Rogue Rider

Sixteen

Kynan and Arik hadn’t found a damned thing. They’d studied the area, questioned whoever would talk to them, and chased down leads. And still ended up with nothing.

It was time to bring in the local cops, because something niggled at Kynan, something about Ms. Cardiff. She knew more than she was saying, and if it took getting an officer to the house to get her to talk, that’s what he’d do.

At least, that’s what he’d do as a first step. He’d play nice… for now.

Ky glanced over at Arik as they climbed out of their SUV and started across the parking lot to the sheriff station’s entrance. “How did Reaver seem to you when you saw him?”

An arctic blast kicked up snow all around them, and Arik had to speak through chattering teeth. “I only saw him for a second. I was getting to the beach party as he was leaving. Seemed fine, though, for a guy who spent three months in hell.” Arik’s own stint in Sheoul had given him a unique perspective on the horrors to be found in the demon realm. “Limos said Harvester admitted to trapping Reaver there, but then Reaver defended Harvester to Thanatos and Regan.”

Halting at the station door, Kynan stared at his friend. “You’re kidding, right? Was your wife drunk?”

“Nope. Limos laid off the alcohol. She wants to be all healthy while we’re trying for a baby.” Arik stomped his boots on the welcome mat. “I’ll never understand angels.”

Neither would Kynan, and he even had an angel in his family tree.

Warm air welcomed them as they walked into the station and were greeted by a deputy who introduced himself as Dennis Waltham.

“I’ll be right with you folks,” Waltham said. He grabbed some paperwork and disappeared into a room down the hall.

Ky stared after him. “Gotta love small towns.”

“Ky?” Arik’s voice was strangled. “Oh, holy fuck. Holy fuck.”

Kynan wheeled around to Arik, who was staring at the bulletin board. “What?” Arik just stood there, his face the color of chalk. “Jesus, you’re scaring the shit out of me.” He strode over to his partner. “What are you—” He broke off, his throat closing like his neck had been caught in a wire noose.

It couldn’t be. The picture on the wall could not be Pestilence. Even as Ky’s brain scrambled for an explanation, his eyes locked on the information scrawled below the photograph.

First name: Reseph. Last name: Unknown. He’d been brought in by Jillian Cardiff one week ago. He was suffering from apparent total amnesia.

Jesus.

Waltham came back, and Kynan and Arik both rushed over to him so fast they nearly tripped over each other.

“That man on the wall,” Arik blurted. “Where is he?”

“Why?” The deputy looked at Arik and Ky like they’d lost their minds. “What’s this about?”

Arik slammed his fist on the counter. “Tell me, dammit!”

Waltham glared. “You might be some kind of demon experts, but I don’t answer to you, so why don’t you try being a little nicer?”

“Excuse us, deputy.” Kynan moderated his voice to counter Arik’s freak-out, but inside, he was screaming. Outside, he was sweating ice cubes. “But this is important. Do you have a file on this guy?”

“We don’t have a lot.” Waltham took his sweet time digging a file out of a drawer and tossed it to Kynan. “We haven’t been able to find out anything about him. What’s in that file is all we have. Is Jillian in trouble? Do I need to get out there?”

So this guy was staying with Ms. Cardiff. Wow, so not a shock. “No,” Ky said calmly. “I overreacted. It’s not the guy we’re looking for. Thanks anyway.”

The deputy shot them a dubious glance, but Kynan didn’t give him the opportunity to get nosy. Ky dragged Arik out of there at breakneck speed. At the SUV, Arik stopped, his entire body a churning cauldron of hate. Kynan had never seen Arik like this before. He was usually level. Very little could rattle him.

Right now, Arik was rattling like a baby’s toy.

“That was fucking Pestilence. How the fuck is he here? He’s supposed to be dead, Ky. I was there. I saw it happen. What if he’s still evil? He can’t start an apocalypse, but he’d still be like a lion in a sheep pen. He could kill millions with plagues alone… holy shit… how the fuck are we going to take him down?” Arik paused in his tirade to take a breath and slammed his fist into the vehicle’s hood, denting the cold metal. “We’ll break into Aegis HQ and grab some qeres—”

“Arik—”

“I’m not letting that fucker near Limos—”

“Arik.” Kynan grabbed the other man by the shoulders and shook him hard. “Listen to me. If it’s really Reseph, we have to be smart about this.”

“If? I’d know that son of a bitch if he was wearing a spacesuit and covered by a motherfucking burka. He blackmailed my wife, nearly broke me in half, and forced me to drink his blood. He owns my soul, Ky. He owns my goddamned soul.”

Yeah, Kynan wouldn’t be overly calm right now if he were Arik, either. Releasing his friend, Kynan dug his cell phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed Ares.

“What’s up, human?” Ares said.

Kynan kept a watchful eye on Arik, because the dude looked ready to launch into orbit. “I need you to get everyone to your place. Arik and I’ll be there in half an hour.” He disconnected before the Horseman could ask questions. This place was too public, and Arik was too… well, fucked up.

“C’mon, buddy,” Kynan said. “Let’s hit the Harrowgate. Your in-laws will know what to do.”

“What if they don’t? That fucker can’t be allowed to roam the earth, Ky. We thought he was gone. We were moving on with our lives. What now?”

Kynan wished like hell he could answer that.

Reaver strode into Ares’s Greek manor and wasn’t even a little surprised to find Limos mixing margaritas behind the bar. Now that the Apocalypse had been averted, every day was a party for her. What he was surprised about was that she handed out the drinks to everyone, including Reaver, but didn’t take one for herself.

Then again, she’d been busy lately, drawn to the starvation epidemics around the world. She’d always said that when others were going hungry, she couldn’t keep food down.

“Hey, Reaver.” Ares, who was pinned to the couch by a young hellhound lying on his lap, downed his drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t suppose you know what this is about.”

“What… what’s about?”

Thanatos, sitting on the arm of the chair Regan was perched in, looked up from the cradle he was rocking with one foot. “Kynan called. Said to gather everyone here.”

“Looks like I have good timing.” Reaver moved over to the cradle, where Logan was sound asleep and Cujo was sitting, one shoulder propped against the frame. “I hope The Aegis isn’t causing trouble. What have he and Arik been working on?”

“Some rogue demon tearing up a town somewhere,” Limos said in a bored tone. No, a single demon wouldn’t even make the Horsemen blink. At five thousand years old, they’d learned to separate the big problems from the small ones, and it took a lot for them to consider anything a big problem.

“How’s everything else?”

Ares scratched the inky black lap hound behind the ear, and the thing made a guttural sound Reaver could only hope was a happy noise. “I’m not sure. There have been some odd rumors floating around Sheoul, rumblings about Pestilence’s old buddies trying to regroup. And Cara is worried about the hellhounds. A bunch have gone missing, and more disappear every day. She won’t let Hal out of her sight.”

Odd. Only someone very powerful would mess with hellhounds. Reaver made a mental note to check with Eidolon, head of Underworld General Hospital, to see if he was aware of a fatal hellhound virus running amok.

Kynan and Arik burst through the front door. Arik went immediately, wordlessly, to Limos and folded her against him.

“Arik.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “What is wrong with you?”

“Let me cut to the chase.” Kynan peeled off his leather jacket and tossed it over the back of one of the chairs. “Your brother is back.”

Reaver’s lungs seized, and oh-shit adrenaline flashed like fire through his veins. His secret was about to become not-so-secret, and not in the way he’d wanted.

Ares came to his feet, dumping the hellhound on the ground. “That can’t be. He was destroyed. We saw it.”

“How can you be sure?” Than asked Kynan, and Reaver didn’t miss how he’d angled himself closer to the cradle, as if expecting Pestilence to pop out of thin air and grab his son.

Arik kept his arm around Limos. “We were hunting a Soulshredder in Colorado. We found what we believed to be the epicenter of the attacks, a woman living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Then we discovered that a stranger appeared around the time the attacks started, a male named Reseph. We saw his picture. It’s him.”

Kynan nodded. “We believe he’s staying with the woman.”

Limos swallowed sickly. “Staying, or holding her hostage? Is he Pestilence, or is he Reseph?”

“We don’t know,” Arik said, “but the fact that there’s a Soulshredder killing people around him doesn’t look good for him being Reseph.”

“Soulshredders were Pestilence’s favorite demon to use to terrorize humans,” Limos breathed. “Oh, God. If he’s Pestilence—”

“He’s Reseph,” Reaver muttered, and all eyes turned on him.

“You knew about this?” Ares asked, his voice going low. “You knew he was alive and walking around with humans and you didn’t tell us? How long have you known?”

Reaver hated that Reseph’s existence had been revealed this way, but he had no one to blame but himself. “I’ve known since the day Thanatos stabbed him in the heart with Deliverance. I’m the one who got him out of Sheoul-gra.”

Stunned faces stared back at him. Finally, Arik broke the silence. “I hope to fuck you have a good explanation for this, because angel or not, I want to kick your ass right now.”

“You’re out of line, human,” Reaver said, maybe a little too defensively. “I don’t do anything without a good reason.” He just hoped his reason was good enough. “I went to Sheoul-gra to make sure Reseph’s soul was secure. He still has a part to play when the Final Days come. The Daemonica’s prophecy may have failed, but there’s still one more to play out.”

“We know that,” Thanatos ground out. “Get to the part where you turned him loose.”

“Patience,” Reaver snapped. “I’m not one of your servants.” He calmly rolled up his sleeves, giving himself a chance to find the right words. “I went to Sheoul-gra. But I didn’t expect to find Reseph the way he was. He wasn’t… a soul. He was himself.”

“Himself?” Ares asked. “As who? Pestilence or Reseph?”

“Reseph. But he was broken.”

Limos pulled away from Arik. “What do you mean, broken?”

“He was Reseph. But he remembered everything he did as Pestilence.”

“Oh, God,” Limos whispered. “How awful.”

Kynan cursed. “I don’t understand what the deal is. So he has to take responsibility for murdering millions of people. Why is this a problem?”

“I’m wondering the same thing, myself,” Arik said. “So what if he remembers what he did?”

“You didn’t know Reseph,” Limos said. “Neither of you did. You only knew him as an evil monster. But before his Seal broke, he was fun, happy, and he never intentionally hurt anyone. If he knows all of the things that happened at his hand, it’ll kill him.”

“And that’s what he was doing,” Reaver said. “He was harming himself. I’ve never seen such self-torture in my life.” Well, what he could remember of his life, anyway. “His mind was fractured.”

“I don’t care.” Arik snapped. “The fucker deserves every drop of misery he experiences.”

“Pestilence does,” Reaver said. “Reseph doesn’t. But that’s not why I did what I did.”

“What, exactly,” Ares ground out, “did you do?”

“I erased his memory and dropped him in the human world.”

“Why?”

“To give him time to heal. We need him whole when the Biblical Apocalypse starts. Even if it doesn’t happen for another thousand years, we need all the time we can get to heal him. He needs to reintegrate his good side, because Pestilence is still in there. His power is diminished and he can’t bring about the end of days anymore, but he could still wreak havoc on Earth and in Sheoul.”

Regan shoved to her feet. “Put him back in Sheoul-gra.”

Reaver closed his eyes. “Regan, I understand your concern for Logan—”

“Respectfully, Reaver, I don’t think you do,” Regan said. “Pestilence wants Logan dead. He tried to kill us both, so I don’t think you get it. You don’t have kids, so you can’t possibly understand.”

Thanatos slung his arm over her shoulder and tugged her against him. “I’m with Regan. I want him taken back.”

“So you want your brother, who you loved for thousands of years, to suffer unimaginable pain?”

Ares, who rarely let emotions interfere with his battle-wise thinking, didn’t make an exception now. “The pain is regrettable, but it’s what’s best for everyone.”

“I drove a blade through his heart,” Thanatos said flatly. “He’s dead to me.” Than scowled, his brow slamming down over his yellow eyes. “And wait, why didn’t Deliverance destroy him?”

Reaver braced himself for this next part. “Deliverance wasn’t the blade you needed to kill Pestilence.”

The sudden silence in the room was broken only by Than’s low growl. “Reaver…”

The souls of those Thanatos had killed, the ones who got sucked into his armor, began to billow around his feet as Than’s anger mounted. Regan lay a comforting hand on his arm, and though the souls eased off the frenzied swirling, the fact that they were still there wasn’t good.

“What’s going on?” The bright orange flower in Limos’s ebony hair wilted, as though it sensed her mood. “What are you not telling us?”

“Remember how Pestilence was trying to find Wormwood?”

Kynan nodded. “He tore apart Aegis headquarters and killed dozens for the dagger.”

“Well, he got it. He knew Wormwood was the dagger that would kill him.” Reaver looked Than in the eye. “You’d been searching for a way to repair Reseph’s Seal, but what you didn’t know was that Deliverance was the answer. You had it all along.”

“A blade his Deliverance,” Than murmured. “Okay, so that part of my prophecy was about saving Reseph. But The Doom Star cometh if the cry fails? We thought the Doom Star was Halley’s Comet.”

Reaver shook his head. “The Doom Star was Wormwood. Gethel and Pestilence figured it out.”

“So if we’d failed to stab Pestilence with Deliverance at the moment of Logan’s first cry, we could have killed Pestilence at any time with Wormwood?”

“Exactly.”

Thanatos’s furious curse made the hellhounds in the room leap to their feet and look for a threat. “I could have killed him. I could have ended this and you didn’t tell me? All this time we were living with a false sense of security? My son could still be in danger and you thought it was best to not tell us?”

The accusing glares of everyone in the room shriveled Reaver’s heart. There were very few people Reaver cared about disappointing, and those here happened to be the few. “I didn’t know about Wormwood until just before Logan’s birth. I only had a few moments to make a choice about giving it to you, and I chose Reseph’s life. He isn’t a threat to you. His memory is gone.”

“Damn you, Reaver,” Thanatos croaked, the rare emotion in his voice shredding Reaver’s insides. He hated to see any of these warriors hurt, and knowing he was at least in part responsible only made it worse. “Damn you.”

Ares swore in disgust. “Take him back to Sheoul-gra.”

Reaver understood Ares’s anger, but dammit, Reaver had made a decision, and he had to stand by what he believed was best. “A, you don’t order your Watcher, or any angel, around. B, we need him whole. He won’t heal if I send him back.”

Limos cast a worried glance at Arik. “What does this mean for Arik’s soul? We thought that with Pestilence dead, it had reverted to Arik. Can Reseph give it back?”

“No.” It had been a long time since Reaver had willingly taken a drink of anything stronger than wine, but right now he could use a gallon-sized shot of tequila. “Only Pestilence can release his soul, and if he takes over again, he could release it into Sheoul out of spite.”

“Meaning?” That from Arik, who looked a little green around the gills.

“Meaning that when you do die, you’re doomed to Sheoul.”

“Oh, good,” Arik said. “Because I didn’t get enough torture the first time around.”

“This is so fucked up,” Thanatos snarled. “We have to move on this. We can’t just sit around and wait for Reseph to get better in a thousand years.”

Arik cleared his throat. “Um… you need to do something.” He was staring at his cell phone. “I just got a message from Decker. He’s got a spy inside The Aegis, and it looks like they’re onto us. They’re sending a team to Bardsley.”

“Fuck.” Limos hurled a juiced lime into the garbage so hard it bounced back out. “That can only end badly.”

Arik shoved the phone in his BDU pants pocket. “We’ve got to get Reseph before they do.”

“Typical day with the Horsemen.” Kynan scrubbed his hands over his face. “Things with you guys only go from bad to worse.”

“No,” Reaver said softly. “I don’t think we’ve begun to see worse yet. Not even close.”

“What does that mean?” Limos asked.

Closing his eyes, Reaver braced himself. When he lifted his lids, hard eyes stared back at him. “Gethel knows he’s free. She’s got Soulshredders hunting for him.”

“And if she finds him…” Arik prompted.

“If she finds him, she can bring out Pestilence,” Reaver said. “And if you think he was angry before, imagine how pissed off he’s going to be this time around.”