He crosses his arms over his chest in disapproval.
“It’s not my fucking fault. I flat-out told her what I was trying to do, and she took it as an insult, apparently. I thought she wanted me to do the motherfucking love thing,” I say, finding it much simpler to say that word now that I’m not actually trying to say that word so hard. “It’d be easier if all we had to do was say it…and be able to fucking say it.”
I throw my hands up in the hallway, ready to go kill some things that go bump in the Black Heart.
“If she’s not strong enough, that only leaves us with one option.” Ezekiel’s voice comes out of nowhere, and I look over as he comes toward us from the other end of the hallway. “Will you have it in you to flip that switch and go out with her? Or will you let that thing escape and Paca die in vain? Because it’s clear she’s no longer concerned about whether or not she makes it out alive.”
Glaring, I crack my neck to the side. “I’d rather die with a purpose than die as that thing’s puppet once it breaks free and grows even stronger.”
“That’s answering the question without confessing anything about how you feel for Paca,” Gage says as he siphons in next to Ezekiel, jumping into the conversation as though he’s been eavesdropping all along.
I bristle, not liking the three of them teaming up on me.
“I don’t exist without you,” I say through clenched teeth, flicking a gaze at them one by one. “You no longer exist without her. It makes figuring out how I feel about her much harder when things are exponentially sped up, the pressure mounts, and I’m not the fucking romantic kind. I never planned on falling for any woman to the sad and desperate level you’ve all succumbed to so quickly. I wouldn’t even begin to fucking know how to do that.”
Gage looks around, brow furrowing as though he’s distracted, but before I can ask what’s stolen his attention, another voice cuts in.
“You flip that switch, and you break our one and only deal. It’s the only thing I’m asking of you,” Paca says in a tone that clearly means she’s crying.
I’m not turning around. I never know what to do with her when she fucking cries, and I somehow always seem to make it worse.
Gage whips his head toward her in surprise, so I have no idea what was distracting him previously. I focus on searching the hallway for anything peculiar, refusing to glance at the sniffling woman behind me.
Kai starts toward her, but she must wave him off, since he stops abruptly.
His jaw clenches. “I don’t think you understand what you’re fucking asking—”
“I think the four of you are still plotting against me even now. We’re divided, Kai. In all our decisions, we’re always divided,” she carries on, sniffling again. “The four of you, for better or worse, stick it out together and make decisions together, even if they’re hard—”
“Because we take a fair fucking vote, instead one person making a decision for all four of us,” I interject, earning a glare from Ezekiel.
“All four of you,” Paca whispers, echoing the one part of the comment she of course has to go and focus on.
I turn around to face her at last, and freeze when I see the drips of purple flames streaming from her eyes. The fire burns through the hallway floor…which should be impossible.
This floor is resting in Hell, after all.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I say in a tone that sounds more like I’m talking a caged animal into not attacking.
She wipes away the flaming tears, shaking her head. “You’ll survive. Even if I have to see to it myself,” she states with an unsettling amount of confidence.
“If you die. We die with you. That’s what it means to be in a unit. No one gets left behind,” Kai tells her, eyes narrowing. “Just like they wouldn’t leave me behind in the trials, and neither would you. You seem to think this is still a one-sided relationship, when all of us, even Jude, has proven to you we care about you just as much—”
“No you don’t,” she says coolly, eyes turning volcanic in the next instant.
Only this time, instead of the red lava lines breaking up the black, glossy stone, there are purple lines of flame. We all take a step back, and I idly wonder if theirs was as unconscious as mine.
Her voice echoes around us as the walls begin to wilt, and her body starts a steady glow of that purple flame.
“Back then, you loved me more than I could have loved you. You were tortured, left to rot in agony for all eternity with no hope for anything more than that,” she says as her voice gets a longer echo, power pulsing from her body, even as those purple flame tears continuing leaking.
Her blonde hair whips in the sudden wind that stirs in the otherwise stale hallway.
“You, of course, fell in love with your savior, a deeper love than you could ever imagine in that lifetime. Whereas, I didn’t even exist without you in this life. If I took my eyes off you for longer than a few minutes, I faded into that horrible nothingness, fearing each time I wouldn’t come back. This time, you were my saviors instead of the other way around.”
She chokes back a sob, and we all take a step forward, only to be pushed back by some unseen force that seems to be coming out of her body, as the temperature seems to rise.
Not that we can feel it rising.
The walls are just turning to sludge, bleeding into a different illusion with more hallways to wilt against her heat.
“I watched everything. I pretended to be a part of your unusual family,” she goes on, wiping away her tears as she laughs humorlessly. “I fell so in love with each of you for different reasons that it’s sad to look back on. I talked a big game, but I was tied to you from the moment my eyes first landed on each one. I did this so I’d love you enough to follow through—”
“You can’t possibly know that,” I interrupt, glaring at her anew. “You sound as though you’ve already decided we can’t win, and I don’t like fighting battles where all five of us are guaranteed to lose. We blow the fucking world up, the way we were meant to, and we seal off Hell. We can use that secondary trigger topside without killing ourselves. If we—”
“No!” she shouts.
The entire floor quakes beneath us, and wind rushes us so hard we all stagger back a few steps in surprise, as that fire burns brighter and brighter around her.
Purple flames…
I’ve seriously fucking seen it all from this girl.
“I think we should all take a deep breath,” Gage cuts in, talking over Kai when he starts to argue. “This is tense. The stakes are high. We need to calm down and try to—”
“You are my only fucking mission in this life,” Paca states in that echoing tone that thunders through the other walls that are now melting away, along with the floor and ceiling beneath us.
Volcanic rock rests beneath our feet, and glimpses of a fiery sky taunt us from overhead.
“You’re it. My absolute goal has been to protect you. I don’t even want you to love me if it means you die too. I’ll do this on my own,” she says as she turns to go.
We all freeze as Caesar and Pico appear before us, beginning a slow clap, even as they keep dead eyes.
“Seven days to save or destroy the world,” Pico drawls.
“The Apocalypse and her Four Horsemen decide now is not the best time for a lovers’ quarrel,” Caesar adds, wrinkling his nose. “I’m embarrassed for you.”
They both disappear when Paca launches a fireball at them, and a tsking comes from behind us. We whirl around to find Cain shaking his head as he snorts a line of something off his hand.
“If you want to keep them, maybe you should just fucking win,” he states as though it’s the most obvious solution to our debacle.
He disappears before the next fireball can hit him.
“If you want a solution to all your problems, you should come with me,” Hera says as she pops in, absently glancing down at her nails as she props against the wall.
I expect a fireball to be hurled at her head, but Paca tilts her head as though she’s intrigued.
Annoyed with her intrusion, I return my attention to Paca. “I highly doubt trusting Hera with the fate of the world and our lives is in our best interest—”
She goes phantom, and she zaps to Hera. I don’t like the smirk on Lust’s lips as the two of them disappear from sight.
“What could she possibly have to offer?” Ezekiel asks as though he’s confused.
“A wealth of males who could become the Horsemen,” Pride says from behind us, continuing this game of Jack-in-the-Box pop-ups.
I start to come back with a witty retort, when his words sink in.
“What?” Kai asks, pushing by me to gawk at Pride. “Are you just being an evil fuck and playing with us right now?”
“He’s telling the truth,” comes Lilith’s voice from behind us, causing us all to do another one-eighty.
She smirks as she blows us a kiss.
“She doesn’t need you for the battle. She just needs the Horsemen’s unity. You guys are struggling to even reach the ‘level’ required to use your true power,” she adds as she struts around, meeting Pride in the middle.
Greed pops in on her other side, and she props up on him. The three of them seem to gloat about something.
“I do love a good lover’s quarrel,” she says through her growing grin. “Especially between my sister and her ever-loyal little puppets. I suppose it’s fun no matter what life you’re living.”
“She won’t take our power away. It’s part of us. She’d never leave us with nothing,” Gage is fast to argue. “Your smugness is a little premature.”
Evil fucking bitch.
I’m not sure why the three of them smile broader.
“Paca going into battle with four different Horsemen,” Greed says with a snort, as Pride’s smile doubles.
“If it is the end of days, at least it got really damn interesting here at the end,” Caesar chirps as the three of them vanish, leaving us alone in the mostly melted hallways.
“Think we pissed her off enough to be that reckless…or wrathful?” Ezekiel asks on a tired sigh.
I open my mouth to speak, and realize…I don’t know the answer to that.
“My siblings only enjoy this so much because it’s bothered them for centuries how truly loyal you are to her.” Manella’s voice has us looking around, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
“However, they forgot to mention something important,” Manella’s voice goes on, before he slowly fades into view in front of us.
We stare, waiting on him to elaborate, as he stretches and groans like this is a bothersome task. We do our best to be fucking patient.
At last, he adds, “If Paca strikes a deal with a temporary set of Horsemen, she’ll have to seal this deal. You should get there before the ‘handshake.’”