Now I know.
I cannot lose her.
It’s not even a question. It’s a certainty. I simply can’t. It’s the same damnable choice Lazarus made when she discovered Ben. A single person can change your life. As a human, you can love deeply enough to doom humanity.
Or redeem it.
Chapter 76
The Beyond
October, Year 27 of the Horsemen
Death
“Wait,” I call out.
Lazarus’s family is already welcoming her; she is frightfully close to that blinding light of the beyond. Have I ever considered heaven frightful before this moment? Because right now, it is. And she’s a hair’s breadth from it.
“Wait,” I say again, softer this time.
Lazarus turns back to face me. The raw hope in her eyes cuts me deep. Too long that hope has been dashed.
It won’t be ever again. I don’t care if I have to apologize every day for the rest of our mortal lives, so long as we get those lives.
I move towards the spirits that surround her, brushing past them to get to Lazarus.
I clasp her spectral face in my hands. When I look into her eyes, I feel a deep sense of certainty not just that I can give up my task, but that I must. Not even God’s commands can drown out this drive I feel. I would tear away my immortality, my heavenliness, and I would unmake the world, all for the press of this woman’s lips against my skin and her voice in my ear.
“If I gave you everything you wanted—your son, an end to the apocalypse and the killing—would you return to Earth?” I ask.
Her brows draw together in confusion, and the sight of it wounds me. I have set her expectations so low, she cannot make sense of this.
“You—” my voice fails me, and I have to start again. “You can go with your loved ones and enter the afterlife. There will be no more pain.” I draw in a shuddering breath, the possibility terrifying to me. “Or, you could stay with Ben, on earth. I can’t promise that there will be no pain. To live is to feel pain.”
She doesn’t say anything, and I can’t read her face.
“What about you?” she eventually says.
I inhale sharply, and it’s as if I’ve drawn in my first breath. “I want you, Lazarus. With every part of me, I do. That will never change.” My love is just as vast and unending as the rest of me. “But I hurt you, and then I took you and then I disappointed you—”
One of her spectral hands presses against my lips, silencing me.
“I have done all the same to you,” she says. “It is forgiven.” She searches my features. “We have spent the entirety of our relationship fighting for our causes. What if we started fighting for one another?”
I go still at the implication.
Lazarus continues. “I want to return to Earth—and I want everything you promised. But I also want one more thing—” She smiles, “you.”
Chapter 77
Los Angeles, California
October, Year 27 of the Horsemen
Lazarus
I gasp in a breath, and my lungs expand. Rocks are digging into my back and everything feels … well, less than whimsical.
I blink my eyes open and stare up at Thanatos.
Except for that face. That face is pure whimsy.
The horseman smiles at me, and that smile manages to drive away all the shadows that linger on his face.
I grin back at him, my entire body feeling alive.
But then the smile slips from Death’s face. For a moment, he looks confused.
“Thanatos?”
Just as I begin to sit up, he chokes.
“Thanatos!” What’s going on?
I slip out of his arms so that I can kneel in front of him.
“Death?”
He looks at me, but his eyes are unfocused. The horseman rises to his feet, and for an instant I think that he’s fine. But then he staggers backwards, looking at something in the distance that only he can see. His armor dissolves away completely, and I realize I’m seeing an angel being stripped of his immortality.
Death’s wings flare wide and he cries out, his body taut with pain. He reaches for his back as the feathers begin to peel off his wings one by one, the inky black plumage tossed about in the wind. The feathers fall away faster and faster. I brace myself for the sight of the flesh beneath them, but there’s nothing there. It’s as though the appendages themselves are being blown away.
I ache at their loss. I know they were cumbersome for him, but I thought they were one of the aspects of the horseman that was beautiful because it was inhuman.
He breathes heavily. All that’s left of his immortal attire are his clothes and boots. With effort, he straightens.