he tapped his foot and Theda thought of the monstrous knife he stored in there. She imagined him storming the den with a Taser in one hand and a knife in the other: both woefully inadequate weapons under the circumstances.
"Oh, no," she said. "Maybe you need to get back in there but I'm not going anywhere." She crossed her arms over her chest as she halted next to the counter, placing her fingers purposely on the sideboard. What good was a bounty hunter who carried nothing more frightening than a Taser and a knife? No good, that was what.
"I'm staying here."
Julio propelled himself from his chair, rounding the counter, pulling open drawers. "And what makes you think I'm going to let you stay here?" he complained. "Who knows how many people saw you come into my apartment? It's not safe for me to let you stay here."
"Well, then I'll go somewhere else, but I'm not going back there." Theda turned her back on Julio, she could handle him. Instead, she glared at Ezekiel.
"You'll go if I say you go." He informed her with perfectly enunciated words that made her blood boil.
"You can't control me."
"Exactly the problem," he said. "And I can't protect you if I don't know where you are. How do I know you won't go off and take another smear. Get yourself captured."
"Maybe giving me a smear is the best way to control me," she said, thinking of how he'd forced her to take three of them when he'd arrested her. She crossed her arms as she confronted him. They'd come a long way since then. "You know, in books the hero tries to protect the heroine, not drag her back into danger."
"Books are fiction, Minou; they're not real."
"Who the hell are you?" She demanded. "First you arrest me so I can be interrogated and nearly killed. You saved me from that and now you want to take me back into the lion's den? It doesn't make any sense. Why save me only to put me back in harm's way?" Her instinct for survival was in overdrive; and she didn't care if it meant Bridget's life or Eddie's, they were nothing to her, really. She had exactly one person to worry about and that person was getting the hell out of Dodge.
He stepped in front of her, blocking her from the door. "I have my reasons."
"Well, I'm not going."
He gripped her by the shoulders, giving her a shake. "You're going. I can use you as leverage to get to Bridget if I need to, but I won't let anything happen to you."
Julio piped up pitifully, over the sound of rattling silverware as he slammed a drawer closed. "Or Eddie."
Ezekiel looked back over his shoulder. "Sure, or Eddie."
"I'm not going," Theda said.
"I told you I can protect you, Theda. Don't you believe me?"
"I don't know what to believe. All I know is I'm not going back there. I'll take my chances on the street."
"And
chances they'll be." Ezekiel said. "You'll be dead before morning. If the horsemen are out in force, it's not just the regular citizens who will be your greatest danger. Trust me."
"You didn't keep me safe before. I almost died in that den."
"Almost died," he repeated as though it mattered, stressing the adverb.
She shook her head. "It's the horsemen, Ezekiel," she said, realizing the depth of the danger she was in, finally. He'd been trying to instill it in her all along, but she'd stubbornly clung to the belief that she was just one small player in a global act, that the anonymity of being so worthless would keep her safe in the end. Now she knew better.
"They're ruthless, Ezekiel. You must've seen them during the Holocaust. You must've watched the devastation they left in their wake." She shuddered as she said this, imagining that the horsemen's path must've been very much like the Vikings in the old world. Vikings and Genghis Khan would have been a bedtime story compared to the things the horsemen did.
"Ruthless doesn't describe it," she said.
He shrugged. "I know."
"You can't know," she argued. "Because if you did, you wouldn't be expecting me to let myself be your bait for a woman I don't even know."
"She's got a point, there," Julio said and Ezekiel's glare made him take a step backward, fumble for the counter.
"A woman who gave you the clothes off her back and a place to sleep," Ezekiel said without taking his eyes off Julio.
She looked down at her dress, thinking she'd give anything to have those simple jeans and T-shirt back, but she'd stripped them off before she'd taken her last smear, back before Ezekiel had pulled her from the house when they were raided. Assuming they had been raided. She didn't even know for sure; all she knew was what he told her.
"I'm grateful to her," she said. "But that's asking too much. I'm not going. Nothing you say can convince me."
"Theda, I'm one of the horsemen."
He looked at his boots as he said this, as he let her take in the full measure of his statement. And it took her several moments for it to completely sink in. His casual, almost thoughtless acceptance of violence and killing. The men from the night he abducted her, his killing of the Mayor. Despite his admitting that he worked for the Beast, she'd assumed his taking of those lives had been a measure of how pressed he'd felt to do so, not because it was a natural inclination for him.
She shivered involuntarily as she realized it, because only then did she realize how close to danger she had actually been all this time. Ezekiel, one of the horsemen. That was how he knew Bridget; that was how he knew Eddie: because as a horseman he would have known the Beast's son, would have met the people in Henrik's harem. She felt a strange sense of betrayal that she couldn't articulate; she could only stare at her feet until she heard him speak again, and even then she couldn't meet his gaze. She could only hug her chest tighter.
"I know full well the ruin of the Holocaust," he said, taking deliberate steps toward her even as she fumbled her way backwards, searching for a glass, knife, something to wield as a weapon. And to think she had almost given herself to him. Believed for a moment he cared about her.
"I saw it all up front. All in living color."
She felt Julio's hand slip into hers as Ezekiel spoke, heard his breath change to something less rhythmic and she realized Julio understood things that still managed to escape her.
"I was there, Theda," Ezekiel said, ignoring the ragged way her chest had begun to move, the way she sucked air in desperate measures, coming close enough that she could smell his cologne and the heat from his body. She thought she was going to be sick.
"I was there during the Apocalypse because death is my business. I'm the Pale Rider."
Agni: Act 3
The Pale Rider. Death himself. Theda knew it all so well. A girl didn't live as the daughter of an evangelical preacher her entire life and not learn a thing or two about the end of times and the four most powerful riders in the history of religion. But the Apocalypse, the idea of tribulation, rapture, of judgment of the just hadn't exactly occurred the way her father always believed or taught. And not just him, either. None of the religions had gotten it truly right. Little bits and pieces of it, yes: just enough that a girl could easily compare the accuracy of the world's religions and their predictions to prophesying an entire novel from a random sentence in the middle.
Even so, Christianity had gotten one thing correct. Four things, actually. Men from all corners of the earth with a particular and specific specialty on their roster of skill sets when the Beast took over the Earth. All equally frightening in prophetic notions, and equally frightening in their reality.
And here she was standing in front of the most terrifying one of the four.
"You didn't bring me to the mayor because I was religion mongering," she said to him, the full weight of her realization making it difficult to speak. "And you didn't save me from him because you saw something that tweaked some dormant sense of humanity in that vision."
He shook his head in response, looking wholly miserable.
"You took me there because you thought I posed a threat to the Beast and his religion-less world and you needed to know for sure. How stupid am I--you tried to tell me that, but I didn't know what it really meant." She choked on a spurt of laughter and put a finger to her temple, thinking it through, trying to remember everything he'd told her. "I thought we shared something in that lifetime that made you care." She chortled humorlessly, feeling the freefall grasping at her throat. "When all along you saved me because you realized it was true. That the Beast would want me alive."
She was prowling the room now, the hand that had earlier clutched Julio's in a sense of protective joining now lay on her heart because the muscle inside had begun to hurt. She'd been stupid, so stupid. The godspit had dulled her wits. And now she was in greater danger than if she had just been left in the Mayor's hands. But he had done that. He was responsible for her alleged escape. He: the Pale Rider of the Apocalypse. She waved her hands in front of her face, trying to feed her lungs and failing. She began to suck air in like it was coming through a narrow straw. It wasn't enough. She wouldn't be able to feel her muscles with such niggardly amounts of oxygen.
"If that was entirely true," he said, trying to catch her by the waist as she spun past him. "If that was true don't you think you would be somewhere else right now"
She wrenched free and he was left to plead with open palms in front of his waist.
"Think, Theda. Don't you think you'd be facing the Beast, not holed up in a dank little apartment?"
"Hey," Julio complained.
Ezekiel ignored Julio's protest. "Minou," he said, trying to grapple for her hand and missing it. "If it doesn't make sense, it must be because it isn't true. Why else would I save you if I didn't care?"
She backed away. "I don't know. I don't know what it is you're after. I only know I'm not safe in my grotto enjoying a night of bliss because you arrested me on pretense of religion mongering. I only know you murdered the mayor when everyone assumed you had left the religion monger in his capably torturous hands. I only know..."
She trailed off because she didn't know any more than that. A few days ago she'd been earning enough money for a sandwich and coffee, enjoying night after night of forgetful ecstasy in the throes of a drug that evaporated her every memory, pain, regret, and found some sort of uneasy routine that at least made this new world bearable. Now all she had was a crystal-clear mind with snapping synapses that made her flesh crawl with realization. The godspit had finally left her system, leaving her painfully aware, and painfully aware was absolutely no way for a gal like her to live.
He looked pained. His green eyes crinkled at the corner. He held his hands out to Julio, supplicating in a way that made Theda press her palm into her belly. Julio shook his hands and backed away, started rifling through his cupboards again, but she didn't dare take her eyes off Ezekiel long enough to find out what he was looking for.
"I ha
d my orders. I never lied to you about that." Ezekiel tried to step closer again, but Theda backed away until her legs met the edge of the sofa. She collapsed onto it.
"Why do you really want to go back to the den?" She asked him and held tightly to her belly as she waited for the answer. Oh, the pain of it, the need for the bliss, the desire for a smear. She could be sick with all of it.
"Bridget," he said.
"You told me you weren't lovers," she accused, thinking as she said it that she didn't truly know anything. She couldn't trust anything he'd said. She couldn't really expect him to give her an honest response, now. She'd grown more stupid with each hour she'd spent with him, trusting, believing.
"We aren't lovers," he said. "I did not lie to you."
"You have lied. You've been lying all along." She wanted to accuse him of more; she wanted to tell him she'd begun to have feelings for him, that she would have given him anything, but she couldn't do that, now. It was an accusation that would hurt her more than it would him. He didn't care. He had never cared. She opened her mouth to say that, and thought she actually did speak until she heard the report of a gun, smelled what she could've sworn was the stink of sulfur, and realized as her mouth clicked closed that Julio had shot at them.
Agni: Act 4
She'd heard somewhere that a person could be hit and not feel it, that adrenaline robbed a body of its pain for exactly as long as it took for the synapses to receive the message and that it could be at least a dozen seconds. She groped about her chest for the hot stickiness of blood in the seconds after she registered the shot, and when her brain registered the feel of her hands scouring her body, she knew she was clean of a bullet. Without thinking, her gaze flew to Ezekiel. She wasn't sure why she was relieved when she found him still standing.
"Get the fuck out," Julio said, the gun trembling in his hand. There was a steely look in his eye, but the seesawing of his jaw gave away his alarm. His stare was locked on the hole he'd put in the wall, not on either of them as he pressed against the cupboards, protecting his back like a cornered rabbit.
Wicked Legends: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection Page 91