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“Boned?”

“I’ll explain it later.”

“Good. I’m tired of making war with that mouth of yours.” He leans in. “Show me the other side to living.”

And so I do.

Chapter 44

I should bewary of days like today, when the sun burns bright and the sky is a blinding shade of blue—the kind of day that hurts your eyes and squeezes your heart. It’s the kind of day that, even in the heart of winter, reminds you what summer felt like.

It’s a fucking liar of a day, and just like all painfully beautiful things, I should know better than to trust it.

Last night’s campsite is far behind us when Pestilence and I enter our first town of the day, the two of us soaking up the morning sun as we chat.

“… I heard a noise beneath my sink,” I tell him, right in the middle of my story, “and when I went to check it out, there was not one, butthreerats.” I pause dramatically.

“I don’t understand how this led to the …fire alarmgoing off,” he says, hesitating a little before repeating the term. I’d only just explained to him what a fire alarm was, and how the one in my apartment escaped the Arrival unscathed.

“They ran at me!” I exclaim.

“So?”

“So?” Rats don’trunat people. Particularly not in an age when people willeatsaid rats. “So I grabbed a can of hairspray and a match, and I made a flamethrower.”

No one drives this bitch out of her home.

At that, the horseman throws his head back and laughs. I stop speaking just so that I can turn in the saddle and stare at him.

Only Pestilence could outshine the sun.

“Don’t tell me you tried to hurt the creatures?” he asks when his chuckles die down.

“You know, that’s real precious coming from you.”

He starts laughing again, and new life goal:get Pestilence to laugh more.

“Did it work?” he asks.

“Of course it didn’t work.”

That only makes him laugh harder.

“Well,Ididn’t think it was very funny at the time,” I say, but I can’t keep a straight face. It’s impossible when he lights up like this.

He manages to smother his laughter enough to say, “Isn’t your job to put out fires, not—”

BOOM!

My body is violently thrown forward as the world explodes around me. I feel the heat, the terrible, scorching heat, at my back as I tumble through the air. It sizzles against my skin, though Pestilence’s body shields me from the worst of it.

I slam into the ground, my side flaring in pain at the impact. All around me, sizzling bits of asphalt and dirt rain down, singeing me in a dozen different places.

I lay on the ground for several seconds, breathing hard as thick smoke billows through the air.

What the hell just happened?

On the other side of the road, Pestilence lays pinned beneath Trixie, a pool of blood spreading out from the back of his head. His horse’s body is partially gone, and what remains is bloody and singed.