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“All the traveling has taken a toll on me,” I admit.

The stress, the long days stuck in the saddle, my mounting injuries, the relentless winter chill, the unreliable meals—I’ve done my best to muscle my way through it, but it only takes Pestilence’s notice for it all to come crashing back into my awareness.

Exhaustion probably won’t be what kills you, I remind myself.

Pestilence frowns. “Then you shall rest. We’ll linger here for—” he glances out the window, taking in the weak winter sun, “two more days.”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that two more days isn’t going to make much difference. That it hasn’tmademuch of a difference. We’ve been pausing for days at a time.

It’s never going to get easier with Pestilence. Care though he might, he’s always going to be impervious to the things that will kill me, and so he’ll always push me harder than what I’m capable of.

But I don’t say these things. Instead I nod and give him another weak smile.

His frown deepens. “I don’t like this look,” he says, studying my features. “You lie with your face. Do you need more time? Three days? Four? You shall have it—only remove this sad, defeated look. I cannot stand it.”

I don’t think anyone has ever told me anything so genuinely frank and kind.

On a whim, I pull him to me, hugging the horseman tightly. At first, he’s stiff in my arms, but as the seconds tick by, he hesitantly wraps his own arms around me, and I feel utterly engulfed by him.

“You’re a good man, Pestilence,” I admit.

And therein lies my problem. He’s not a nice man, he’s not a peaceful man, but he’sgoodman.

I close my eyes and breathe him in. He smells like cheap soap, and beneath that, divinity. (Didn’t even know one could literally smell divine, but there you have it.)

His lips brush my ear. “You forget, I am no man, Sara.”

A laugh escapes me. “Fine. You are a good harbinger of the apocalypse.”

He holds me tighter, his cheek brushing against my temple. “And you are a compassionate woman.” I feel him finger a lock of my hair. “Fartoocompassionate, if I’m being honest,” he says under his breath.

I take some solace in the fact that whatever this is that I’m beginning to feel, Pestilence is experiencing it as well. And we might each be bulldozing our morals, but at the very least, we’re doing it together.

We end upleaving the house two days later. That’s about all the time I could take in that messy place. I’m no paragon of cleanliness, but that house … even now, kilometers away, my skin crawls at the thought of it.

I’m pulled from my thoughts when I catch sight of a sign in front of us. After we fled Vancouver, we’d traveled through mostly backroads and places off the beaten path, but inevitably, Pestilence had made his way back to the main highways. And now I see something I’d missed.

I suck in my breath.

Seattle 54 mi.

“What is it?” Pestilence asks.

“We’re in America.”

Somewhere between Pestilence getting attacked in Vancouver and my own brush with death a few days ago, I hadn’t even realized that we’d crossedcountries.

“Ah,America,” Pestilence says with distaste, dragging me back to the present. “Here they are made particularly mean.”

A ridiculous wave of fear washes through me at that. “Pestilence, we need to get off the main road.”

“Whatever for?” he asks, genuinely curious.

I can still feel the ruin of his head, cradled in my lap. I’m not ready to go through that again.

“There’s a large city coming up,” I say. “Bigger than the last one.” There were dozens of people waiting for Pestilence in Vancouver; how many would there be in Seattle? “Let’s go around it.”

“I will not be driven off my course by the presence of humans.”