By the time I return to my hometown of Whistler, I hear enough reports and firsthand accounts to believe the incredible.

The plague really did disappear over the course of days.

Just … poof, gone, and the horseman with it. I try not to think about that. My heart aches enough as it is.

I learn that, like me, people didn’t believe the news—not at first, at least. Weeks without incident had to pass before anyone dared to hope that the Messianic Fever was truly over and that the horseman had vanished.

Then people began to hope—in that ridiculous way we do—that other things would return to the way they once were. That electricity would begin to work as it ought, that batteries would hold a charge and perhaps even the Internet would eventually come back.

They hoped in vain.

The world never went back to the way it was. I doubt it ever will.

Without the horseman by my side, no one recognizes me as the girl he kept. Despite the few blurry photos that once circulated, not a single person has connected the dots.

When I finally arrive home, I get a hero’s welcome—the firefighter who took a stand against the horseman, the woman they all thought long dead.

My father holds me for a long time, and my mother openly weeps. I’m blubbering like a baby when I see them both alive.

Plague never got them.

Our reunion is touching and ridiculous and beautiful, and I just fucking love my parents.

When I return to the fire station, Luke is the first one to see me. It’s almost comical, the way the shock registers on his face.

“Holy motherfucking shit! Burns!” He nearly overturns the chair he sits in when he sees me. “You’re alive!”

“So are you!”

It’s startling to see him after all this time. He looks a little leaner, not that I should be surprised. Living through a Canadian winter post-Arrival is difficult enough. Living through a Canadian winter in the frozen wilderness is near impossible. And that’s what he and all these other survivors had to do to escape the plague.

Luke’s exclamation draws the attention of others, who are soon thumping me on the back and pulling me into hugs, Felix among them. They all escaped with their lives, all of them except for …

“Briggs?” I ask, my eyes searching for him.

Could just be his day off.

Someone sobers up. “Didn’t make it.”

“He … didn’t?” My mood plummets. I was supposed to be the one that kicked the bucket, not him.

Surely he had enough time to escape.

“They needed help at the hospital. He came back early to aid the sick.”

And he died for it.

The more I look around, the more I notice other missing men. “Who else?”

“Sean and Rene. Blake. Foster.”

So many.

“All died in the line of duty,” someone else adds.

I should’ve known. First responders will always put their lives on the line for others.

I get that itchy feeling beneath my skin. It should’ve been me. A dozen times over it should’ve.

Pestilence stopped the plague altogether because of you, a quiet voice whispers at the back of my mind. Of course, that thought comes with its own strange pain.

“How did you escape the horseman?” Felix asks.

They’re all looking at me.

I’ve dreaded this question since I realized there would be survivors in Whistler. There’s so much I have to answer for, and I don’t know what to include and how much to say.

So I keep it simple. “The horseman … showed me mercy.”

Surprisingly, life returns to normal. Or at least, as normal as I can expect these days.

I move back into my apartment, though I spend an agonizing few weeks carting my belongings from my parents’ house—where they were brought when I was presumed dead—back to my place.

In the wake of my return, people have questions—so many questions.

How did you survive the horseman?

Where have you been all these months?

Why did it take you so long to come home?

For most people, I get good at non-answers. For those who matter, I give them half-truths. At some point, I can’t not; the truth is suffocating the life out of me.

But even then, I don’t share everything—like how I fell in love with a monster, or how in the end, he saved all our miserable lives. How I recited poetry to him and felt him change from a nightmare to a man.

I can’t shake the loneliness I now feel. I first noticed it on the road home, when I bunked in abandoned houses or trekked over kilometers of unbroken snow. And now that I’m home, it seems to rush in from all sides. I’m drowning in my loneliness and no amount of company can banish the sensation.

Not even this, however, can compare to the horrible feeling of falling back into an old life when everything is now different. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I hate it, but there’s nothing better for me anywhere else, and so I stay here in this drab apartment, and each day I go to the fire station and pretend I’m okay when I’m not.

I’m really not.

Sometimes my mind wanders to what impossibilities might have been if Pestilence were a human man. What it would be like to be with him without the baggage. But then, if he were human, Pestilence wouldn’t be Pestilence, so I guess it doesn’t do to ponder the possibility.

Some things are just not meant to be, I suppose.

Now, glass of homebrewed and very suspect wine in hand, I reread a much loved book of mine. Pre-Pestilence, I might’ve flipped through my collection of Shakespeare or Lord Byron (hardcore lit bitch right here), but the greats are ruined for me. Particularly Poe. His dark soul and macabre heart are too similar to mine.

A knock at the door has me setting my book aside.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Shut up, Poe, no one asked for your commentary.

I might legit be losing my mind.

Standing, I glance from the wine in my hand to the shotgun propped against the edge of the couch. I got two hands, and I need one to open the door, so what will it be—the gun or the wine?

Tough decision. Night visitors are always suspect, and I’m not super trusting these days, but … in the end, wine.

Glass in hand, I open my front door.

“Sara.”

I drop the wine, the sound of shattering glass barely registering.

Pestilence fills the doorway, his golden-blond hair framing his face like a corona. His crown is gone, his bow is gone, his golden armor is gone. Even his clothes are different, not dark and pristine. He wears a flannel shirt and jeans, and on his feet are scuffed human boots.

“Pestilence,” I breathe, my heart thundering.

Can’t be real.

“I am Pestilence no longer,” he says, continuing to stand there, not daring to come any closer.

It’s so unbearably hard, staring at him. He still looks like an angel, even in human clothes. Will he ever not look like a divine thing?

But it’s more than his sheer beauty. It took a long time to admit to myself just how far I fell for him. Too late I realized that I loved everything about him—his heart, his mind, his very essence. But even as I realized it, I mourned it because, by then, he was gone.

And now I don’t know what to do, whether to close the distance between us or keep away from him. I don’t know in what state he’s coming to me.

I left him … a broken thing.

I bite the inside of my cheek. “They said you just disappeared.”

He searches my face, and maybe I’m just imagining it, but he looks like he’s trying to memorize each one of my features.

“I can do many things, Sara, but disappearing isn’t one of them.”

A surge of relief follows that statement. He can’t just vanish and leave me.

I stand aside, opening the door wider. “Want to come in?”

Pestilence’s gaze moves to the apartment beyond me, his eyes sparking with interest and a want so fierce it makes my knees weak.

My horseman came back for me.

Carefully, he steps inside, glass crunching under his boot as he does so. His attention is everywhere, taking in each little piece of my humble life.

“Where are your things?” I ask softly as I close the door, my eyes scouring him again. The bow that’s never more than an arm’s span away from him, the crown that almost always decorates his head, the golden armor that makes him look ever so otherworldly—it’s all gone.

I surrender, he’d said.

He swivels to face me. “My purpose is served.”

What does that even mean? And why does that fill me with dread?

“And Trixie?” Had the creature served his purpose too? That would kill me.

Pestilence jerks his chin over his shoulder. Only now, when I manage to tear my eyes off of the horseman, do I bother to look out my window. In the darkness beyond, I catch the barest shadow of his mount.

Trixie Skillz, the steed whose back I road on all those weeks, snuffles in the darkness, his reins looped about a broken lamp post.

I turn back around only to find Pestilence standing close, his eyes devouring me like a starving man.

“How did you find me?” I ask.

“I never left you.”

My brows furrow.

“Come now, Sara,” he says at my confusion, “I wasn’t just going to let you slip out of my life that easily. I’m far too stubborn and not nearly noble enough.”

What is he saying? That the entire time I made my way back here, he shadowed me?

“Besides,” he continues, “you were still recovering, and I didn’t trust your fragile body to make the journey back.”

I can’t take in enough air.

He cared. Even when he thought I didn’t, he never gave up.

“So you followed me?”

He nods.

And I never knew.

“Why didn’t you ever show yourself?”

Pestilence glances down at his boots. “You had made your decision. I wanted to respect that.” He laughs self-deprecatingly, toeing a stray piece of broken glass. “But I couldn’t, in the end.”

And I’m so glad for it.

“You stopped the plague,” I say.

He meets my gaze, his expression turning guarded. “I did.”

“Why?” I ask, searching his face.

Pestilence’s eyes are deep and true. “Because love brings out the best in you.”

I swallow thickly. If the last couple months have been a nightmare, this is some wonderful dream, one where I get everything I want.

I don’t trust it. I’ve come to expect that things that appear too good to be true often are. Why should the one thing I want more than any other follow different logic?

“Back at that last house, why didn’t you tell me you cured the sick?” I ask. That would’ve saved months of this agony.

Pestilence’s gaze is agonized. “My mind was a mess at the time. I … had not committed to my actions, not even after I set them in motion. Nor after I let you go. It took weeks of contemplation for me to come to terms with my decision. My heart spoke first; my mind had to follow.”

His expression turns fierce. “I should never have let you go. I should have listened to you, spoke with you, fought for you. I’m only now learning how very complex humans are.”

My heart beats madly at his words. Hope is beginning to surge through my veins, and that scares the crap out of me because all hope does is prime you for a letdown, and I’m not sure I can take another letdown.

“And the plague—it’s gone for good?” I ask.

Pestilence gives me a sad smile. “Sara, there will always be sickness and disease—that I cannot change. But my divinely-wrought plague will never infect another. I have … served my purpose,” he says again.

And again, that one sentence fills me with a strange sort of dread.

I tug on the sleeves of my shirt. “What happens to you now that you’ve served your purpose?” I’m proud that my voice doesn’t tremble like the rest of my body is beginning to.

It shouldn’t be possible to feel this much. Excitement and anxiety and fear are all churning inside me. But mostly fear, fear for my horseman. I never asked him what would happen if he simply stopped spreading the Fever.

I probably should’ve.

Pestilence’s blue eyes pierce mine. “Come with me and find out.”

That ache in my chest expands, but now it hurts with something that is halfway between pain and pleasure.

“There are so many things between us,” I say. So many insurmountable things. I want him so badly it hurts, but I swear it feels like he’s the one thing I can’t have, even after all his wrongs have been righted.

Pestilence closes the last of the distance between us. Gently he takes my hands, staring down at my knuckles. “I may no longer be Pestilence the Conqueror, but I will fight for what I want, and I want you.” His eyes rise to mine. “Tell me you want me too.”

I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. All I have to do is take one single step, and then everything can change. Everything will change.

He squeezes my hands. “Come back to me,” he says. “Quote me Poe and Byron, Dickinson and Shakespeare. Tell me your human histories, share with me your memories. Let me taste your food and let me drink your wine. Let me make love to you and hold you in my arms until dawn. Share your life with me.”

I stand there, still frozen, still sure he’s some vision made to haunt my days. Sure I’m going to wake.

Pestilence’s hands move to cup my face. “I was wrong—about humanity. And I was wrong so many times when it came to you. Forgive me.”

I press my eyes closed, then open them. He’s still there, still gazing at me with his sad eyes.

“Come back to me, Sara,” he repeats. “Please.”

That damn word.

The world distorts beyond my watery eyes.

“I’m still going to die someday,” I whisper.

He nods solemnly. “I know.”

“You’re okay with that?”

His thumb strokes my cheek. “Sara, I don’t know how many minutes you get or I get, but I do know I want to spend them all with you.”

My heart hammers in my chest.

I look at his face, his angelic face with those sad, solemn eyes. He really could be an angel—maybe he is an angel, if such things exist. I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything, except that joy is a strange thing, and I feel it now with him just as I have felt a hundred times before in a hundred different little moments between us.

I reach up and wrap a hand around his wrist. “If you are no longer Pestilence the Conqueror, then what would you like me to call you?” I ask, leaning a little into his touch.

He gives me a shy, vulnerable smile. “‘Love’ had a nice ring to it.”

“Alright, love,” I say, noticing his whisper of a smile at the endearment, “what minutes I have left—they are yours. I am yours.”

There is a moment where it doesn’t compute. My horseman’s eyes are still haunted, and he looks like hope utterly abandoned him somewhere back in Washington. But then it does register, and his whole face transforms.

First his gaze brightens, his eyebrows hiking up, and then a smile that could outpace the sun spreads across his face.

He leans down and takes my lips, and the kiss is an end and a beginning all at once.