Then it had all gone in a moment.
Unlike my Brothers who’d closed themselves off, I took the opportunity to feel whenever I could. Like I could build a callous on my heart so if it ever happened again, it wouldn’t hurt so bad.
I pulled Dippy into an empty bit of floor and tucked her close, closer than I’d held her last night. And she let me. She stood stiff for a moment, but eventually the heat of our bodies and the thrum of the music had her melting against me. “Been a hell of a day, hey?” I said softly.
She sighed, and I felt the fight leave her body. If I let her go now, she’d slide to the floor boneless. “I’ve had worse.”
I bet. I didn’t miss the part about Purgatory. About her torture. It made me want to tear down the world, and that wasn't a feeling I was used to when it came to someone I’d just met. I’d practiced the art of no-strings. Now I felt like a marinette. “You sure you don’t have some kind of enchantment power, Dippy?”
Again her laugh was all bitterness on her tongue. “I’ve been alone forever, Solomon. If you knew just how old I was, you wouldn’t ask me that.”
“I’m a lot older than I look too, you know.” Judas would kick my ass for hinting like this, but there was no harm. She knew we weren't human.
“Oh Solomon. I’m, like, 5000 years old. Old enough to know your namesake. Old enough to have seen terrible and wondrous things.”
My arms dropped and I felt my mouth fall open. Holy fucking shit. “Fucking hell,” I growled, blinking rapidly. She gave another sad laugh, standing there with her arms wrapped around herself, looking vulnerable. How? How could a woman who had lived so long have any vulnerability left, any soul at all?
I shook my head and grabbed her back in my arms. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I was going to have to tell Judas.
“You can’t die at all?”
She shrugged, her body stiff again in my arms. “Not that I can tell. I have a theory that if you cut off my head and carved out my heart and then burned my body I’d be pretty damn dead. Thankfully, no one has tried to do that yet. You aren’t going to be the first, right?”
I shook my head vehemently. “No fucking way. You’re safe here. We live by our oaths.”
I wanted to mine her brain for secrets, I wanted to know everything about her and the things she’d seen. I wasn’t much of an academic, but even I knew that her brain would be filled with answers to things that had plagued the world for generations.
Cain would call me a fucking nerd.
“Why alone?” That was the real question. She was so fucking beautiful. Men would have razed civilisations for her if she’d asked. She could have been a queen. A goddess.
She swayed, her stomach pressed firmly into my abdomen. The baby was kicking furiously. She enjoyed dancing like her mama too. “It was just easier that way. You can only watch so many people you love wither and die before it takes a mental toll. People notice you don’t age like others. Superstition kept people alive back then. There was a science to things, but it was easier to believe that I was causing crops to fail, or women to be barren, or cows to die of some weird disease. So I moved around constantly. Never staying in one place. Always alone.”
I flexed my hand where it rested on her spine. “Not anymore. Never again.”
She rubbed her belly, thinking I was talking about the baby. I didn’t correct her. I convinced myself that I meant the baby too. “I guess not. Unless Uriel finds out and gets rid of us both.”
I couldn’t suppress the swell of power in my body, the spirit of the Horseman flooding my body. I breathed deeply through my nose before everyone died of emaciation. I’d learned that one the hard way. I had to have complete control of my power or people died.
Dippy moved away, her eyebrows drawn together as if she could feel the swell of my power. Hell maybe she could. “What are you?” she whispered.
I struggled to wrestle the Horseman back down. He normally sat dormant, a kernel of power just glowing next to my soul waiting to be called out. He was hard to get back into his box though. Unlike my Brothers powers, Famine had been locked away for decades. Today, I let him out against the cop, and he’d tasted freedom. Now he wanted more.
Judas was suddenly beside me, his hand curling around my arm. “Take a walk, Sol. Get your shit together.” He looked over his shoulder at G, who was staring daggers at Dippy like it was all her fault. “Goliath, go with him.” He lowered his voice so Serendipity couldn’t hear. “Knock him out if he can’t get it under control.”
Both G and I nodded. It would hurt like a bitch tomorrow, but I didn’t want to inadvertently hurt my Club.
I let G drag me through the front doors of the Clubhouse and down into the back corner of the lot behind the building. I could hear the hoots and bad R’n’B music of Apocalypse, taste the coming of winter in the air. I breathed that shit in through my nose and out through my mouth and tried to cajole the Horseman back into his box.
G was muttering about how this was all Serendipity’s fault, and he was the kind of asshole who didn’t say much but would rub an “I told you so” in your face whenever he could. I mean, it was her fault to a degree. If she hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t be this wild. This close to the edge. But I couldn't find it in me to wish we’d never met. Something had changed when she’d slid from Cain’s truck, and I don’t think I could go back. If that made me a pussy, so be it.
I looked at the murderous giant in front of me. Looked him dead in his flint grey eyes. “I’m going to have her, G. Whether you guys want her or not is up to you. But she’s meant to be with us, man. I feel it here.” I banged the left side of my chest, my power still pulsing in my body. “You would too if you just let yourself.”
G bared his teeth. “There’s nothing there anymore, Solomon. Nothing but hate.”
Then he punched me in the face and it was lights out. Motherfucker.
12
Serendipity
Judas ordered Cain to take me to bed like I was a naughty child, like he’d caught me and Solomon doing something forbidden. I’d desperately wanted to dig my heels in, to tell him to go fuck himself, he wasn’t my President. But I didn’t want to bite the hand that fed me just yet. And in all honesty, I was still fucking exhausted. Trigger had woken me from my nap, but lethargy still made my movements sluggish. So I’d let the domineering dickhead have his way and obediently followed Cain upstairs.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the swell of power that had suddenly emanated from Solomon. One minute, he felt like a normal human. The next minute, I was being suffocated under a power so indescribable, so malevolent, I was suffocating on it. What the hell were these guys? Demons? Warlocks dabbling in things they didn’t understand? I mean, I’d seen that kind of power over the years. But Solomon’s power didn’t really feel like that.
I turned it over and over in my head, but I couldn’t pinpoint what they could be. There’d been other “supernaturals” in the world, beings that had died out over the years as humans populated to near plague-like proportions. Things that would have been considered magic, but were just different evolutions of the same general mould, had been abundant in my first thousand years. Then natural disasters, the rise of the human population, and disease had wiped them out one by one. But I couldn’t remember anything that fit these guys.