Breath (7 page)

The baby said nothing, which Xander took as complete agreement.

“Oh, he’s a good dad and all. He’s just helpless around babies. Play your cards right, he’ll be wrapped around your finger before you’re two. Like me with Riley.” He grinned as he imagined Riley’s full lips pulling into a lush smile. Oh, that smile. “So. Wanna hear just how much I’ve fallen in love with the amazing Riley Jones?”

The baby yawned. That had to be Baby for “Of course I want to hear, tell me everything, I’m a great listener.”

He told the baby his secret—and then the clock on the dresser let out a harsh beep.

Xander blinked at the baby, who was on his lap, tucked neatly into a blanket, as Xander rocked on the chair. Frowning, he stared at the clock, which showed that he’d been in the nursery for twenty minutes. He could have sworn that he’d just walked into Lex’s room maybe a minute ago.

“Huh,” he said aloud. “I think I’m sleep deprived.”

Lex’s tiny face scrunched up, as if he were mulling over his brother’s words. Then he passed gas and settled down, closing his eyes.

Xander chuckled. “Nice. You’ll be stinking up the bathroom in no time.”

He rocked Lex gently as he hummed an old
Sesame Street
tune. He stroked Lex’s hair and looked at the crib, ready and waiting for its precious cargo; looked at the changing table atop the banged-up dresser; looked at the desk lamp and book on the nightstand next to the rocker-glider. It was a novel by an author named Ibáñez. The title read
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Curious, he flipped the book over and scanned the back cover. He’d thought it would have been something along the lines of
Good Omens
or some other romp about the end of the world, but no; this book was historical fiction about a family just before and during the First World War. Much more his mother’s taste than his.

When he thought his brother was really sleeping, he kissed Lex’s head, ready to place the baby into the crib. As his lips brushed the peach fuzz of Lex’s hair—

(kiss them all goodbye)

—an image caught fire in Xander’s brain: something dark and incomplete, like a silhouette given life.

A dead man made of shadow.

Xander shook his head and chuckled again.
Definitely
sleep deprived.

He carefully placed the baby into the crib. Lex didn’t stir as Xander silently backed away, channeling his inner ninja as he aimed for stealth. He waited until a count of fifty before he slipped out of the nursery and gently closed the door. With luck, Lex would stay asleep for at least two hours. By then, it would be a proper sort of Sunday morning, one that included actual daylight.

Back in his room once more, Xander threw himself into bed and waited for sleep to come.

It didn’t.

Instead, he saw a dark vision rise behind his closed eyelids—humanlike, filled with horrors and yet hollow, empty. A black hole sucking in all light, all life.

The end of everything.

Xander shoved his pillow over his head and made himself remember holding Lex—his fragile baby brother, with the soft spot on his head that still hadn’t closed.

He’d kissed the baby and had seen something dark and full of dread.

A kiss before the end.

A kiss goodbye.

His eyes snapped open. A kiss goodbye, because it was the end of everything. The end was here . . . no, the end was coming, heralded by empty space in human form.

The Pale Rider was coming—coming soon.

That was it: the finale in four letters, a coda leading to full stop.

The urgency of
soon.

Xander turned on the table lamp that rested on his nightstand and grabbed the spiral sketchbook and drawing pencil that waited there. It wasn’t his main sketch diary, and it wasn’t the sketchbook that he used as part of his portfolio when he’d applied to Carnegie Mellon and other art-heavy colleges; this was a small book, almost a notepad, meant for him to quickly touch on ideas and thoughts. Capture the notion, tease it out with the immediacy, the intimacy, of paper and pencil and return to it later to better refine it.

Get it down; get it out. Turn the page and move on.

He set the point to the paper’s surface and began to draw. He played with shapes, toyed with impressions, quickly filling the page with half-formed images. Art breathed; if you overpowered it with meaning right away, it suffocated. He sketched four horses trampling the world, a world riddled with coins. Each horse had a color, a purpose: bold, thick strokes turned one horse solid black, like charred food; flames outlined another horse, suggesting the fiery red that was its coat, and he dotted droplets around the horse’s mouth to represent blood—that horse was a biter; the third horse he left stark white, with dust beneath its hooves that hinted at filth; as for the last, he smudged the outline until it only suggested a horse, leaving it pale, ghostlike.

A horse that was not a horse, for a man who was not a man.

He wrote a few words, too, when the pictures in his head didn’t translate properly onto paper as a form. One word,
kiss,
he knew he’d remember in the sense of a kiss good night, a kiss goodbye—something intimate, something final. Sealed with a kiss. A promise, irrevocable.

Another word:
end,
as in the End, game over, hit the lights on your way out. The end of everything.

And a final phrase, one that made his chest tighten and his heartbeat quicken.

The Pale Rider comes
.

Yes.

He didn’t understand what he had drawn, and it wasn’t exactly what was banging around in his head, but it was close enough for now. It touched on the inevitability, the sense of finality. Of farewell, forever.

A kiss good night. A kiss goodbye.

He let out a shaky laugh. Must have been one hell of a dream.

Xander tossed the sketchbook and pencil onto his nightstand, where they landed with an indifferent thud, and he stared at his lead-darkened fingertips and debated washing his hands. No point, he decided; he was just going to get them dirty again later in the morning, when he would do his next round of sketches. Then he settled into his bed and pulled his covers high.

When he was a kid, his mom used to tell him that after he had a nightmare, the rule was he had to have a good dream next. “It’s only fair,” his mom would say as she mopped his sweaty hair from his face and soothed him. “After the bad comes the good. Time for a good dream, Xander.”

So Xander said aloud, “Time for a good dream.” Ideally, one about Riley. And him. And maybe a new car.

And doing things in the new car that didn’t involve driving.

Xander grinned and reached for his lamp, but then he paused. His fingertips, stained from the pencil, had left dark streaks along his pillowcase. He frowned at the white fabric marred by black, then flipped his pillow.

Good enough, he decided as he shut off his lamp. It didn’t matter that he knew the black was there.

He was good at hiding the truth.

The bride wore white, of course. She looked radiant in the way that most brides do—something about the pledge of eternal love and devotion heats them from within and sets their cheeks aglow. This bride, in particular, wore her silk gown splendidly; the beading over the bodice emphasized curves and softened angles, helping turn the woman in white into a delicate work of art.

The groom was equally brilliant as he gazed adoringly at the one who’d stolen his heart. His tuxedo was the same as those worn by the other men in the wedding party; from behind, they all could have been waiters at a particularly upscale restaurant where you have to pay a hundred dollars for a dollop of food set upon the plate
just so.
But the groom could have been dressed in jeans and a ratty T-shirt, and he still would have been majestically handsome because of the light in his eyes, the joy in his smile.

It was enough to make Famine want to puke.

The Black Rider of the Apocalypse stood in the back of the room, clad in ink and shadow, frowning at the loving couple. They didn’t notice her, of course, just as no one in the room noticed her. The Horsemen were visible to mortals only when they wished it, and right now Famine didn’t want to be seen. What she wanted was to be happy for the bride and groom, but they were just so pathetic—two meat sacks decked out in Vera Wang and Ralph Lauren. Sure, they were sated for the moment on love, but let them go a week with no food, then see how blissful their looks would be.

A touch of frost skimmed the back of her neck.

“You couldn’t stay away, either?” she asked, not turning around.

Death slouched up next to her. “Of course I could stay away. As could you. Yet here we are.” A pause. “There’s something about weddings that gives people a new appreciation of life, don’t you think?”

Famine declined to answer.

In the back rows, the guests began to shiver. An old woman loudly wondered if the air conditioning was set too high, and she was shushed by the people around her.

“Do you miss her?”

Famine scowled. “She made her choice long ago.”

“Not to be the Black Rider? Or not to be your friend?”

She turned to glare at Death, but then she paused in her indignation. “Why are you wearing pajamas?”

“Too lazy to put on a tux.” His blond hair was a tangled mess that crashed over his ears, and his blue eyes gleamed with winter’s secrets. He smiled as he offered her a bouquet of pink and white flowers, bundled together in a wide satin bow. “For thee, Black Rider. They don’t really go with my outfit.”

Startled, she took the flowers. As soon as they touched her gloved hands, they began to wither, starved.

“They were already dead,” Death said cheerfully. “Cut in the prime of their beauty, all for impact and style. Absolute murder on the bride’s mother’s allergies, but it’s merely one of her many sacrifices for her daughter. Or so she’d tell you. Frequently.”

Famine smiled thinly, a sliver of lips and teeth. “She hasn’t changed.”

“People rarely do.”

She saw the truth in that.

They watched the bride and groom gaze at each other lovingly by the altar as the officiator recited the words that would bind them with love and affection for all eternity, or at least until divorce court.

The Black Rider frowned at the bride. Could the woman dressed in white sense Famine’s presence? It was possible; even though the bride was no longer anorexic, she had once wielded the Scales of office. Did she miss flying through the skies on horseback, feeling and fueling the appetite of the world? Or did she pretend that part of her life had never happened?

A phrase from the clergyman nudged Famine from her bleak thoughts, and she sneered from the presumptuousness of the words.

Love is stronger than death.

Ridiculous. A previous incarnation of the Black Rider had died of heartbreak. Nothing was stronger than death.

“Such flattery,” Death murmured. “One would think you want something.”

“Not this time.”

He smiled. “Liar. You just don’t know what it is you want. But you want something. All living things do.”

“I’m not like them,” she said. “Not anymore.”

“You think just because you’ve turned your back on your humanity that you’re no longer human?” He chuckled. “You’re adorable. And you didn’t answer my question. Do you miss her?”

The Black Rider said nothing. In her arms, the dried flowers flaked to ash.

“Of course you do,” Death answered for her. “Despite your protest, you’re only human. And so you miss her like a starving man misses food.”

She lifted her chin. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m many things, but I’m not wrong. She was your best friend—past tense, verging on the pluperfect—and yet here you are, present tense, at her wedding. You miss her.”

“You’re
wrong,
” Famine insisted.

“Am I now?” He gazed upon her, gazed through her with his empty blue eyes. “Since you know so much, do you want to know what you were to her?” His smile turned sly. “Nothing.”

A lump formed in the Black Rider’s throat, and she choked it down.

“In the scheme of things, you were just a distraction to her. That’s all.” Death stood in his ill-fitting green and white striped pajamas, and he stared blankly at the bride and groom, even as that sly smile played on his face. “She cut you out of her life so that she might live. As for him, he never cared for you in the first place. You didn’t matter then. And neither of them thinks about you now.”

Stung, Famine cringed.

“It doesn’t matter that you emulated her. It doesn’t matter that you followed in her footsteps. Lisabeth Lewis left you stranded in a field of dust.”

The Black Rider whispered, “Why are you being so cruel?”

“If truth is cruelty, then I am a sadist.” He turned to face the Black Rider, and this time she flinched as his empty gaze fixed upon her. “You look so hurt. Don’t be. Embracing the truth can be cathartic. Rather like purging, wouldn’t you say?”

She bit her lip until she tasted blood.

“Here’s more truth for you: People make choices, and each choice brings with it repercussions.” He laughed softly, the sound like a graveyard wind. “A butterfly flaps its wings and the earth trembles. Lisabeth chose to walk away from you, and as a consequence you chose to become Famine. In doing so, you chose to walk away from your humanity. What do you think the consequence of that action will be?”

“Nothing,” the Black Rider said tersely. “I may as well have never existed before I took the Scales from you. I’m Famine, now and forever.”

“Nothing is forever, Tammy.”

The room filled with thunderous applause.

Her lip sore and already swelling, Famine glanced at the altar. The groom was kissing the bride. And kissing. And kissing. It looked like he was eating her face. When they finally paused for air, Lisa giggled and her groom, James, kissed her again, to the hearty approval of their guests.

Famine dropped the dead bouquet to the floor, where it landed in a pile of black stems and ash. The satin bow fluttered to the ground, a discarded memory of something bright and festive. The Black Rider sighed. She wanted to be happy for her former friend, but she just couldn’t manage it. She was too raw inside. Empty, like Death’s bouquet.