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“Yes, Sara, I do,” he says, resolutely.Fiercely. Like his love is here and it’s here to stay.

Just as I’m about to smile, another memory comes back to me.

Then I hope it hurts to watch her die.

The words have my stomach knotting up.

Had a doctor said that? It seemed like it from the bits I remember of the conversation. And wearein a hospital. It would make sense that Pestilence spoke with a doctor … a doctor who wanted Pestilence to understand a thing or two about loss.

That’s about when the screams began. I thought maybe they’d been in my head, those screams, but now I look around again. These people have blood coming out their ears and their eyes, their noses and their mouths. Plague victims don’t look like that.

“What happened?” I repeat, staring at the bodies.

Something is not right here.

“They would not heal you.” Pestilence’s voice is cold, so cold.

My eyes sweep the hallway before returning to him. “Allof them?”

“Enough.”

My eyes linger on what used to be a nurse, her eyes, ears, and nose bloody. These deaths weren’t from plague. They wererevengekillings.

I’m beginning to shake, and I think it’s from horror.

“If they all died, then whodidheal me?” I ask.

“There were a handful whom I found, and I kept them alive long enough to tend to you.”

Long enough.

“Come,” he says, cutting off the rest of my questions so that he can help me onto the cart.

He helps lay me down, and I have to pinch my eyes shut because he’s being so gentle, so careful. Even though he recently mass exterminated a hospital, he handles me like I’m delicate.

“Don’t do that, Sara,” he says quietly.

He’s not going to spare humanity, just me.

“Do what?” I force my eyes open.

“Don’t act like I’m the monster. They were going to let you die.” His gaze burns, like he’s still trapped in the flames.

“Not all of them,” I whisper.

“Enough.”

I glance away from the horseman.

“This is what I was created to do!” he says hotly. “They died fast. Doesn’t that count for something?”

It does. And they would’ve died regardless. It’s just that I saw all those bodies, and that is a sight I can never unsee.

It’s one thing to watch a family die in their homes, to talk to them and care for them and witness their deaths. It’s another to see a building full of rotting corpses, their faces awash with terror. I can’t see them for the people they once were, and that makes them all the more grotesque.

I don’t respond. Honestly, I’m too damn tired to argue with Pestilence right now.

“So be it,” he says.