Dark Destiny (Principatus) (13 page)

She stood still, the early morning sun heating her cheeks, the weight of everything that had just transpired stealing her breath. For a moment, she toyed with the idea of going after them. She could overcome Ven easily enough, even if he could survive sunlight…well, she assumed she could, and as for Patrick…

The thought faded away. And Patrick what? She’d just witnessed him destroy a
nikor
with the Powers knows what, he’d shoved her halfway across the beach without lifting a finger, let alone a fist
and
her attempt to hold him with her mind had failed miserably. Something entirely impossible. No one could escape the grasp of Death, no matter who or what they were. No one.

And yet, Patrick Watkins just did.

Beyond frustrated, she huffed into her fringe. Answers. She needed answers, and standing here, gaping after two annoying, irritating, stubborn and unfortunately sexy-assed brothers wasn’t getting them.

With a sharp sigh, she dragged her fingers through her hair and transubstantiated.

Straight into the Realm’s library.

The room, one of many all the entities and first-order demons could access at will, glowed with warm light. The squat table lamps positioned on either side of two large leather armchairs illuminated the wall-to-wall bookshelves and open fireplace.

She dropped into one of the chairs and kicked off her boots. A small trickle of sand spilled from each one onto the rug beneath her feet and a wry smile pulled at her lips. Even in the Realm she couldn’t escape the Australian lifeguard.

Hah. Escape him? That was the last thing on her mind.

An unexpected image of Patrick—wet from the surf, muscles coiled and pumped with blood—filled her mind and her belly tightened. Damn it, she needed to focus on the situation, not how sexy the Australian lifeguard looked. How was she to discover what was going on if she kept daydreaming about him?

Without invitation, Patrick’s brother popped into her head as well, sardonic expression making her sex constrict, pointed fangs making her palms prickle.

She dropped her head into her hands and groaned. She was in trouble. Big trouble and it was all the damn Watkins brothers’ fault. How dare they be so damn sexy and mysterious and…and…

Grinding her teeth, refusing to admit to herself just how irrational and childish that last thought was, she conjured the first book from the top shelf and opened it.

It seemed Pestilence wanted Patrick Watkins out of the picture for some reason, but why? Hopefully the answer could be found in one of the books in this room.

Scanning the pages of
The First Horseman and the Case for Human Eradication,
a heavy, pompous and ancient tome, she blew at her fringe in disgust. Nothing. Its author, a second-order seraphim, had been infatuated with Pestilence’s power over man’s health, livestock and crops, and had spent far too many pages babbling on about why man should be made to suffer. Apart from clichéd ideas and tired rhetoric however, it offered nothing. No mention of Patrick, Steven, a vampire who could withstand daylight, hell, not even a passing reference to Australia or the beach.

She conjured another, this one with the delightfully antiquated title,
How the Horsemen Shall Punish Man
. Honestly, why half the Realm’s population hadn’t kept with the program and realized the idea of the Apocalypse had been benched eons ago was beyond her.

She skimmed through it, finding nothing but an overuse of words like annihilation and obliterate, before discarding it with a growl.

Forty-one books of the same theme and style later and she wanted to scream. No mention of Patrick or Steven Watkins in any of them. Forty-one books and all she had to show for it was a headache, a growing detestation for the word “thou”, and an insane urge to round up the authors and give them all a damn good beating. Seriously, were there no decent writers in the Realm?

Running her fingers through her hair, she pulled another book from the shelf and read its title.
Of Men and Demon.
Catchy.

She flicked through its pages, made, she suspected with a curl of her nose, from cured flesh, scanning each one for anything of—

The brother who cannot walk in the sun shall cast a shadow on the shifting grains of glass, and the shadow shall be of blood.

Fred’s heart smashed against her breastbone and she read the sentence again.

The brother who cannot walk in the sun shall cast a shadow on the shifting grains of glass, and the shadow shall be of blood.

The brother who cannot walk in the sun shall cast a shadow? Surely that had to be a reference to Ven, the only vampire she knew of who could withstand sunlight? But on the shifting grains of glass? Grains of glass? She gave the book’s cover another look, noting the author. The last Fate. Cautious excitement tingled in her veins. Maybe the old biddy finally sprouted something of significance, instead of the usual cryptic mumbo-jumbo she’d been known for before her unexplained disappearance.

She reread the line, trying to garner more information from it before reading the paragraph before it. A growl rumbled in her throat. Nothing relating to or referencing Ven or Patrick at all. Just forty or so sentences carrying on about the relationship between seraphim and archangels and how they interacted with virgins of mankind’s sixteenth century.

The next ten paragraphs after the tantalizing line were the same. The last Fate really seemed to be hung up on the sex lives of the upper-order angels, describing their mating rituals in great detail and an awful lot of very purple prose.

Fred huffed into her fringe again. It was as though the line about Ven just popped out of nowhere.

She read the rest of
Of Men and Demon
word for word, hoping there might be something else, but there wasn’t. Damn it.

The Powers alone knew how many books later, and she was beginning to get well and truly pissed off. Nothing. Nothing! Just a waste of time, an even bigger headache and an entirely rational desire to strangle just about every author in the Realm. Once she’d put them back together after tearing them apart the first time, that was.

She threw the latest disappointment aside and glared blankly into the empty fireplace. “Fuck.”

There were ten books left on the shelves. Ten tomes containing the sum total recorded knowledge of the Realm and the world of man.

Scrunching up her face, Fred conjured the thinnest—
Death and Lust in the Time of Genesis
. She cocked an eyebrow. A book dedicated to her. She grinned. This could be, if nothing else, entertaining.

The first chapter was dedicated to her antics before the Powers intervened. She chuckled. The author—anonymous, of all things—seemed to have taken quite a few liberties with the facts. Half of what they’d attributed to her after the Creation she had nothing to do with. To believe the author’s account, she’d been a right psychotic bitch.

Making a mental note to discover who “anonymous” was later on, she continued reading. The rest of the book read like a trashy human gossip mag. Hearsay and conjecture making up most of the word count, with the odd illustration—mostly of her morbid cloak-and-scythe persona—thrown in for good measure. Nothing entertaining or illuminating at all.

Damn, damn, damn.

She slammed the book closed…just as a line leapt out at her from the pages.

The Cure shall face the Disease o—

A tingle shot up her spine. What was that?

She jerked the book open, frustration eating at her. Damn it, what page had she been on?

“Somewhere near the back of the book, Fred,” she muttered, fanning the pages. “Opposite an illustration of you and the other Horsemen, remember? You curled your lip at the way the artist had depicted you—all dead and gross and male.”

She whipped through the book, searching for the illustration. Where
was
it?

Her pulse burst into furious life. There. Tenth page from the last.

Giving the hideous artwork a quick look—
For Pete’s sake,
male
?—she read through the page of text opposite it, looking for the line that had caught her eye.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah.
The Cure shall face the Disease on the shifting dunes and the end shall begin and the beginning shall end.
Blah, blah, bl
—

Fred’s stare locked on to the disconnected sentence.

She read it again.

The Cure shall face the Disease on the shifting dunes and the end shall begin and the beginning shall end.

What did it mean? It wasn’t written in the snarky past tense, adjective-heavy style of the rest of the book, nor was it obsessing about her so-called achievements an eon ago, and it bore no relation to anything else written before or after it.

Fred gnawed on her bottom lip. Who the hell was anonymous? Another Fate? One of the earlier sages now long gone?

She studied the words again. What did they mean?

The Cure
. Nope. Nothing.

The Disease
. Pestilence. Had to be. He’d never taken a human name, considering himself far too superior to do so, but referred to himself often as the Disease, usually with self-absorbed arrogance.

On the shifting dunes
… Hmmm. The beach? Surely. Or maybe the desert?

Fred pulled a face. Damn it. There were a lot of deserts in the world and most of them had been the site of one important event or another.

She moved onto the rest of the sentence.

The end shall begin and the beginning shall end
.

What the fuck did that mean?

The end
. She chewed on her lip again. Could be the Apocalypse? Or the final episode of
Cheers
?

Frustration, hot and thick, rolled through her and she let out a roar, her inner demon surging briefly to the surface. This was useless.

She stared at the fireplace again. This was getting her nowhere.

Then go see the only element of the equation you know.

Fred groaned. By the Powers, why hadn’t she thought of that before? Pestilence was confined to the Realm. All she needed to do was speak to him and she’d get her answers.

A distasteful knot twisted in the pit of her belly at the thought. The last time she’d talked to her colleague he’d made some preposterous offer to become partners in an even more preposterous scheme, trying to sweeten the deal by suggesting they become partners in bed as well.

The memory made Fred screw up her face. She couldn’t think of anything worse than sex with ol’ sick and weedy.

Nevertheless, she had to see him. He’d sent a
nikor
after a human. That alone demanded some interrogation. The task of assigning an end to a mortal’s life fell to her and her alone, not the First Horseman. If nothing else, she needed to give him a damn good dressing down. No one stepped on her turf without facing the consequences.

Putting
Death and Lust in the Time of Genesis
aside, she returned her boots to her feet and drew an image of Pestilence’s place in the Realm to her mind.

A shimmer rippled through her body, a tingle through her being, and then she was there. Standing in ol’ sick and weedy’s master suite, the stench of disease, burning tallow and rotting bones seeping into her lungs with each breath she took.

Her gaze fell immediately on his throne and a surge of contempt heated her blood. The Powers had ordered Pestilence to get rid of the thing. Not only did it offend Their very existence, it was an affront to the Order of Actuality.

She studied it, nose curling. It was fucking hideous and gross, as well. She’d heard rumors of some of the things he did on it, some of the acts of debauchery and depravity. She shuddered with disgust. How she’d been born of the same source as him was beyond her.

“This is a surprise.”

The reedy voice behind her made Fred jump and she spun about, fixing the thin man standing in the doorway with a dark glare. “I thought you were ordered to destroy that thing, sicko,” she snarled, watching Pestilence walk toward her.

He looked the same as he always did. Small and scrawny. It was a trick. She knew that. His inner demon was almost as powerful as her own. Almost. Why he chose to inhabit such an offensively weak form was still a mystery to her. It didn’t do him any favors. Still, she’d heard he had no trouble getting laid. Maybe the lower-order she-demons liked their men…wimpy?

“Do you often make it a habit of trespassing in other people’s private space, Death?” he asked, his pale eyes roaming over her with glowering conceit. “Or is this a treat just for me?” He stopped but a mere foot before her, the sickly sweet stench of his body heat curling around her like fingers of fog. “Perhaps you have reconsidered my previous offer?” He flicked his gaze to the massive bed beside the throne before returning his eyes to hers. “I am ready whenever you are.”

A shudder of revulsion rocked Fred and she ground her teeth. “I’m afraid my tastes and your tastes differ some what, Pestilence.” She fought to contain her contempt, remembering why she was there. It wasn’t to point out his depravity. It was to get some answers.

His pale stare drilled into her and she struggled with the urge to fidget. Of all her fellow Horsemen, Pestilence was her least favorite. War she could deal with. He knew his place, knew his job and stuck to it. His moral and work ethic were of the highest standards and he knew the definition of personal grooming. He was also a very considerate lover and had a dry wit. Famine was a little irritating, but still likeable. She had a warm personality and a weakness for kittens. She just needed, in Fred’s opinion, to eat a little more, and maybe lighten up a bit when it came to places like Zimbabwe. What that country had done to her, Fred could never work out. Still…both the Second and Third Horsemen were preferable to the First. And neither of them had tried to grope her during their last gathering.