Death is unlike the other Horseriders in many ways—in this moment, he is unlike us in the way he moves. I sway above Shadow, our slinking limbs in perfect harmony. Death glides; keeping the ghostly presence he’s had since I first knew him.
Beside me, Death glides and brings me back to the vineyard, where he would sweep over the ground, his feet not always touching the dirt, but floating above it.
It reminds me that he is ancient. Not like me. A force, an entity—something so strong and eternal that his existence came before mine, and might stretch farther than my own.
Does the revelation of War’s purpose affect him? Or will Death merely be freed from his shackles?
“Do you not want to know why I have called for you?” I ask him lazily.
My free hand strokes my tired steed’s neck. There isn’t a cabin in sight, so we must ride on. Still, the twist of guilt reserved only for Shadow deepens in my chest.
Shadow responds to my worries, “Worry not, Pessie. We will find a place to rest.”
Death takes no notice of my beloved steed.
Even Scythe, his own steed, goes ignored. Though, I feel the warmth from the dripping black horse. He always did like Shadow and I.
“Unless your reason for calling on me,” begins Death, “is to soothe the ache we both keep for each other, then I have little interest.”
My jaw sets.
More branches and leaves strike out at us; before they can even leave their marks on our skin, we have healed.
“You make it hard to resist my urges,” I eventually say, and lower my lashes at Death.
He dares to let his lips twist into a smile that once tore my heart from my chest. Now, it stings my insides with bitter poison.
“The urge to flood your veins with my disease,” I add.
It’s not enough to wipe the smile from his face. If anything, it widens and his eyes turn darker, into ink spilled over parchment.
I’m not done. “I could cripple you. Doom you to an existence as painful and wretched as my own.”
“My Hella,” he whispers, fingers dancing down the nape of my neck. “You already have.”
The trees thin, and soon they give way completely to a murky riverbank. I don’t think anything of it, until I feel Shadow’s jolt of relief spur through me like the boatmen’s spears.
“You want to rest here?” I ask him curiously, lines pinching my face into a scowl. “It is wet.”
“It is safe,” he replies in a hoarse whisper. He gestures his heavy head above, at the low hanging leaves and branches from the frontline of the woods.
It will give enough cover, I suppose.
With a hum, I slide off of him, my hands running over his smooth coat. “There, Shadow.”
He follows my gesture to a nook between two trees, hugged so closely together that a grand pile of browning leaves pads the dirt.
Shadow spends the last of his energy dragging himself into the nook. A dark silhouette slips after my steed—Scythe, joining him in a rest.
I turn to the riverbank, keeping my face smooth and clean of the battle within me. Even after all he’s done to me, Death still has the power to set me alight and flood me with hope all at once.
Death has dismounted his steed—he intends to be staying a while. I shouldn’t let excitement or relief take me. But if I’ve learned anything in this cursed life, it’s that my choices are not my own.
“War is here,” I tell him, facing the dark, murky river water. It shimmers, catching light from fireflies and my near-white eyes, but I catch sight of a few eyes of their own.
In the water, camouflaged to human sight, are dozens of glowing stares hooked onto me and Death.
I tilt my head, and study the crocodiles.
Their faces are much narrower than I expected. But as expected, they know better. Some begin to slip back to the opposite side of the river. Others turn faster than a blink of the eye and speed up the way, disappearing into the darkness of the water.
I see some brave enough to stay and watch us. It’s those ones that I spare a smile for—a smile from one predator to another.
Slowly, I peel off the strips of my armour. Sheets of my dress hit the mud at my feet with the clang of heavy metal.
Death slips up behind me.
“I have felt War since you have,” he says, fingers tracing the bare marks on my back where my wings burn off and regrow. Forever red and angry strips of skin. “In fact,” he adds, voice lowering into a dangerous whisper of a growl, “I felt him so clearly that I can still taste the lust he has for you.”
“Had,” I correct. “He had just woken, and was terribly confused.”
I look over my shoulder at my old love, whose eyes travel the skin of my back. He beholds me as though I am something from above, when I am actually something from below.
“He isn’t confused now,” I add. “War remembers why he was sent here, to us. He remembers his mission.”
Death hears the implications in my tone, and his gaze flicks up to mine. I swear a gleam of panic lights up his black eyes for a moment.
“War is here to end all of humanity.”
It takes a second.
A firmness, setting his face into stone—Why should he care about the humans?
Then, it hits.
The Horseriders exist because of the humans. Without those to cull, there is no need for the Horseriders.
No need for me.
426 B.C.; Athens.
Between the grapevine walls, an atrocious thing happened.
Stains darkened the vineyard under the night sky. But neither of the tangled two noticed the spread of black rot on the leaves.
The ghostly pale body didn’t glisten. No sweat beaded on the moonlight back, not even as his pace quickened and the human beneath him began to writhe.
But she glistened. A sickly grey, the beginnings of sickness, beading on her body.
Death curved over her, a protective shield against the prying eyes from above. Hella gripped tight onto his back, red streaks tearing down his skin, and healed in a blink.
Her leg hooked around his hip, guiding him into her, pulling him closer, deeper.
Fingers digging into the dirt, he slammed up against her, and struck from a new angle.
“Heavens!” Hella cried out, toes curling.
Death groaned a hot breath against her neck. “There is no heaven,” he rasped, then slammed into her again.
A wave of pleasure crashed over her; Hella grunted, holding onto him so hard that her nails threatened to snap.
“No,” she agreed throatily. “Not for me—not after this.”
If Death suspected a hint of regret, all he had to do was wait a moment. Hella let out a laugh that jingled like bells at a funeral.
He looped his arm under her back and held her close. Slowly, he slid out of her, lips tasting every bead of diseased sweat that glistened on her neck.
“Why have you stopped?” she whispered, fingernails leaving the fresh dents on his back.
His answer came without words.
Death drew back, a wedge between them, and … beheld her. Stars seemed to glitter in the black of his eyes as he drank her in like wine born of the finest grapes.
Heat crept into her greying cheeks.
Hella had never been looked at in such an intense, glorious way, a way that made her feel like she was something beyond ordinary. Not a slave, stolen from her homeland countries away; not a dying, murderous human with the taste of death on her lips.
In that moment, Hella felt as though she was a fallen star. A godly creature. Someone to be worshipped.
And that is what Death did.
He worshiped her in his travelling gaze, lingering his stare over every bare sliver of skin her wrap dress revealed; in his icy fingertips that grazed over the straps of her dress, drawing them down her shoulders until her breasts peaked under the night’s chill.
Then Death found her lips again with a kiss so gentle and soft that it terrified her.
Slender fingers wrapped around Hella’s wrists, pinning them to the dirt.
A wicked smile took her mouth. Between a string of gasps and grunts, she managed, “You’ve done this before.”
Death’s pace didn’t hitch or hesitate. But his mouth twisted to match hers, and his words came out in breathy whispers; “No. Not like this… Never like this…”
Knees pressed into the hard dirt, he hiked himself up, pushing deeper and deeper inside her.
Hella threw her head back, shudders latching onto her limbs, and she let out a guttural moan. “Yesss…”
It struck. The suspension in time, the freeze that took both of their bodies. Total stillness before the waves came crashing down on them.
Together, their cores pulsed and—
Their shouts caught in the breeze.
Death ground his hips, hands slipping up to tangle with hers.
Hella let her lips graze over his mouth, a heaviness to her eyelids born from their atrocious deed.
Olympus, Heaven, Zion, Nirvana—whatever there was, whatever it was called, Hella knew in that moment what she had done. She had spit at the gods and taken their Death in her body.
But what more could be done to her?
Chapter 14
“War is here to end all of humanity.”
We know what it means—for me.
Death’s face goes slack, and his fingers press harder into my skin. Desperation, clinging to me.
“Hella,” he breathes.
That confirms it. Death is safe from his end. He will return to the duties he held before this life. He will be Death still, and forever.
I slip out of his touch and into the chill of the crocodile-plagued water.
Death follows me, the hem of his shadow-dripping cloak spilling swirls of darkness into the ripples.
“War confirmed it.” I spread the water over me, feeling the dirt from a day’s riding rake down my skin. “I am the final part of his mission—he is to kill me once the last of the humans fall.”
Death threads his damp fingers through my course hair. My eyelids flutter shut. Familiar sensations spring to life within me, and memories flood my unwilling mind.
I must focus. Remember what he’s done to me. The eternal heartache he’s cursed me with.
My muscles go rigid as I jerk out of his reach and turn to face him. I make careful work of not meeting his eyes.
“I will not let that happen.” Death’s voice is gentle, but I know him well enough that I can almost taste the determination in his tone; harder than stone. “I might have the answer to our doomed lives.”
“Our doomed lives,” I echo, a laugh brewing in my throat. But among the fear that I drown in, I can only manage a crooked smile. “Only I am doomed, Death. And one day soon, you will take my soul to the place of damnation.”
“Never.”
I look up at him, studying the cutting shape to his eyes, like blackened blades. As Death—before the Horseriders—he is his own being. A powerful entity of free-will. Maybe he won’t take me to the life that awaits me after this one.
But to leave me would be the greatest curse of all.
“You would abandon my soul, leave it to wander the earth for all eternity?” I can’t keep the hurt from twisting my face. “Leave me to wander between the veils like the rest of these humans?”
That is what happens now to those who die between our missions. While Death slumbers, the dead wander, sometimes for centuries. And when he wakes, he takes to the lands and gathers them at his own pace.
I wonder how many he has left behind.
“I would not.” Death takes a step closer, and the black ripples send the last of the crocodiles scattering. “And there will be no need to collect your soul, Hella. I never planned on taking you to your afterlife in the beginning. That hasn’t changed.”
Back then, when I was dying of the first plague I ever spread—the one in Athens, when I was a mere murderous human—I’d thought Death would take me to the Dark Place; where spoilt and toxic souls suffer forever, drowning and writhing in a ghostly river.
“Where were you going to take me?” I ask.
Death rakes his gaze down my front, pausing at the shimmer of water that dances above my breasts. “I planned on remaking you.”
I blink, stunned.
Remaking…
“Into what?” My whispered words betray me—I balance on a tightrope between hope and terror.
Death turns slightly, and glances over at our steeds, tucked beneath the covering of the thick branches. They sleep, heavily.
He looks at me. “Into my Reaper.”
On the tightrope, I stumble. I don’t fall.
“You were going to remake me … into a story.” It’s not a question. I state it as blankly as I feel it.
Death grins, and it’s so wicked and delightful that every nerve in my body is set alight, and my toes curl deep into the muddy riverbed.
“No, not into a story. A Reaper. A true one, with a body and mind—with choice. And at my side, forever.”
I bite down on my lips to stop a smile from taking.
“You were too late,” is all I managed before I turned my back to him.
Against the darkness of the blackening night, I shut my eyes and let my mind wander to things never to become.
If Death had succeeded that night, would we have gone the way that we did? Would I have found him in the rockpool with the Siren, kissing her, my heart at his feet, and would he have watched me walk away?
If Death had succeeded that night, would I be as broken as I am?
He slips his arms around me, and the icy chill of his cheek against my neck prickles my skin.
We stand, entwined, for so long that I don’t remember the sun grazing the sky with its morning, chaste kisses. Not until I open my eyes, do I realise the night has abandoned us. And in the light of the morning, standing with Death’s arms wrapped around me isn’t unseen. These moments are best left in the safety of the dark.
I draw away from him and wade back to the riverbank.
Shadow begins to stir as I pull on my heavy dress. Armour, disguised by draping blue and sheer purple; heavier than my heart in this moment.
Shadow feels it. All of it.
He looks up at me, our eyes locked for a mere second, and then he’s on his hooves, striding toward me. I don’t miss the glare he cuts Death.
But Death only tilts his head, mildly fascinated. He’s never captured the bond that Shadow and I have. He’s never understood it. Yet he knows, to do anything to Shadow would be his end. I would find a way to kill him for it.
I suppose I should take some solace in this—my greatest love for my steed than my first love.
Shadow nudges his cold nose against my cheek. “My greatest, too.”
I smile and stroke his nose.
Scythe grunts as he stands, beckoned silently by Death.
It’s time. Time to leave each other again.
Since he woke, Death hunted me—searched for me. And now, it seems so empty. Hollow. Like he only needed me for a night, needed to know that I am still his and always will be no matter the pain I’m in.
If that is what he needed from me, he got it. And he’s ready to watch me leave again.
“You called to me, too.” I glance over my shoulder at Death as he fixes the wispy saddle on Scythe. He pauses and listens, not looking at me. “For days, you have been calling out to me—following me. Why?”
Death finishes with the saddle, then takes the reins that seem to melt into his hand, like black oil spilling onto white sand.
“I missed you.”
The honesty strikes me silent and I stare at him, mouth parting into a gape.
“You missed me,” I echo quietly.
Shadow huffs, his hoof hitting the mud wi
th too much force.
He misses what you are.
Shadow’s raspy voice is unmistakable in my mind.
I lock eyes with my steed, taken aback by the sudden turn in his thoughts of Death. Not so long ago, he willed me back to Death’s side. He wished for forgiveness.
What has changed between last night, when we arrived at the river, and now?
Shadow answers my unspoken question, though not in the way I would like.
He misses what you are.
Our bond is so strong, our minds so entwined, that I needn’t wonder for a moment what he’s telling me.
What I am is a killer. What I am, always have been, and will be until my last moment of existence, is a vengeful murderer.
Gaze sliding to Death, I say. “Whatever heart I had left was shattered the night you betrayed me.” I mount Shadow in a single move, then look down my nose at my old love. “You say you miss me, but words without actions are just like you, my dearest Death. Hollow.”
Shadow doesn’t wait for my command. He gives a loud, whiny neigh, and turns his rear to Death and Scythe.
Before we can ride off, Death stops us.
In a swift breeze, Death is on his steed and blocking our way. His bleak eyes, chasms of lives never lived, steal my gaze.
“I will prove my love for you.” Promises from his lips taste like rot and blood. But I am Pestilence—I crave that foul taste. “For now, focus on your mission. You are already sick. Too weak to fight your fate alone.” He tilts his head to the side, and a menacing smirk graces his ghostly-white face. “In my hands, Hella, we will be what we were supposed to be all those lives ago. You and I will be one.”
“Death,” I whisper bitterly, “and his Reaper.”
I let the implications hang between us.
A Reaper—even the first of its kind—is not Death. Just a hand of Death. I will be second to him, a shadow.
My smile turns feral.
“I am fucking Pestilence,” I growl. “I will never be your minion.”
Chapter 15
Hours ago, Shadow and I left Death behind.
He watched me leave. A habit that is forming.
Feared Fables Box Set: Dark and Twisted Fairy Tale Retellings, (Feared Fables Box Sets Book 1) Page 39