Page 88 of War

It’s unnerving as hell, mostly because I’m reminded that as brutal as War is, he’s a strategist. And I think he knows how to play me.

Shortly after I lay down on my pallet, he does the same, removing his shirt as he does so. I can see his tattoos glowing in the night.

“You don’t need to go to bed just because I am,” I say.

“I don’t want to be awake when you’re asleep. Talking with you reminds me of how lonely it is to exist.”

Those words tighten my chest. I hadn’t imagined that the horseman might feel that way when he lives among a horde of humans. To be honest, I hadn’t considered that he was evencapableof feeling lonely. Loneliness is a very vulnerable, very human feeling. It doesn’t fit my notion of War.

Maybe your notion is wrong.

He’s right there. It’s not too late to be a little less lonely for an evening.

“Miriam,” he says, interrupting my thoughts.

“Mm?” I say.

“Tell me something beautiful.”

I’m not sure I heard the horseman correctly.Hewants to hear about something beautiful? I didn’t think a man like War had room in him for something like beauty.

My notion of him is mostdefinitelywrong.

I turn on my pallet so that I can look at the horseman. He lays on his own bed, staring up at the stars. He must feel my gaze on him, but he doesn’t turn to me.

Something beautiful …

The story comes to me almost immediately. “My father was Muslim. My mother was Jewish.”

He’s quiet.

I run my fingers over the cloth of my blankets as I speak. “They met at Oxford while they were both getting their doctorates. My dad told me he heard my mother’s laugh before he saw her face. Supposedly that’s when he knew he was going to love her.”

My fingers still. “They weren’t supposed to love each other.”

“Why?” War’s voice comes from the darkness.

My eyes move to him. “Their families didn’t want them to be together—because they were from two different cultures and two different religions.” My father, Turkish-American, and my mother, Israeli.

The horseman doesn’t say anything to that, so I continue.

“In the end, it didn’t matter to them what their families thought. They knew that love was love. That it can bridge all gaps.”

I exhale. Now my parents are gone and this great love story I believed in as a kid came to a shit ending.

So maybe it’s not beautiful, after all. The world takes away everything, in the end.

Now he turns his head to face me. “So, you find love beautiful, Miriam?” he asks.

“No,” I say, my eyes meeting his in the near-darkness. “Not love itself.” Everything I’ve ever loved I’ve lost. There’s no beauty in that. “It’s the power of love that I find beautiful.”

It can change so many things—

For better, or worse.

Chapter 24

I wake againstWar.

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