Theta Waves Book 1 (Episodes 1-3) (21 page)

"Books are fiction,
minou
; they're not real."

"Who the hell are you?" She demanded. "First you arrest me so I can be interrogated and nearly killed. You saved me from that and now you want to bring me back into the lion's den? It doesn't make any sense. Why save me only to put me back in harm's way?" Her instinct for survival was in overdrive and she didn't care if it meant Bridget's life or Eddie's; they were nothing to her, really. She had exactly one person to worry about and that person was getting the hell out of Dodge.

He stepped in front of her, blocking her from the door. "I have my reasons."

"Well I'm not going."

He gripped her by the shoulders, giving her a shake. "You're going. I can use you as leverage to get to Bridget if I need to, but I won't let anything happen to you."

Julio piped up pitifully over the sound of rattling silverware as he slammed a drawer closed. "Or Eddie."

Ezekiel looked back over her shoulder. "Sure, or Eddie."

"I'm not going," Theda said.

"I told you I can protect you, Theda. Don't you believe me?"

"I don't know what to believe. All I know is I'm not going back there. I'll take my chances on the street."

"And chances they'll be." Ezekiel said. "You'll be dead before morning. If the horsemen are out in force, it's not just the regular citizens who will be your greatest danger. Trust me."

"You didn't keep me safe before. I almost died in that den."

"Almost died," he repeated as though it mattered, stressing the adverb.

She shook her head. "It's the horsemen, Ezekiel," she said, realizing the depth of the danger she was in, finally. He'd been trying to instil it in her all along, but she'd stubbornly clung to the belief that she was just one small player in a global act, that the anonymity of being so worthless would keep her safe in the end. Now she knew better.

"They're ruthless, Ezekiel. You must've seen them during the Holocaust. You must've watched the devastation they left in their wake." She shuddered as she said this, imagining that the horsemen's path must've been very much like the Vikings in the old world. Vikings and Genghis Khan would have been a bedtime story compared to the things the horsemen did.

"Ruthless doesn't describe it," she said.

He shrugged. "I know."

"You can't know," she argued. "Because if you did, you wouldn't be expecting me to let myself be your bait for a woman I don't even know."

"She's got a point there," Julio said and Ezekiel's glare made him take a step backward, fumble for the counter.

"A woman who gave you the clothes off her back and a place to sleep," Ezekiel said without taking his eyes off Julio.

She looked down at her dress, thinking she'd give anything to have those simple jeans and T-shirt back, but she'd stripped them off before she'd taken her last smear, back before Ezekiel had pulled her from the house when they were raided. Assuming they had been raided. She didn't even know for sure; all she knew was what he told her.

"I'm grateful to her," she said. "But that's asking too much. I'm not going. Nothing you say can convince me."

"Theda, I'm one of the horsemen."

He looked at his boots as he said this, as he let her take in the measure of the fullness of his statement. And it took her several moments for it to completely sink in. His casual, almost thoughtless acceptance of violence and killing. The men from the night he abducted her, his killing of the Mayor. Despite his admitting that he worked for the beast, she'd assumed his taking of those lives had been a measure of how pressed he'd felt to do so, not because it was a natural inclination for him.

She shivered involuntarily as she realized it, because only then did she realize how close to danger she had actually been all this time. Ezekiel, one of the horsemen. That was how he knew Bridget; that was how he knew Eddie: because as a horseman he would have known the beast's son, would have met the people in Henrik's harem. She felt a strange sense of betrayal that she couldn't articulate; she could only stare at her feet until she heard him speak again, and even then she couldn't meet his gaze. She could only hug her chest tighter.

"I know full well the ruin of the Holocaust," he said, taking deliberate steps toward her even as she fumbled her way backwards, searching for a glass, knife, something to wield as a weapon. And to think she had almost given herself to him. Believed for a moment he cared about her.

"I saw it all up front. All in living color."

She felt Julio's hand slip into hers as Ezekiel spoke, heard his breath change to something less rhythmic and she realized Julio understood things that still managed to escape her.

"I was there, Theda," Ezekiel said, ignoring the ragged way her chest had begun to move, the way she sucked air in desperate measures, coming close enough that she could smell his cologne and the heat from his body. She thought she was going to be sick.

"I was there during the Apocalypse because death is my business. I'm the pale Rider."

The Pale Rider. Death himself. Theda knew it all so well. A girl didn't live as the daughter of an evangelical preacher her entire life and not learn a thing or two about the end of times and the four most powerful riders in the history of religion. But the Apocalypse, the idea of tribulation, rapture, of judgment of the just hadn't exactly occurred the way her father always believed or taught. And not just him, either. None of the religions had got it truly right. Little bits and pieces of it, yes: just enough that a girl could easily compare the accuracy of the world's religions and their predictions to prophesying an entire novel from a random sentence in the middle.

Even so, Christianity had got one thing correct. Four things, actually. Men from all corners of the earth with a particular and specific specialty on their roster of skill sets when the beast took over the earth. All equally frightening in prophetic notions, and equally frightening in their reality.

And here she was standing in front of the most terrifying one of the four.

"You didn't bring me to the Mayor because I was religion mongering," she said to him, the full weight of her realization making it difficult to speak. "And you didn't save me from him because you saw something that tweaked some dormant sense of humanity in that vision."

He shook his head in response, looking wholly miserable.

"You took me there because you thought I posed a threat to the beast and his religionless world and you needed to know for sure. How stupid am I--you tried to tell me that, but I didn't know what it really meant." She choked on a spurt of laughter and put a finger to her temple, thinking it through, trying to remember everything he'd told her. "I thought we shared something in that lifetime that made you care." She chortled humourlessly, feeling the freefall grasping at her throat. "When all along you saved me because you realized it was true. That the beast would want me alive."

She was prowling the room now, the hand that had earlier clutched Julio's in a sense of protective joining now laid on her heart because the muscle inside had begun to hurt. She'd been stupid, so stupid. The godspit had dulled her wits. And now she was in greater danger than if she had just been left in the Mayor's hands. But he had done that. He was responsible for her alleged escape. He: the Pale Rider of the Apocalypse. She waved her hands in front of her face, trying to feed her lungs and failing. She began to suck air in like it was coming through a narrow straw. It wasn't enough. She wouldn't be able to feel her muscles with such niggardly amounts of oxygen.

"If that was entirely true," he said, trying to catch her by the waist as she spun past him. "If that was true don't you think you would be somewhere else right now"

She wrenched free and he was left to plead with open palms in front of his waist.

"Think, Theda. Don't you think you'd be facing the beast, not holed up in a dank little apartment?"

"Hey," Julio complained.

Ezekiel ignored Julio's protest. "
Minou
," he said, trying to grapple for her hand and missing it. "If it doesn't make sense, it must be because it isn't true. Why else would I save you if I didn't care?"

She backed away. "I don't know. I don't know what it is you're after. I only know I'm not safe in my grotto enjoying a night of bliss because you arrested me on pretense of religion mongering. I only know you murdered the Mayor when everyone assumed you had left the religion mongerer in his capably torturous hands. I only know..."

She trailed off because she didn't know any more than that. A few days ago she'd been earning enough money for a sandwich and coffee, enjoying night after night of forgetful ecstasy in the throes of a drug that evaporated her every memory, pain, regret, found some sort of uneasy routine that at least made this new world bearable. Now all she had was a crystal-clear mind with snapping synapses that made her flesh crawl with realization. The godspit had finally left her system, leaving her painfully aware and painfully aware was absolutely no way for a gal like her to live.

He looked pained. His green eyes crinkled at the corner. He held his hands out to Julio, supplicating in a way that made Theda press her palm into her belly. Julio shook his hands and backed away, started rifling through his cupboards again, but she didn't dare take her eyes off Ezekiel long enough to find out what he was looking for.

"I had my orders. I never lied to you about that." Ezekiel tried to step closer again, but Theda backed away until her legs met the edge of the sofa. She collapsed onto it.

"Why do you really want to go back to the den?" She asked him and held tightly to her belly as she waited for the answer. Oh the pain of it, the need for the bliss, the desire for a smear. She could be sick with all of it.

"Bridget," he said.

"You told me you weren't lovers," she accused, thinking as she said it that she didn't truly know anything. She couldn't trust anything he'd said. She couldn't really expect him to give her an honest response. She grown more stupid with each hour she'd spent with him, trusting, believing.

"We aren't lovers," he said. "I did not lie to you."

"You have lied. You've been lying all along." She wanted to accuse him of more; she wanted to tell him she'd begun to have feelings for him, that she would have given him anything, but she couldn't do that now. It was an accusation that would hurt her more than it would him. He didn't care. He had never cared. She opened her mouth to say that, and thought she actually did speak until she heard the report of a gun, smelled what she could've sworn was the stink of sulfur, and realized as her mouth click closed that Julio had shot at them.

She'd heard somewhere that a person could be hit and not feel I, that adrenaline robbed a body of its pain for exactly as long as it took for the synapses to receive the message and that, that could be at least a dozen seconds. She groped about her chest for the hot stickiness of blood in the seconds after she registered the shot, and when her brain registered the feel of her hands scouring her body, she knew she was clean of a bullet. Without thinking, her gaze flew to Ezekiel. She wasn't sure why she was relieved when she found him still standing.

"Get the fuck out," Julio said, the gun trembling in his hand. There was a steely look in his eye, but the seesawing of his jaw gave away his alarm. His stare was locked on the hole he'd put in the wall, not on either of them as he pressed against the cupboards, protecting his back like a cornered rabbit.

"We're going," Ezekiel said. He reached his hand out to Theda, keeping the other held up in surrender.

"No," she mumbled. "I'm not going with you."

Julio levelled the handgun at her. "I don't care if you're going with him or not; I just want you to get the fuck out."

She forced the lump down her throat and eased her way toward the door. Ezekiel came along behind her, and she held her arm outstretched, holding him off. "Back off," she told him. "I'm warning you."

A dark humor came over his face. "Warning me? You forget I have a Taser and a knife. Julio over there has a gun pointed at you. What do you have, Theda?"

She couldn't answer. She had nothing. Besides, Julio began hissing at them to get the fuck out and he didn't look angry so much as scared--a bad combination for a man holding a weapon. Then she knew what she had, the only thing she'd ever had: her two feet, her survival instinct, and the element of surprise.

She yanked open the door and tore off down the hallway, only realizing she was in an apartment building as her bare feet hit the carpet. She'd been out of it when Ezekiel had brought her to Julio's, and he obviously would know the way out, but because she had no idea which way the exit was, he couldn't possibly anticipate her movements. Surely that would give her some edge.

She didn't bother to look back to see how close he was on her heels; she sped headlong, arms pumping, chest burning as she zigzagged through the hallways.

It didn't occur to her that she should have taken some time to put on shoes until she reached the elevators and had to face the decision to go down the stairs or down the shaft. She didn't even know how high up in the apartment building she was. She could be on the bottom floor for all she knew. Her biggest question was which way Ezekiel would assume she'd go. No doubt he'd expect her to leave the building. She decided on the elevator, pressing the up button in a frantic urge to get the doors to open. And when the doors did slide open, she was in such a hurry to get in that she rammed straight into a thick wall of leather clad chest.