“Unsettled,” I say. “I feel unsettled by it.”

“Why am I not surprised?” he mutters to himself. “You want me to understand your kind, and yet when I show any interest, you condemn my curiosity.”

I literally have nothing to say to that. I don’t even know whether he’s right or if he just strung enough pretty words together that he appears right.

Not going to psychoanalyze that one.

“Fine,” I say, taking a sip of my tea and meeting his gaze. “Look your fill.”

His eyes stare unwaveringly back at me. “I will.”

I’m about to look away because it does feel horribly weird to have someone openly appraising you, but then—fuck that. If he’s going to stare, then so am I.

I take him in, from the arched tips of his golden crown to his dark shirt and soft leather boots. My gaze shifts to his hands—he has oddly attractive hands for a man.

Of course he does, Sara. Everything about him is attractive. It’s you who’s only starting to notice the fine details.

Pestilence smiles as my eyes rove over him, and I swear he presses his shoulders back just a little at my inspection.

“Are you enjoying what you’re looking at?” I ask, even as I drink him in. The comment is supposed to be snarky, but it comes off more like bait for a compliment.

“Your form is oddly pleasing to me.”

Like just about everything else Pestilence says, his words bring out two opposing emotions. My blood heats, and yet … pleasing? A painting is pleasing. And oddly so?

A woman should not be oddly pleasing. She should be a ball-busting, skull-crushing, badass motherfucker who is impossible to forget.

A line forms between Pestilence’s brows. “I hadn’t expected that—to enjoy the sight of you—just as I hadn’t expected food to entice me, or your liquor to enthrall me.”

I take another sip of my tea. “What had you expected?”

“To be unmoved and unaffected by all human ways.”

It should fill me with hope that Pestilence is affected by those things, and it does, but … I chew on my lower lip. The thing is, it goes both ways. As much as I’m affecting his view of humans, he’s affecting my view of horsemen.

“You haven’t mentioned God yet,” I say.

Pestilence looks at me quizzically.

“You keep mentioning how much you hate humans, how it’s your job to end them, and how shocking it is to like the same things they do, but in all of our conversations, you haven’t really mentioned God.”

A crease forms between his brows. “Why would I?”

I lift a shoulder. “Isn’t that what this is all about? God’s wrath?”

“This isn’t about God,” Pestilence says evenly. “It’s about humans and their poisonous nature.”

I grab a nearby stick and distractedly poke the logs, causing the fire to jump and spark. “I just figured He was behind your existence,” I say.

The horseman stares at me, eyes narrowed. “It is not for me to discuss with you the reasons I’m here.”

“So God does unequivocally exist?” I prod. “And he’s a man? And he put you up to this?” It’s not like he said these things, but he didn’t deny them either when I mentioned them.

“Sara,” Pestilence says with some exasperation, “surely you know by now that something beyond this mortal world exists. Am I not proof enough?”

Well, yeah, but he could at least confirm it for the record and all.

“As far as gender goes,” he continues, “only the feeble human mind could imagine a superior being, then have the audacity to shape that being in their own image—and to give it a gender.”

Pestilence continues. “God isn’t a man or a woman. He’s something else entirely.”

“Then why do you keep using male pronouns?” I ask.

“Because you do.”

I give him a quizzical look.

“How do I know English?” he says. “Or wield a bow and arrow? Why do I wear breeches and a breastplate and look like a human? I, like God, have been fashioned into something you can understand.

“But this,” he gestures to his body, “is not what I really am.”

“It’s … not?” Having trouble with this one.

“I am pestilence, Sara,” he says softly. “Not a man. I have a body and a voice and a sentience not for my own benefit, but for yours.”

Not going to lie, this might be the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had.

“So …” I say, to bring this full circle, “God isn’t a man.”

His tilts his head. “You seem surprised.”

Do I?

I shift uncomfortably. “I’m not surprised. It’s just …”

“It’s just what?” Pestilence asks when I don’t finish the sentence. For once he’s actually being halfway open with me.

“I don’t know,” I say. I prod at the fire with the stick I still hold. “Is He—or She, or It—even Christian?” The Four Horsemen, after all, were mentioned in the Bible.

Pestilence gives me a disparaging look. “You humans and your hang ups with names and labels. God isn’t Christian—just as he isn’t Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or any other denomination. God is God.”

An answer that will appease pretty much no one.

The horseman leans back and appraises me. “What do you believe, Sara?”

I drop the stick and take a sip of my cooling tea. “Before you came to earth, I didn’t believe in anything.”

“You believed in nothing?” Pestilence is looking at me like he wants an explanation.

Knowing how he feels about the World Before, I really don’t want to give him this part of me.

“We had science, and that was its own kind of religion,” I say. “At least, for me it was. It explained why the world worked the way it did—it answered the mystery of it all.”

“I know enough about your science, Sara. It never answered the most important mysteries, as you call them. What is a soul, where it goes when you die, what lies beyond—”

I put a hand up. “Point taken, buddy.”

He frowns at the endearment.

“I didn’t need answers to those questions. I assumed that this life was all anyone got and we were all deluding ourselves to think there was more.”

“But you’ve changed your mind?” he prods.

I give him a sad smile. “It’s hard not to when the Four Horsemen show up and all the world goes to hell.”

I can hear the fire station’s T.V. in my head, the unending newsreel playing. Political pundits had been replaced with religious leaders and scholars, each one explaining their take on the Bible, the Quran and the Hadith, the Sutras, the Vedas, the Tanach, the Mishnah, the Talmud and Midrash, and a thousand other biblical texts that suddenly pointed The Way to redemption. I half listened as each preacher and priest, rabbi and imam beseeched the world to find God before it was too late.

“It’s just … religion up until now has been a matter of faith. It hardly seems like religion for me to believe now that there’s proof.”

What I don’t say is that it’s still hard for me to believe in religion now that our proof comes in the form of four beings who want to kill us. If we’re suddenly all lambs up for slaughter, what is the point of life? And more importantly, if a painful and untimely death is what I’m to expect from life, then what should I expect from the afterlife?