Immortal Rider

Twenty-seven

Leave it to Pestilence to ruin Limos’s wedding night, and as he came closer, gripping a sword in one hand and a hellhound head in another, her stomach dropped to her toes. Arik tugged her close, putting one leg in front of hers in a subtle, protective blocking stance.

Pestilence plopped the severed head into the snow, the blood creating a grotesque slush around it. “Don’t worry, your guards aren’t all dead. Just drawn off by my minions.”

“What are you doing here?” Than growled. He’d armored up, and so had Ares.

“I was hurt that I wasn’t invited to the wedding.” Pestilence sheathed his sword, the clang of his armor ringing out in the frosty night air. “But I brought a gift anyway.”

Limos gripped Arik’s hand tight. “We don’t want anything from you.”

“It’s not for you, dear sister.” Pestilence’s toothy grin was the very definition of evil. “It’s for Arik. Keeping in the theme of the wedding, I brought you the gift of truth.”

Limos’s vision blurred with alarm as she pulled on Arik and prepared to throw a gate. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

“You’re not going anywhere.” Pestilence kicked the hellhound head, and it slammed into Limos’s gown, splattering blood all over the beautiful, satiny fabric.

“You bastard.” Arik lunged, and Limos, reeling with shock, couldn’t stop him.

Thankfully, Thanatos caught Arik around the waist. “Dial it back, bro. He’s not worth it.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t plan to kill Arik until he hears what I came here for.” Pestilence’s fangs glinted like icicles in the darkness. “Limos, tell your new mate and our brothers the truth about your escape from Sheoul.”

“Reseph, no.” Limos swallowed the lump of oh-shit in her throat. “Please, don’t do this.”

She could have sworn she saw something familiar, something regretful, in Pestilence’s icy blues, but then it didn’t matter, because while Ares didn’t lower his blade, he did glance at Limos. “What’s he talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Suddenly chilled, she rubbed her arms and looked bet plane Ares didween her brothers. “Let this go. Don’t listen to him.”

“Trust me,” Pestilence said. “You want to hear this.”

Anxiety spiked, and she put her hands together in desperation. “I’m begging you, brothers. Go back inside and pretend Pestilence was never here.” She moved forward, her high heels punching through ice softened by hellhound blood. “You said you love me no matter what, so this isn’t important. Please. Go inside.”

Silence stretched. Ares and Than exchanged glances, and then Thanatos released Arik, who was still staring daggers at Pestilence, and Ares sheathed his sword.

“Get the hell out of here, Pestilence.” Thanatos strode up to their brother and got so close their armor clanked and their noses almost touched. A breeze whipped their hair until it obscured their faces and mingled strands, pale, warm blond tangling with cold platinum. “Limos is our sister, but you are no longer our brother, and you’ve fucked with us one too many times.”

Another flash of pain sparked in Pestilence’s eyes, and he hissed. “I haven’t even begun to fuck with you.” He grabbed the back of Thanatos’s head and smashed their foreheads together so hard that the crack of skulls echoed deep into the night air.

Than snarled in outrage, and they went down into the snow and ice, fists flying. Ares and Arik went after Pestilence, but the bastard slashed out with a blade, catching Than in the cheek as he rolled to his feet.

“You know who has fucked with you?” Pestilence snapped. “Your sweet, virginal sister. She didn’t escape Sheoul. She sent the demons who attacked us in the first place, and then she found us, lied about escaping, and convinced us to start the war.”

Thanatos remained sitting on the ground, blood running from his cheek and mouth. “Li? You wanna tell this douchebag he’s full of shit?”

“That would make me a colostomy bag, moron,” Pestilence chimed in, reminding her so much of Reseph that her eyes stung.

But yes, she did want to tell her brothers that Pestilence was full of shit. The compulsion to lie was so strong that the evil side of her scales dipped low. She slid her gaze to Arik, who was looking at her as if he fully expected her to explain this all away as a big misunderstanding. He moved toward her, but she stepped back, unable to take comfort from him, not when she didn’t deserve it.

“Limos?” This time, Than’s voice was clipped, threaded with fear. “Say he’s lying.”

“Can’t,” she rasped.

Ares let out a nasty snarl. “Who forced you? What were you threatened with?”

“You think she was coerced?” Pestilence laughed. “Of course you would. Limos would never betray us like that on her own.” He cocked a blond brow at her. “Go ahead. Explain, little sister. Queen of the Underworld.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Again, Arik went for Pestilence, and this time, it was she e, bag, moronwho prevented him from doing something he might not live to regret. When she grabbed his arm, he settled down, though he angled his body so that any move Pestilence made against her would catch him first.

God, she did not deserve him.

“Limos,” Ares said quietly. “Explain.” The word was no less of a command for the soft tone, and she gulped some air like it was made of courage.

“I was raised to be a demon,” she began in a shaky voice. “You know that. But what you don’t know is that I was treated like a princess. I… we… were all part of a plan. From the very beginning, maybe from our conception, Lilith and Satan planned to use us to bring destruction upon the human race.” Her muscles twitched as she forced out the next bit of information. “So when the time was right, I was sent aboveground to study you. To find your weaknesses.”

“You spied on us?” Ares asked.

She nodded. “For a year. You never saw me, never knew I was there.”

A dark shadow passed over Ares’s face, turning his expression to stone. “And what, exactly, did you learn?”

“That your weakness was your loved ones and your arrogance in thinking you could protect them. Than, yours was your peace-loving nature. Reseph, yours was your inability to focus on anything.”

Ares had gone steel-rod taut, and she knew he’d arrived at the end of her story before she’d even gotten through the middle. “Go on.” His voice was dead. And to him, she probably was too. But he and Than had said they loved her no matter what, and she had to cling to his words. “What did you do after you learned what you needed to?”

“I went back to Sheoul, and it was decided that it was time to bring you into our fold.”

“Jesus.” Thanatos jammed his hands through his hair. “What did you do?”

Her throat closed up. The rest of her story only got worse from here.

“She sent demons to attack us.” Pestilence filled in the blanks, his voice so thick with loathing that she knew Reseph was in there somewhere, hating her for what she’d done to him. “She sent the demons to wreak havoc on humans. And then, when things were at their worst, she made herself known to us. She pretended she’d escaped from a hellish existence to find us and tell us the truth about what we were.”

Ares’s eyes became black lasers that lit on her the way they fixed on his enemies. “The demons that tortured and killed my wife… you sent them.” It wasn’t a question. Ares knew. He just wanted her to say it.

She wanted to throw up. “Listen to me, Ares—”

“Answer me, damn you.”

Every instinct screamed for her to lie, but if there was any hope of salvaging a relationship with her brothers, she had to make them understand why she’d done what she’d done. To make them realize that if she could take it back, she wit v>

“My job was to encourage you to war against the demons, to bring humans into it in order to destroy them.” Hysteria had started to lace her voice, and she fought to keep from losing it. “How I got you to do it didn’t matter. The more pain you experienced, the deeper your hatred for demons would be. And once you were corrupted by hate and self-loathing, it would be easy to bring out your demon sides.”

“My wife died at your order,” Ares snarled. “What about my sons? Did you plan to kill them too?”

“You sent them away before that could happen,” she croaked. “But I didn’t want them dead, Ares. I swear.”

Pestilence barked out a laugh. “Only because as Ares’s offspring, they were potentially powerful.”

True. They could have been useful as they grew. Unfortunately, they became casualties of the demon war, so yes, she was responsible, if indirectly. She risked a glance at Arik, who stared at her in stunned silence. Shame constricted her chest, and when she looked at her brothers, the loathing and disappointment in their eyes constricted everything else.

“The demons slaughtered most of my family,” Thanatos said, his voice so icy she shivered. “I watched almost my entire tribe be torn apart by Soulshredders. Do you know how they kill, Limos?” Leaping to his feet, he seized her by the beautiful pearl collar of her ruined dress and got right in her face. “Do you?”

Yes, she did, but before she could reply, Arik was there, shoving his muscular arm between her and Than.

“Back off, Horseman.”

Than’s voice was an avalanche rumble. “This isn’t your concern, human.”

“It became my concern about an hour ago, when I drank her blood from a cup.” Arik said. “So back the fuck off. Now.”

No one was more shocked than she was when Thanatos released her. But he wasn’t done with her. Not by a long shot.

“That reminds me,” Pestilence said casually. “I’ve released thousands of Soulshredders in the human realm. Things are going to get real fun, real soon.”

Ares jabbed a finger at Pestilence. “We’ll deal with you later.” He turned back to Limos. “But you.” He practically spat “you” at her. “You’re as bad as he is. At least Pestilence has the excuse of a broken Seal.”

Her eyes burned with unshed tears. “You said you loved me no matter what. You said you couldn’t hold what I did thousands of years ago against me—”

“That was before I knew you are responsible for the deaths of everyone I loved,” he roared. Ares’s hatred lanced her so fiercely that she stumbled backward, pain radiating through her chest.

“Did you know how Heaven would react?” Thanatos demanded. “Did you know angels would be sent to punish and curse us as Horsemen?”

“No,” she rasped. “That wasn’t part of the plan. You were to be my wedding gift to Satan.” Her fingers flexed at her sides. “Before we were even born, he’d foreseen that we would play a role in the Apocalypse, but he didn’t know how. So I was to bring you to him. But I was too slow. Lucifer warned me that Heaven would only tolerate so many human casualties before they took action. I miscalculated, and before I could take you to Sheoul, angels interfered and we were all cursed by them to be Horsemen.”

She’d paid for her failure in blood. After two months of torture, she’d been sent back to the human realm to make up for her mistake.

“Tell them the rest.” Pestilence folded his arms over his broad chest, the metal clanking loudly in the cold night air. “Tell them how you worked against us for hundreds of years to break my Seal. And tell them how you were responsible for stealing Deliverance from The Aegis, not because you didn’t trust The Aegis to keep it safe, but so you could destroy it and prevent Ares or Thanatos from killing me if my Seal broke.” Pestilence bared his fangs in a diabolical smile. “The best part of all of this? She killed Sartael to shut him up, isn’t that right? You thought he was the one person who could find your agimortus, but you were willing to give that up just to protect your piece of shit self. You pissed off the wrong person, Limos. Sartael was Lucifer’s pet, and Lucifer’s sworn to take out his fury on all of you. So not only did Limos ruin your old lives, she’s going to fuck the shit out of your current ones, as well.”

“Limos.” Ares’s big body trembled with the kind of rage she rarely saw—and she’d seen him murderously angry. “You lying, scheming spawn of hell.”

Agony fisted her heart, so powerful she cried out. “Ares, please—”

“Please?” Pestilence spat. “You should be Satan’s whore. Not the human’s. The Dark Lord would give you the pain you deserve—”

Rapidfire gunshots rang out, and the top half of Pestilence’s head exploded in a grotesque rain of bone, blood, and brains.

“Christ,” Arik said calmly, as he holstered his weapon. “Do you ever shut the fuck up?”

Pestilence fell backward into the blood-soaked snow, but even as he landed, he opened a gate and hurled his destroyed body through it.

Limos looked over at Arik, who stared at her as if he didn’t know her at all. Anguish squeezed the blood right out of her heart. “I’m sorry, Arik.”

“Oh, Limos,” he murmured. “What have you done?”