Page 44 of The Pale Rider
“Oh, shut up. I’ve known this girl longer than you have. She doesn’t scare easily. If she hasn’t figured it out yet, she has a right to know. It could probably help your happy ass right now.”
“Someone better tell me, or I have a feeling I can throw a pretty epic temper tantrum.”
Aeron ran his fingers through his hair and started pacing.
“You know how long I looked for her, right? When I finally found her, she didn’t even remember her own name, much less me. I can’t just tell her everything without hurting her. I’ve been spending this entire journey here trying to ease her into everything and gaining her trust. You could ruin everything, Mabel.”
I blocked Aeron’s path. I crossed my arms and tried to stare him down.
“If you want me to trust you, then you will let her tell me why I keep painting those horses. If you want to keep making a stink about it, you can turn around, walk out that door, and go to Mexico without me.”
“Ariel—”
“No, Aeron! Every time I’ve had a memory, you’ve explained things to me and given me more of my past. I haven’t been hurt. Those horses came from somewhere when I tattooed that pumpkin, and now, they are all over my apartment. I want to know what it means!”
Aeron grumbled and plopped on my couch. This huge, horse riding, sword-wielding man was pouting like a child.
“I would tell you when you had more of your memories back,” he muttered.
“You said you tattooed these horses on a pumpkin? What in hell were you doing tattooing pumpkins, Ariel?” Miss Mabel demanded.
“Well, Jade wanted a tattoo from me, but I didn’t remember how. She sacrificed one pumpkin from her basket for me to practice on.”
“Let me guess. Your vision blurred, and you had no idea what you were drawing until you finished.”
“Yes, exactly. I had no idea I had drawn those four horses until I finished.”
“That’s how you created all your art, Ariel. Until you learned to disguise it better, so it wasn’t as obvious, a lot of things in your paintings eventually came true. It’s why you ran away from your father. After he stopped bringing you to that lab, there was a room he would lock you in. It was a padded room with a drawing desk. He’d lock you in there after school and terrorize you until you drew something like it was some sort of exact science. You made him a rich man until you ran away.”
Why didn’t I see any of that shit when I was getting flashes? And how exactly was I drawing the future in these trances? How did something in my blood cause the Rage mutation? I really needed a fucking drink.
“If Meremoth is not a normal horse, then I guess I’m not a normal girl either, am I?”
Miss Mabel clapped her hands.
“We need supplies. Aeron, go back to my apartment and get the cigar box on top of the fridge. I know exactly how to handle this.”
I was glad someone did because I sure as hell didn’t. I could remember that I talked to Miss Mabel about everything. Fuck, we even talked about my sex life. I trusted her enough to tell her about the visions in the past.
“Did we talk when I painted these horses? Did we ever figure out what it meant?”
“You painted those right around the time you met Aeron and Leif in that chatroom. You kept asking if I thought they were creeps, and you should ban them from the softball game. Then, you got to know them. You became obsessed with the Book of Revelations trying to figure out why you kept painting different versions of those four horses. Those four horses are from the bible.”
“But from what I can remember, I wasn’t religious at all.”
“No, child, you weren’t. You took the Lord’s name in vain all the time, and the fucking church would have exploded if you set foot inside without getting doused in Holy Water first. But those visions of yours came from somewhere, and I don’t think it was from down below.”
“So, the horses are important. I don’t remember a fucking thing about the Book of Revelations.”
“No, but I do. I watched it play out. That right there is the Black Horse. His rider brings pestilence and famine. We saw that with the Rage mutation. One rider down. The Red Horse is said to bring war. We already had that. World War III wiped several countries off the map. The White Horse is supposed to bring conquest. After governments started falling during the wars, people were swooping in and seizing power. Entire countries were getting absorbed into other countries and renamed. The Pale Horse brings death.
“Rage Heads outnumber humans and food is scarce unless you happen to live somewhere people decided to work together instead of fight. There are other states like California, where they have rebuilt homes, are breeding livestock, and planting. They’ve walled up the entire state to keep the Rage Heads out, and their rules may even be stricter than Jade’s. It’s not everywhere because some people don’t want a community, they want to rule the roost, but they are out there.”
Aeron had a pale horse that wasn’t a normal horse. He said several times his specialty was death. Could I trust Aeron? How did I know he was trying to get me to Mexico so his friend could figure out why the AB negative people didn’t turn with the rest of the population when they poisoned the water?
Suddenly, my traveling companion, who I was pretty sure I was starting to have feelings for, was starting to seem pretty dangerous. I knew him before in that chatroom, and I agreed to go to Mexico with him for some reason, but he was in that chatroom just to get to me. He sought me out and planned for us to go to our private room, eventually.
Fuck, had he been playing me this entire time? Was the real reason he didn’t want to tell me anything was because I had figured something out and had tried to get away from him? Did Aeron put me in that fucking coma, and the only reason he came back was that the place had been overrun with Rage Heads?
