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“It’s just what?” Pestilence asks when I don’t finish the sentence. For once he’s actually being halfway open with me.

“I don’t know,” I say. I prod at the fire with the stick I still hold. “Is He—or She, or It—even Christian?” The Four Horsemen, after all, were mentioned in the Bible.

Pestilence gives me a disparaging look. “You humans and your hang ups with names and labels. God isn’t Christian—just as he isn’t Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or any other denomination. God is God.”

An answer that will appease pretty much no one.

The horseman leans back and appraises me. “What doyoubelieve, Sara?”

I drop the stick and take a sip of my cooling tea. “Before you came to earth, I didn’t believe in anything.”

“You believed innothing?” Pestilence is looking at me like he wants an explanation.

Knowing how he feels about the World Before, I really don’t want to give him this part of me.

“We had science, and that was its own kind of religion,” I say. “At least, for me it was. It explained why the world worked the way it did—it answered the mystery of it all.”

“I know enough about your science, Sara. It never answered the most importantmysteries, as you call them. What is a soul, where it goes when you die, what lies beyond—”

I put a hand up. “Point taken, buddy.”

He frowns at the endearment.

“I didn’tneedanswers to those questions. I assumed that this life was all anyone got and we were all deluding ourselves to think there was more.”

“But you’ve changed your mind?” he prods.

I give him a sad smile. “It’s hard not to when the Four Horsemen show up and all the world goes to hell.”

I can hear the fire station’s T.V. in my head, the unending newsreel playing. Political pundits had been replaced with religious leaders and scholars, each one explaining their take on the Bible, the Quran and the Hadith, the Sutras, the Vedas, the Tanach, the Mishnah, the Talmud and Midrash, and a thousand other biblical texts that suddenly pointed The Way to redemption. I half listened as each preacher and priest, rabbi and imam beseeched the world to find God before it was too late.

“It’s just … religion up until now has been a matter offaith. It hardly seems like religion for me to believe now that there’s proof.”

What I don’t say is that it’s still hard for me to believe in religion now that our proof comes in the form of four beings who want tokillus. If we’re suddenly all lambs up for slaughter, what is the point of life? And more importantly, if a painful and untimely death is what I’m to expect from life, then what should I expect from the afterlife?

I half assume Pestilence is going to proselytize to me, but he doesn’t. He just continues to give me that unnerving stare of his.

I meet his gaze, and I hold it. The smoke makes sleek ribbons between us and the rain dapples our clothing. Even in the firelight, I can see his blue eyes clearly. They’re an appropriate color; I feel like I’m drowning in them, in him.

A bubbly, warm sensation spreads beneath my skin.

I once heard that you can fall in love with someone simply by staring them in the eyes long enough. This is not that (please God let it not be that), but itissomething.

Like lightning striking, the realization hits me: despite every wound we’ve inflicted on one another, despite him trying to end my world and my world trying to end him, he wants me …

And I want him.

I don’t know who moves first, only that I’ve set my tea aside and he’s getting to his feet. There is no rush to our movements.

I’ve had plenty of those nights, where you can’t possibly move fast enough because the moment you slow the rush, you’ll realize what you’re doing is desperate and stupid and you really think the other person is annoying but you just want to feel the press of their skin against yours, so you’ll forgive it all until morning.

Both of us have plenty of time to turn away. To draw that line in the sand where he’s some biblical entity that’s come to end the world, and I’m a human simply trying to stop him. But right now, he doesn’t hate humans nearly so much as he wants to believe, and I don’t wish to defy him as much as I want to believe.

Before I have a chance to get up, he kneels in front of me. The fire that was once a barrier between us now sits like a sentinel at our side.

“I cannot decide if you are a toxin or a tonic,” he says, lifting a hand to my cheek. “Only that you plague my thoughts and fill my veins.”

Pestilence really could work on his compliments.