by Jenny McKane
People began streaming from the buildings clawing at their skin and ripping their clothing off in the streets, uncaring of who saw them or watched on in horror. In no amount of time, whatever unseen assailant was attacking the population, had moved on to every onlooker and the streets were full of people trying to tear their skin from their bodies as they convulsed on the ground.
They died quickly. Before two minutes had passed, Sunny guessed that she was looking at nearly 200 dead bodies, all struck down by the same unseen sickness.
One of the bodies nearest her, a woman in her 50s who now had a green pallor to her rigid body, began to twitch. And shudder. And in horror, Sunny watched as the woman (and soon others around her) pushed themselves to standing and started shambling in all directions.
“What the hell?” Sunny whispered. “Zombies?”
Plaxo spoke beside her. “Reanimated corpses,” he said, probably not familiar with the term. “Tasked with spreading the sickness even further.”
Her stomach dropped. Zombies? She could hardly wrap her head around it.
“Pestilence,” she whispered, realizing what she was witnessing.
The White Rider. The bringer of disease and pestilence—and he’d just dropped a bomb of a bug off in China, the most populated continent in the world.
The scene changed suddenly, before Sunny had a chance to see Pestilence’s face. Soon, she and Plaxo were standing in what could only be the American heartland. There was a wheat field that stretched out in front of her as far as the eye could see. It was a bright, sunny day and bees were buzzing in a flower patch nearby.
From the right side of her vision, a figure clad in black armor moved forward. Instead of opening a portal, however, he raised a large battle standard he was carrying and tapped it on the ground three times.
Beneath her, the earth shuddered and moaned and the sky above her changed from a bright, cloudless blue, to a sickly, alien-looking yellow. In front of her, the crops had suddenly died and rot now stood where the wheat had. The bees and insects buzzing had dropped dead to the ground, and any signs of life in the scene were gone.
A chill washed over her.
“Famine,” she breathed and Plaxo nodded.
As if on cue, the scenery shifted again. Now, they were in a quaint village. Somewhere in Europe? She couldn’t tell. But she heard shouting and raised voices and it didn’t take long for a group of men and women in military gear to come running down the road, battered and bloodied and weapon-less.
Sunny couldn’t tell quite where they were going, but they seemed to be seeking some sort of cover. They were being pursued.
Seconds later, their pursuers came into view and she saw a squad of what she could only describe as killer angels. They had every bit the look of angels—tall, fair, painfully beautiful, but they, too, had modern looking military armor and guns.
That seemed odd to Sunny. Angels needed guns now?
The humans had made it to a building and just as Sunny thought they might have made it to safety, a figure dressed in red armor stepped through the door.
The humans dropped to their knees at the sight of him and began begging for their lives, pleading for what looked like mercy. It sounded like they were speaking German.
And unlike the other riders, Sunny could clearly see the face on this Horseman. It was almost as though he’d angled his body perfectly so that she could see him.
Malach.
Her chest constricted as the fallen Seraph gave a pitying smile to the humans that didn’t quite reach his eyes. It worked on the humans groveling for their lives in front of him, however, and they looked relieved—for just a fraction of a second.
Malach gave the signal to the armed angels behind them and without missing a beat, they opened fire on the survivors and Sunny had to look away.
“He just killed them,” she choked out. “They were begging for their lives and he killed them.”
Plaxo didn’t say anything, He just stared ahead as Malach gave orders. Soon, the military angels were kicking in doors and rounding up survivors, dragging them out to the streets and herding them together. These were not resistance fighters—they were citizens.
And they were murdered just like the soldiers had been, right in front of Sunny’s eyes. She squeezed her eyes shut against the scene playing out in front of her, but there was no way she’d ever forget the sound the gunfire made or the screams of pain that followed.
Sunny felt like she was going to be sick and just before it got to be too overwhelming, the scene was gone.
She fell to her knees in the blackness where only Plaxo’s face was illuminated.
“War?” Sunny asked the obvious question and Plaxo sadly nodded.
“Lady Hunter was very brave to watch that,” Plaxo said, and she swore she saw a tear in his eye. “Plaxo will have a hard time getting over that part. It was almost too much.”
Plaxo had seen a lot of violence in his days in the demon realm, but he seemed shaken by the suffering, pain, and violence that was headed their way.
“We have one more,” Sunny said, realizing she’d only seen three of the four riders. The final Horseman, Death, had yet to be shown.
Plaxo, for his part, didn’t seem in a huge rush to show her, either. He was stalling.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she whispered, afraid of his answer.
He nodded.
“You have to show me, don’t you?”
Again, he nodded. “Plaxo wishes there was another way to get the truth to you, but there is an enchantment on this and Plaxo cannot speak the name until you watch this for yourself,” he said, his voice almost breaking. “Plaxo wishes there was another way, truly, Lady Hunter.”
The dream demon had been through so much and was now at the point of breaking because of a message he’d been tasked to deliver for her. She pushed herself to her feet and straightened her spine, not wanting her friend to suffer anymore. If he had to face what was next, then so would she.
Without realizing what she was doing, Sunny reached over and grabbed Plaxo’s hand before speaking.
“I’m ready,” she said, doing her best to make her voice sound steady and strong, despite it feeling anything but.
“Lady Hunter is sure?” Plaxo said. He was stalling, she could tell. “We could wait until tomorrow, after consulting with the archangels. Even the archdemon?”
“But you won’t be able to utter the name, right?” she asked, a little confused at what exactly he was trying to protect her from, and how exactly delaying it might help anything. “I need a name and a face if we’re going to form a plan, don’t I?”
Plaxo was quiet and Sunny knew she was right.
He let out a small sigh and closed his eyes.
“Lady Hunter knows that these visions can be manipulated and warped, doesn’t she?”
There was something off about the tone of the question, as though Plaxo was truly just trying to make her feel better about something she was about to see—even when he clearly thought the worst of it.
“That’s not what is going on here, though, is it?” she pressed. “You believe the message you were sent, don’t you? You don’t sense any untruths, do you?”
Plaxo would try to protect her with his last breath, and he’d proven that recently, but she was certain that the one thing he wouldn’t do was lie to her.
The dream demon’s shoulders were slumped forward and he looked utterly destroyed about what she was insisting on seeing.
“Is it the message or the messenger?” She was trying to get any sense of what she was about to witness out of him. She knew Death was the final Horseman, the Pale Rider as he was called, she was going to see. Plaxo had shown her the other three—even the brutal monster Malach had become as War personified. What was so much worse about Death?
“We need to do this,” she pressed and the dream demon nodded reluctantly.
“Remember,” he said as he squeezed her hand tighter. “This is just a vision. Death is not reall
y here. Not yet.”
Sunny promised to remember and urged him to proceed.
Looking back, Sunny realized later she should have taken Plaxo up on that offer to delay the unmasking of Death, for she was truly not ready for what she was about to see.
But she’d thrown her die and cast her lot and Plaxo was going to deliver the vision to her, against his own better judgement.
The black scenery shifted around them and Sunny was transported to a very familiar place. One she had not seen in years.
Her old, childhood home. And standing there on her old street, she heard voices she had not heard in a very long time.
Her parents.
Chapter Thirty-four
Her parents were still alive.
In the vision, anyway.
The front door to her old home opened and she watched with a slack jaw as her father walked out the door carrying two suitcases. He had on his old leather jacket and a pair of khakis. She remembered that outfit. Her mother followed close behind, wearing a pair of black pants and a sweater. She was wearing her lucky strand of pearls, the one they’d buried her in three days later, and boat shoes.
Sunny remembered every detail about this day—her parents were on their way to the airport and were going out of town because her mother had a presentation at a conference in Las Vegas and they were going to turn it into a short working vacation.
Sunny saw a smaller, 12-year-old version of herself walk out the door with her brother, Sam. Her heart choked at the vision. It seemed like so long since she saw Sam’s face, and there he was, nearly 16, waving as their parents packed their bags into the car. Their aunt Lottie came out of the house and put her hands on young Sunny’s shoulders. She was waving to her parents. They promised to be home before Sunny even realized they were gone and Sunny had taken their word for it.
But they never made it to the airport.
With a flick of his wrist, Plaxo moved the vision along and suddenly they were standing on a large stretch of open road that led to the municipal airport. The lanes were clear, the road was dry. Sunshine shone overhead and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
She knew this spot well, too. A few weeks later, Sunny and Lottie would hammer two wooden crosses onto the side of the road, just a few feet from where Plaxo and Sunny were standing.
She felt herself begin to panic, knowing what the vision was obviously going to show her. Who would know these intimate details of her life and show her an angle of her darkest moment that even she hadn’t had to witness? Sure, she bore the grief and loss of losing both parents that day, but at least she’d been spared witnessing the accident that killed them both.
But someone, or something, seemed intent on showing her the gory details of her parents’ death.
“I can’t do this,” Sunny whispered, her hand clamping down on Plaxo’s as her knees wobbled and threatened to give out. Now she understood why Plaxo had offered to delay showing her the vision. It was going to be too much for her and she hadn’t understood him.
Why hadn’t she listened? Was it too late? Could she back out of the vision now?
“Please make it stop,” she begged her friend and from the pain that was evident on his face, he couldn’t help her.
“We’ve begun,” he said, his own voice cracking. “Plaxo cannot, Lady Hunter. Please forgive him.”
Sunny briefly wondered if she could run from the dream. She’d cast Gideon out of her space with relative ease. Could she remove herself from this?
Closing her eyes just as she heard the sound of a car engine in the distance, she bucked and pushed with all her might to be set free from the dream, but it was no use.
The boundaries of the vision were holding fast and she was a prisoner.
“It will be over soon,” Plaxo said, most likely in an attempt to calm her down. There would be no calming her down.
“Stop it!” She screamed toward the sky in the vision, knowing it was likely fruitless and that Death was not actually with them now. She was watching a memory—a rerun. “Stop, you sick son of a bitch!”
Her parent’s blue sedan was now in view, nearly half a mile away. In her panic, she wondered if she could somehow stop the accident from unfolding. Was it possible? Looking around, Sunny tried to find the source of what had caused her parents’ car to go end over end three times and could come up with nothing, despite the fact that they were getting closer.
Where was the other car? The object they had hit?
There was nothing there.
The car was blocks away now—not traveling too fast or over the speed limit, not swerving or out of control whatsoever. All of their travel conditions were perfect.
What had gone wrong?
There was a blink in the air in front of them—a ripple in the space between Sunny and Plaxo and her parents’ vehicle when suddenly she saw the back of a man. He seemed familiar.
When the man who’d appeared in the road turned to look in the opposite direction, Sunny was able to see his face and she staggered on the spot, her brain unable to process what she had just seen.
It was her brother, Sam. Only this version of Sam was not a sulky teenager. This Sam was larger, taller, and broader. And—angelic?
She couldn’t mistake the luminosity of his skin that hadn’t been there earlier in the house or in any of her memories of him and his dark hair gleamed like onyx in the sunshine.
How did the angel look so much like her brother? Her eyes and her brain were at war with one another, and she felt like she was losing her grip on reality quickly.
“Is that my brother?” Her whisper to Plaxo was jagged and broken and despite knowing that she was looking at her brother—in his true form, perhaps, her mind would not accept it. “Is that Sam?”
Tears were streaming down her face freely now.
In the past two years, Sunny realized she had faced some terrifying situations and sights. She watched a tree bleed with the blood of its victims. She watched angels and demons consume their own and perform atrocious acts on the other species out of some self-aggrandizing sense of justice, but she was certain in that moment that what she was about to watch—what she was seconds from witnessing, quite possibly could break her mind completely.
Her heart would shatter in her chest if she watched what she was certain was about to unfold. If the signs were correct, and Sunny was certain they were, way in the dark recesses of her heart, she was about to watch the person she’d grown up with and loved as a brother not only reveal that he’d been some sort of imposter, but she was going to watch him murder her parents.
“No,” she screamed again, but Sam didn’t listen. He held his hand out and a sword appeared in it. It was bigger than he was, but he held it aloft with no problems.
Further away, her father, who was driving, noticed the figure in the road too late—Sam had appeared so close to the car and made himself visible at the last possible moment so that there was clearly no time for her father to stop.
Sunny watched as her mother and father’s eyes widened when they recognized their son, a larger, more lethal looking version of him, standing right in front of them with a sword.
The squeal of tires told Sunny that it was too late—it was as good as done and there was no saving them. She’d known that the whole time, but something inside her began to crack. There was truly nothing she could do at this point but watch her parents die.
And she’d force herself to watch, too. If this sick bastard, whoever it was, was going to force her into his game, she was going to gather every detail and nuance she could in case she could use it against him later.
And she’d use it, Sunny swore just as she watched Sam swing the giant sword up and over his head and bring it crashing down onto the car’s hood with a force so strong that the front end of the car collapsed into the pavement and the backend went flying into the air, somersaulting the vehicle.
Time slowed at first.
Sunny watched the hood of the car collapse and crush to the grou
nd and as the back of the car launched, she saw the horror in her parents’ eyes as they realized too late that they weren’t going to survive a crash this violent.
Sam, or whoever he was, was gone by the time the car began its death tumble. End over end, it flipped for almost a quarter mile before coming to rest on its hood and spinning in a slow circle.
Sunny didn’t need to see what happened next. The accident report had told her plenty when Lottie let her read it a few months later.
Even in the vision, Sunny could smell the gasoline leak. She closed her eyes as the tears began to flow in earnest and held her breath. Only a few more seconds…
The blast was huge and had she been corporeal and truly standing so close to the crash, she would have been burned and blown back. But because she was a visitor to this grisly scene, the flames and the air did nothing to her.
The fire consumed the car quickly, likely with a little supernatural assistance, Sunny thought bitterly, and she made Plaxo let her stay until the last flame died and there was nothing recognizable of the car. It was only then that emergency crews began arriving on scene, too late to be of any use, also likely a design of the attacker.
Sunny drew in a long breath and stared at her feet.
So many questions.
Mercifully, Plaxo drew her from the dream and back to the darkness where it was just the two of them.
She was unsteady on her feet again but she made herself stay standing. She didn’t try to stop her tears, but she would not allow herself to collapse into her grief.
Moments ticked by as the sobs wracked her chest and she struggled to compose herself.
It made sense now, Plaxo’s insistence that she be more prepared for what she was going to see. But how could she have known the depths of the heartbreak and anguish that was waiting for her in that vision?
She’d been so naive to think that this was some self-contained puzzle that she could skip her way into and solve before skipping back out and resuming her life.
No, the vision had made it clear that she’d been a player, albeit unwitting, for a long time. There were no coincidences in this war and that much had been made clear.
