Rogue Rider (Lords of Deliverance) (27 page)

“I hate him.” Tears streamed down her cheeks, leaving trails in the blood smeared across her face. “I hate him so much.”

Warily, Reaver crouched as close as he thought he could risk before she could strike out in defense, either physically or verbally. She didn’t tolerate kindness well.

“This is Reseph,” he said reminded her. “Not Pestilence.”

“I don’t care!” she screamed. “I want him strung up
on hooks and peeled. I want him castrated and raped and tortured for the next century.”

“Listen to me, Harvester.” He kept his voice low, soothing, although it didn’t seem to be doing much good. “You’re his Watcher. You can hate him, but you can’t arrange for him to be harmed. Get yourself together or you’ll be pulled from duty. Is that what you want?”

“Isn’t that what you want?” she snapped. “How nice for you to be rid of me.”

“You might not be my favorite person in the world, but I’d rather deal with you than a replacement.” A replacement who might be worse.

“Better the enemy you know, right?” Harvester smiled. Just a little, but it was better than the snarls.

“Right.”

She met his gaze, and he inhaled sharply, knocked off balance by the naked emotion in her eyes. He’d seen vulnerability in her before, most notably when he’d found her being tortured by Gethel, and now, when she’d been crying. But this was different. This wasn’t pain. It was… gratitude? Affection? What the hell was it?

An uncomfortable stirring skated around inside his chest as they locked gazes and the island around them fell away. In the background, he heard the waves crashing on the beach, but it felt as though they were crashing into him. He was being buffeted by the oddest feelings of tenderness.

He cleared his throat of its sudden dryness. “Look, ah, if you can’t help with Reseph right now, everyone will understand—”

Harvester exploded to her feet. The anger returned to her expression, only this time it was directed at Reaver.
That was what he got for being kind to a dark-hearted fallen angel, he supposed.

“Understand? I don’t need understanding from the likes of you. What do you take me for? A weakling victim? Fuck you and the air current you rode in on.” With that, she stormed back inside the manor, leaving Reaver trying to recover from whiplash.

What he didn’t think he’d recover from were the feelings she’d ignited in him. Oh, he hadn’t fallen in love with her or some crap. What he’d felt had seemed more like an echo, as if he and Harvester had shared a moment of affection before.

He racked his memory, wondering if the time he’d spent as her prisoner, his brain soaked in addictive marrow wine, had anything to do with the déjà vu. Nothing specific came to mind, but then he’d been delirious most of the time.

Still, that had to be it. Because no way had he ever liked her. And even if he had, it wouldn’t matter. Because someday, somehow, he was going to kill her.

Hell was neverending pain. It was a fog the color of blood. It was a set of sharp claws that ripped into the brain and shredded it like pulled pork. With every dig of the claws came a new memory, and with each new memory, Reseph screamed.

Sometimes the claws stopped digging; instead they recycled memories he’d already been through but that were juicy enough to relive over and over, bringing nonstop regret and the pain that went with it.

The things he’d done as Pestilence clanged around inside his skull in a maddeningly loud screech, filling his vision so completely that only rarely did he see his surroundings or his siblings when they came. Reseph wasn’t even sure why they came. Limos tried to clean him up with wet, warm cloths, and Ares tried to get him to eat, but Reseph didn’t deserve any of it. He did, however, deserve the knockout punch he’d gotten from Arik before Limos dragged the human away.

He also didn’t understand why he was here. Thanatos had killed him, so how was it that he was alive?

Then there were the other memories, the ones he wasn’t sure were real.

Jillian
.

He blinked, slowly becoming aware that he was lying in a fetal position on the floor. He never knew where he’d find himself when he came to or how broken his body would be. And he wasn’t sure if the periods of lucidity were better than the periods of driving memories that took him out of the present. At least when he was being tortured by the memories of what he’d done, he didn’t have to come face to face with the people he’d done them to.

He’d tried to apologize to them, but after Harvester’s beating and Arik’s punch to the face, not to mention Thanatos’s scorching glares of pure hatred, Reseph had given up. “I’m sorry” was beyond lame, an insult, even, given the gravity of his sins.

And Jillian… had those days spent with her, making love and being at peace, been a figment of his imagination? A dream that made the nightmares seem all the worse? Maybe his conscience was playing tricks on him, because the days with Jillian might well be a dream, but
she
was real.

“Kill me,” he whispered through a throat that was raw from his screams. “Someone… kill me.”

But there was no one around to hear. Even Harvester, who delighted in his agony, had left after fitting him with restraints. He didn’t care about the shackles. He wasn’t going anywhere anyway. Besides, sometimes he jerked on the chains just to feel the soul-deep knifing agony that shot through his bones.

How long had it been since she’d chained him, anyway? He remembered a couple of nights, a couple of dawns.

Suffer, you bastard. Suffer as no one has suffered before
, she’d whispered, before licking at a trail of blood that ran from his face to his ear.
If you care at all, you should know that you aren’t free of Pestilence. Only a sliver of evil could turn you back into him. Oh, not in an apocalyptic sense, but you could revert back to the disgusting creature you were if evil taps into the demon half that was awakened when your Seal broke. You think you’re miserable now? Turn back into Pestilence and watch your brothers and sister hunt you into the ground
.

Harvester’s words rang in his ears over and over as he fell back into the pit of memories, so soaked in horror.

“End me,” he whispered.

But no one heard.

Limos stood in Ares’s great room for the sixth day in a row, biting her lime-colored nails and staring down the hallway toward Reseph’s bedroom, where his screams had grown louder over the last hour. They should peak soon, and then he’d fall into a period of soft whimpers as he rocked himself back and forth, staring blankly into space.

“He’s not getting any better.” She turned to her brothers, husband, and Kynan. “We can’t let him suffer like this.”

Ares closed his eyes for a second, face tilted to the ceiling. “No one wants Reseph to suffer, Limos.”

“Really? You could have fooled me. Thanatos stares daggers at him every time we go in the room.”

Than, who was pacing the length of the great room, paused. “It’s not that I want him suffering. It’s that I can’t get what he’s done out of my head.”

“But that’s not Pestilence in there,” Limos insisted. “It’s Reseph. We need to do something to help him.”

“What do you suggest?” Ares asked. “He won’t listen to any of us. He won’t eat, he won’t drink, and when I tried to drag him into the shower today he just dropped to the tiles and screamed. Like he didn’t deserve to be clean. I’ve seen a lot of trauma in my life, but this is beyond anything I know how to deal with.”

Arik looked up from playing tug-of-war with Hal. “What about what you did for me? When I was all out of it after escaping from Sheoul.”

Limos thought about that for a second. “I stimulated you.”

Arik winked. “And you did a damned fine job of it.”

“Christ,” Kynan muttered. “Get a room.”

Ares shrugged. “It can’t hurt to try something new. Limos, the woman Reseph was with… he’s been calling for her. Do you think they had something going on?”

Jillian’s devastation had definitely been real. “I didn’t talk to her for long, but if I had to guess, I’d say they had some sort of relationship. Which, for Reseph, would be a first.”

“Bring her here.” Ares spoke as if he was a general giving a soldier orders, but for once, Limos didn’t call him on it or take it personally. Deep down, he was as worried about Reseph as she was. “The human may be the only person who can help him right now.”

“I’m on it.” She just hoped that Jillian would want to come.

Finding out that the male you had been sleeping with was not only half demon, but that he had almost brought about the End of Days wouldn’t be a selling point.

“You might want to hurry.” Reaver’s voice came from out of nowhere. Limos spun to where he stood near the fireplace, his sapphire eyes bright with concern.

“Why? What is it?”

“I’ve just come from the Watcher Council. Their fear that Pestilence will return is urgent.”

Ares strode forward, a lock of his reddish-brown hair falling over his eyes. “You said exposure to evil could do that. We’re keeping him isolated.”

“That’s good, but in the state he’s in, his mind is weakened. This same thing would have happened if I’d left him in Sheoul-gra.” Reaver sounded a little relieved that what he’d done had actually been the right choice. “His mind is full of cracks that Pestilence could slip through. He needs to heal, and it needs to happen now. Even then, he’s going to spend his entire life fighting to keep Pestilence at bay.”

Thanatos cursed. “Then we’re screwed. Reseph has always been one to ship out when things get rough.”

“We’ve got to let him try,” Limos said fiercely. “I’ll get Jillian. Maybe she’ll give him a reason to fight.”

“And if she doesn’t give him a reason to keep Pestilence locked down?” Ares asked.

“Then I give you Wormwood.” Reaver spoke in a low, grave tone. “And you put both Reseph and Pestilence out of their misery.”

It had been almost a week since Reseph had gone. Six days that Jillian had spent in a desperate search to find him. Or, at least, find out what, exactly, had happened. How the hell did three people pop in and out of thin air? Well, four, counting Reseph.

Jillian had spent the first day crying, curled up in the sheets that still smelled like him, thinking that maybe she was crazy. But then she’d reminded herself that she’d seen demons with her own eyes, so things once thought impossible were now very, very real.

She’d spent the next two days scouring the Internet, getting millions of hits on people who could do what she’d seen. Unfortunately, there was too much information to wade through. Aliens. Angels. Demons. Superheroes.

She had, at least, gotten hits when she typed in the names Reseph, Ares, Limos, and Thanatos. Individually, she got lots of mythical references. But together, she got one very, very interesting return.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

At that point, she’d been too overwhelmed to continue doing anything but stare at the computer screen, until she fell asleep on the keyboard. She’d needed solid answers that made sense, so she’d called an agency that seemed to be everywhere.

The Aegis.

They knocked on her door the next day. Five minutes later, she regretted the call.