“Look at me,” Thanatos demands softly.
I shake my head.
“Lazarus, look at me.”
“I don’t take orders from a horseman,” I say, dragging in a deep breath.
He lets out a low laugh, one that raises the hairs on my arms. “You won’t look at me because you feel it too, and you know I’d see it in your eyes.”
“You are delusional,” I say.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him grin, and my stomach does a weird flip at the sight.
Finish what you started, I command myself, refocusing on the knot. My hands, however, are still shaking.
“We keep fighting this pull between us,” Death says.
“There is no pull between us,” I say adamantly. “You are my enemy.”
“Oh, there is a pull between us.”
I glare down at him. “There isn’t.”
Thanatos stares deeply into my eyes. After a moment, a slow grin spreads across his face. “There it is. You want me too.”
“How would you even know what want looks like?” I accuse.
“There are many souls who crave me, in the end,” he says.
People who crave death, he means.
I frown. “Well, I’m not one of them.”
His grin only grows, making my stomach flutter in the most infuriating way.
“I’m not,” I say defensively. “You’re beautiful. That’s all.”
Dear God, did I actually just say that out loud?
The horseman’s expression grows more intense, his eyes seeming to burn. “You think I’m beautiful.”
Death no longer needs to kill me, I think my own embarrassment will do the job just fine.
Why did I say that?
His gaze is still heated, his expression still challenging me.
“Aren’t you tired of all this?” He nods towards the ruins of Kansas City. “Aren’t you tired of the fighting, the struggle, the pain?”
God, but I am. For every town I save, there are at least five others I can’t.
“Of course I’m tired.”
Tired to my bones.
It doesn’t change anything.
Death’s gaze gentles and he says softly, “Then come with me.”
For a moment, the offer sounds unbearably good, like falling into bed after a long day.
I stare into Thanatos’s eyes, which are full of so many secrets. So, so many secrets.
“Come with me,” he says again.
I could. No more fighting. No more exhaustion. I’d just … give in. Perhaps I cannot die and my body can never know true and final peace, but this seems like a close second.
“We would just keep fighting,” I argue with myself out loud.
“What if we decided to stop hurting one another?” he counters, and he’s the devil in my ear. “I despise seeing you suffer, and I know it’s no different for you.”
My heart is beating fast. He’s saying all the right things, and I am being lured in by those sweet promises.
Which is why I get off of him and force myself to back up.
“You’re not taking me anywhere,” I say. Assuming, of course, that I bind up his feet—and his wings too. I have more rope in my bag, but my bag is across the street, and getting to it means giving this horseman my back.
He lays there on the ground, then laughs, the sound building on itself. “Do you truly think you are in control?” he says. “That despite your previous failed efforts, you can just tie me up and walk away?”
All at once he lifts his bound wrists, then rips them apart, the rope tearing like tissue.
I stumble back, my eyes wide.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
With catlike grace, the horseman pushes himself to his feet. He straightens, his black wings folding at his back.
He paces towards me. “I think we’ve already discovered that I make a poor captive,” he says carefully. “I slip my restraints a little too easily.”
Thanatos stops several feet from me. He extends his hand. “Let there be no more pain between us. No more strife. Come with me, Lazarus.”
I’m still shaken by his show of strength, and that I sat on his chest for minutes, and in all that time, he could’ve ripped the rope apart and grabbed me.
But he didn’t.
And now … his offer and his earnest expression wriggle their way under my skin.
No more pain. No more gnawing loneliness. No more scheming and breaking myself trying to stop this man.
It’s overwhelmingly alluring.
I take a step towards him.
Death’s eyes alight with some intense emotion.