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I yelp as I swing into his arms. “What are you doing?”

“Helping you,” he says, carrying me back into the house. He sets me down on the floor of the living room, where the fire is nothing more than a few dying embers. Kneeling in front of me, he takes my feet and, one by one, rubs heat back into them.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask, watching him carefully.

He shakes his head, but doesn’t answer me.

Once I’m warm again, I grab my clothes and slip them on. All the while, the rest of the house is utterly still.

We leave shortly after that. And even though it’s the middle of the night and the snow is coming down harder, I’m so freaking relieved—to be alive, to be leaving that house, to feel Pestilence at my back, his arm gripping me tightly.

We’ve barely made it to the highway when Pestilence jerks on the reins, bringing Trixie up short.

I look around in confusion. “What are we … ?”

Pestilence tilts my jaw and then his mouth slams down on me, his other arm crushing me to him. It’s the kiss of a desperate man. Like he’s trying to inhale me into himself. Whatever initial clumsiness he had with the act is gone, replaced by this ferocity.

He eventually breaks away, his lips swollen.

Pestilence’s blue eyes are luminous. “You came … too close to death for my liking.”

It’s like he’s only now really processing it. And right here is the answer to my earlier question—my death would have affected the horseman.

Discreetly, I press a hand to my hammering heart. I mean something to him. What a shock.

He casts his gaze to the dark horizon and clicks his tongue, and we resume our punishing pace once more.

“How long do you plan on keeping me captive?” It’s an almost hilarious question, considering how muddled our roles have become.

Pestilence is quiet.

I glance up, only to see him staring down at me, his eyes deep.

“Until my task is complete, you and I shall ride together,” he says.

Until his task is complete. That’s such a simple statement, but it encompasses a vast, nearly unimaginable task ahead of us. To travel the entire world on horseback, watching millions fall to plague. How many months would it take? How many people would I have to watch die before my mind broke? How many more brushes with death would I have to face?

It would be unendurable.

“So I’m going to travel the entire globe?”

“Yes.” He sounds pleased.

I’m going to die.

Not by Pestilence’s hand, perhaps, but there will be someone in some city who will do what Nick could not.

That was always the plan, Sara. From the moment you pulled that blackened matchstick, you knew you were a dead woman walking. Don’t get remorseful now.

Of course, my continued existence bothers me nearly as much as my impending death.

I search his face in the darkness. “Of all the people whose paths you crossed, why did you pick me?”

He’s quiet for a long time. So long, in fact, that assume he’s not going to answer. It’s only as I’m about to face forward that he does.

“I felt God’s hand move me to spare you,” he says.

Surprise washes through me. I imagined that he might feed me his story about making an example of me. But this …