War wrenches his wrist out of my grip and yanks me closer.
The steel of the sword presses into my thigh, but I don’t wince. I’m too stunned by the unleashed heat in War’s stare.
“Go,” he growls at me. “Take your steed and flee. You can kill Death—destroy him before he destroys you.”
Brow arched, I blink at him.
I’m not certain what catches me off guard more. War’s intimate lure to my body, his heated belief in my abilities, or that he thinks either of us can really kill Death.
“I cannot defeat him alone,” I say.
We barely stand a chance together.
“You can, because he will not be expecting it. Death expects you to run to him, weak and tired of this life, and ready to sacrifice everything to join him. So join him,” he adds with a smile, toothy and cruel enough to excite me, “deceive him like he has done to you, then break him.”
War kisses me.
I freeze, hands stiff against him.
But War is in a flurry of unleashed desire, and pins me against his body. His tongue takes advantage of my shock and sweeps into my mouth.
He even tastes like bloodshed…
I blink, hands coming down on his strong shoulders none too gently. And I bite his tongue hard enough to taste more copper spill into my mouth.
He releases me. I stumble back.
War gives me that cruel crooked smile, and my insides twist. I’ve been lured by that darkness before, and look where it got me.
“Don’t think this lets you out of our battle,” he warns, wearing that damn smile.
I manage a grim look. “Then I hope you are willing to join my beloved in failure.”
War barks a laugh. It’s sharp and cutting, like shattered glass. There’s something beautiful about it.
And now I know I’m in trouble.
Swallowing hard, I take a step away from this bait. War will not be my next undoing.
He sharply turns to the advancing hums. A dozen shiny black machine-birds, closing in on us, stretching over the sky like gargantuan bats.
“Go!” War shoves me.
The thunderous thrum of the machine-birds almost drowns out his voice.
I stagger to the doors, where the steeds are rushing out to meet us. Brunhella zips past me without a look back, and takes her place with War.
He raises his sword, and a booming war-cry ignites everything. The balcony rattles, and cracks spear at my feet.
Thunder tears through the sky with a force so powerful that the machine-birds rattle—one plummets to the ground in a smoky ribbon.
Snatching Shadow’s reins, I leap onto his back and he dives over the edge of the balcony.
Shadow lands on the damp dirt of the woods.
He barely has a moment to start a gallop when the entire earth shudders all around us.
Crashes scream out from the balcony.
Wide-eyed, I look over my shoulder, hair whipping my face, just in time to see the machine-birds blow into great bursts of flames. If fire came in balls, that is what they became. And they piled into the villa, setting everything alight.
I don’t see War.
But as the villa crumbles to blasts and flames, I feel his sudden absence from the bond.
“Run.” My voice shakes with the awe clinging to me. Humans have come too far—and this being my final mission makes all the more sense. “Faster, Shadow! Run!”
And he does.
Before any more machine-birds or fireballs can come, we’re already long gone from the remains of the villa and scorched woods.
Invisible to the humans, we race through the trees, and soon, I can’t even hear the crackle of the fires anymore.
I force my bond shut like a stubborn drawer, throwing all my weight against it.
It’s the only way now.
War stayed behind to buy me time.
With my silence in the bond, Death will think I’m in the abyss. Weak. But he’ll fast figure it out. I don’t have much time.
So I ride, the fury of betrayal forcing me on, and Shadow’s growing strength nurtured by his protectiveness of me.
“Are you sure you can do this, Pessie?” he asks as we pound through the land.
“I am a killer,” I hiss, “with a broken heart. In this existence, I was born for this.”
Finally, I will get revenge for all that Death has done to me.
And Death will pay the price for crossing me.
Chapter 27
For days, I bound through the lands and oceans, chasing Death.
The vineyard is where he waits for me—I don’t need to pry open the bond to know that, because I know him. His arrogance, his predictability. It’s all the guidance I need.
We stop for very little. Not even to give ourselves the rest our bodies crave.
Sickness still scrambles within us, hoping to cling onto a strengthening bone or pulsing vein. But we defeat it in our stubbornness.
Even without the bond open, I know War is silent.
Whether he survived the fires and collapse, or he was stolen away by his final act in his mission, I don’t know for certain.
But he delayed the humans somehow. Distracted them—long enough for war, famine and pestilence to sweep the lands.
Already, I can taste it in the air … the loss of a species.
Because of War’s sacrifice, I’m a mere border away from Athens, and I haven’t seen a human since I left him on the balcony.
“He did us a service,” comments Shadow as we trot through a village ravaged by my plague.
Bodies are strewn about all over. Dangling from windowsills that overlook us.
Here, I feel all of us.
Pestilence in the putrid stench oozing from sore-spotted corpses. Famine in the moulded tins of food rolling down the roads in the breeze, and on the maggots that nest in butchered meats within the shops. War in the blood running down the streets like rain water in a flood.
Most of all, I feel him. Death. His inky, bitter smell is everywhere. Souls don’t wander in this village of horrors.
He’s come through here, collected the lost souls and taken them to Athens with him. It churns my stomach with a whirlpool of cold dread.
What food is to humans, what blood is to War, souls are to Death.
Souls make him stronger.
My gaze lingers over the corpse of an old woman, a wooden cane at her stiff fingers. She’s sprawled out on the road, painted in blood, smeared in puss and vomit.
The stench of her waste crinkles my nose.
I press my lips together.
Any one of us could have been the one to end her. It’s impossible to tell now that the animals have gotten to her.
Nature, righting the balance.
Crows peck at the gooey remains of her eyeballs, dogs clearly having devoured most of her legs.
It’s not disgust or pity I feel.
“Then what is it?” Shadow asks as he trots around the corpse.
I look ahead, hardness setting my face.
“Justice,” I say firmly.
Shadow isn’t surprised, and I wonder if I expected him to be.
This mission, my mercy spent on the treacherous Addie, the hunter on the cracked land, the boatmen, the soldiers—it has only cemented my disdain for the humans.
“I wavered once,” I tell my steed. “I nearly let myself forgive them for their wrongs. That was a mistake—a weakness. War was right to judge me for it.”
Shadow skips out of the dead village.
“There has never been a greater killer than the humans,” Shadow says after a while of silent pondering. “And I dislike them more now than ever before.”
“Why is that?”
“Before,” he says, “at least they could not fly.”
I laugh.
My head throws back and, for the first time in many long-ago memories, a laugh juts my body. A true deep one that rumbles my belly and aches my jaw.
Beneath me, Shadow guffaws at his own jo
ke.
“It will be a mission to remember,” I say, grin fading to a smile.
Never have we had a mission like it.
The humans’ advancements, Death’s return into my nook of the world, Famine’s orders then her sudden disappearance, and of course, War.
So much more of War than I expected. Not for a long time have I felt this much. Too much, I might say.
But my steed, as loyal and wise as he is, says, “Better to feel too much before our graves than to feel nothing at all.”
I smile and plant a gentle kiss between his ears. They twitch, happily.
“And what do you feel, Shadow?”
“All that you do,” he states the obvious, “and pride.”
I arch an eyebrow at him.
He explains, “I am proud of you, Pessie. I go gladly into battle by your side.”
The rest of our journey passes in silence.
Our shared loyalty and love need not be declared—we know it in each other without the words. We go, together, to the vineyard where I was never cursed, like I thought for so long.
No, this is no curse.
I was blessed. By my steed.
My Shadow.
426 B.C.; Athens.
Death’s final visit was one of duty.
He had come for her.
Most of the household had perished to the sickness by then. Hella had watched them go, one by one, and each time she found that she cared a little less than the last.
But then it was her turn. And she was afraid.
Death held her. In the vineyard, where they’d first met, he wrapped his arms and cloak around her.
They waited.
They watched the stars and waited for the sound of her last breath, the final beat of her slow heart.
Hella titled her head back against his collarbone and looked up at him.
Death already gazed down at her.
“Did you ever notice,” she croaked, “we’re both reapers? I reap grapes. You reap souls.”
He pulled her closer, his arms caging her against him.
“I wonder,” she said, “are we both … slaves, too?”
Death ran his fingertips over her stomach. The scrape of his sharp, coarse nails tugged at her bandage dress.
“Yes,” he said.
“I…” She hesitated. “I’m afraid to leave. I’m afraid I won’t see you again.”
Death brushed a kiss against her sweaty forehead. “You will.”
Hella’s eyes fluttered shut. “Will you visit me in hell?”
If Death had an answer, she never learned it.
The muffled sound of hooves hitting the dirt broke them apart. Death was on his feet, a blood-crusted dagger in hand.
Through hooded, bloodshot eyes, Hella squinted into the darkness ahead, where Death’s dark gaze reached.
A shadow swelled up between the rows of grapevines.
At first, it looked like a distorted beast, an animal from the pits of hell.
Hella leaned against the wicker basket, too sore to run, too weak to scramble away. Hell’s hounds had come for her, she thought. But as the bulbous shadow crept closer, she realised what it was—and who.
A stark white horse strode up the dirt path towards them. It wore a golden saddle and ribbed armour. Its nose shone like the juices of a rotten grape in the night, casting a faint bloody glow on the vineyard.
On its back was what Hella had first thought to be an angel, if angels had no wings and carried cruelty in their eyes. A golden river of hair rippled down the side of her dark-skinned face, where her empty eyes pierced across the lane to Death.
Sheathed in armour to match her horse’s, the woman strode proudly towards them, her chin lifted and eyes locked onto Death’s.
Then, her gaze shifted to Hella.
She stared at her for a quick second, a split moment in the whole of time. But Hella felt it strike through her. Disgust poured from those eyes.
The Horsewoman wore the colours of the dirt and rotten foods, and spoke in a voice like gravelled stone; “Thanatos.”
Death’s pale fingers still clutched the dagger at his side. “Conqueror.”
“They know,” was all she said. “And They have a message for you.”
Golden-flecked eyes drifted, slowly, to Hella on the dirt. Her browned lip curled.
Death traced Conqueror’s gaze to the human, and even through the fog of sickness that had settled over Hella, she saw the flash in his obsidian eyes—he was afraid, or close to it, if even for just a second.
Death turned back to the Horsewoman. “She is dying as we speak. At most, she has minutes. I will take my punishment after I guide her through the veil.”
His cloak swirled as he moved for Hella.
Hella drooped to her side, staring at him with pained eyes. Her hand lifted, reaching out for his, but when he stilled, her hand dropped back to the dirt.
The white horse stomped its hoof.
“You do not understand,” said Conqueror, fury laced into her voice. “Your crimes—bedding a human,” she spat the word, “have earned the most severe punishment, my old friend. Their message to you is this: You will have what you want most in a manner you loathe most. You will be bound to Their servitude for eternity, to this world only. You will be bound, eternally, to the human you desire so much.”
Hella choked on a raspy cough. Her glossy eyes pleaded up at Death, begging him to hold her hand one last time.
But Death stared down at her in horror, as if he truly saw for the first time the sickness on her grey-tinted skin, her brittle hair, her reddened eyes and chapped lips.
It wasn’t what Death saw that had him frozen in horror. It was the promise in Conqueror’s words.
Death rounded on her.
Tar dripped from his cloak, the poison from all the dead he carried. Globs of it slapped to the dirt and sizzled. “You threaten me, Conqueror? You might be the Horsewoman, and your powers formidable, but I am Death. I will strip you of your skin, your insides, down to your soul if you dare threaten her—”
“It is not I who threatens her.” She looked heavenwards. “It is They who promise wrath.”
Before Death could trace her gaze to the skies, a sudden darkness swallowed them up. The stars vanished behind the thickness of the cloud, and thunder rumbled through the air, down to the rattling ground.
Death made to reach Hella, to lunge at her.
He was not fast enough.
He’d barely turned her way when the storm gathered in a bubbling, churning cloud right above her and—
Six lightning bolts tore from the clouds at once. Each one of them blasted into the dying mortal like a half-dozen arrows from heaven.
Hella cried out, a sound strangled in static-like agony, a pain so intense it could’ve only come from another world.
The blast bounced her upwards, high into the air, where the storm clouds threw down upon her. Where she’d laid a second before the lightning, was now only a charred, scorched circle in the ground.
She fell from the air and smacked onto the ground.
Death rushed to her side.
His hands hovered above her soot-smeared face, as if afraid to touch her for fear of hurting her. Smoke billowed from her mouth and nostrils, all colour to her skin had melted into the sizzling ground. She laid, sprawled, on the dirt, as still as the night sky suddenly went.
Conqueror dismounted her steed.
“She will survive,” said the Horsewoman. “Plagued by disease, always. Her new life will forever be bound to the last moments of her human existence—a constant state of sickness. She will always be on the brink of death, but never reach its warm embrace. And you, Thanatos, will bear witness to her suffering forever.”
Conqueror took a step closer.
“Your Free Will has been taken. You shall henceforth do as They command. Together, the three of us shall slumber until our time comes and we awake to the calls of Their commands.”
Crouched over the motionless body,
Death let his eyes close, his arms holding her to him.
“I will conquer the world, spread famine, wage wars,” said the Horsewoman. “She will plague, and you will collect.”
Death’s eyes stayed closed as he whispered those three words to her unhearing ears, the three words that she, herself, brought upon them with her mockery of Them.
“The Three Horseriders.”
Chapter 28
At the edge of a brittle blackened tree, I dismount Shadow and drape his reins over a branch.
Before he can argue, and I know he will, I take his face in my hands, forcing his furious eyes to mine.
“For once,” I say to him, “I beg you not to fight me. I always have the final say, and your safety is not something I will jeopardise.”
“We will die soon regardle—”
“On our own terms. Shadow, please. Let me not be distracted by your wellbeing in this.”
You are my weakness.
Shadow huffs a hot, heavy breath and turns away.
I’m tempted to say goodbye, just in case this doesn’t go to plan, but I feel his sorrow through the bond, and I know he will break under a farewell.
A gentle sigh leaves me before I kiss his coat, then wander up the remains of the place from my past. It doesn’t bring back memories, though it should.
It is now a place of rubble, waste, and construction. Humans—always desecrating to build more, further out, farther up. They ruin so much.
Mostly, charred trees are what surrounds me. But the thinning of them tells me humans tried to destroy them. They wanted even more of the land that didn’t belong to them.
With a wicked turn to my lips, I relish in victory. Finally, they were delivered a worthy punishment for their greed and arrogance. Finally, I can put to rest my hatred of them.
I reach the end of the scattered trees, and stop.
In a burnt patch of grass ahead, rounded by fallen tree trunks and dried-out bushes, a slimy-skinned woman is sprawled out on her side. Her ribs are peeled apart and, carved from the middle, is a heart settled neatly on the dirt. Pale feet, stained with blood, stand near the stone heart, that’s cracked with oozing crimson streaks.
Feared Fables Box Set: Dark and Twisted Fairy Tale Retellings, (Feared Fables Box Sets Book 1) Page 45