24.6

 

Roisin takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment, then breathes out slowly through her nose. She doesn’t even think about the difficulty of it. She’s never had any trouble breathing through her nose. She’s never had a cold, or the ‘flu, or even a sniffle during the cold rains of winter. Her breath trembles as she realises it, an indication of the stress she feels through this forced, urgent decision. Why couldn’t she have just lived her life in peace? Why did she have to be born a fucking angel? Why must she stand so indecisively on this slackline between Horseman and Mortal? Twenty years of tranquillity, all to change forever in one night, and now she has only seconds to make the choice.

She can taste the truth of it like mustard on the side of a vegan salad. She can feel the mantle stirring in the Nephilim’s chest like a ballistic missile igniting in a Jerusalem launch tower. She can visualise the echo of herself intercepting it and taste the ashes in a land empty of crops.
She feels the outline of the shape she is becoming — the in‑between, the bridge, the echo of a Horseman.

Astaroth watches her with unsettling calm. “You are not Famine,” he says, his smile somewhere between amused and mocking, “but neither are you merely Roisin.”

His words land like a cricket bat to the back to the back of the head and Roisin feels her knees weaken and she looks down, almost expecting to see a river valley far below her, an eternity of regret should she fall.

The Nephilim reaches out to steady her, its hand cupping the ball of her shoulder.

Astaroth’s smile deepens. “Good. You feel it.” The angel studies her the way a mathematician studies a paradox—slowly, reverently, with a kind of delighted horror. The Nephilim stands rigid beside her, its awareness wrapping her like a forcefield in a videogame, but even it cannot block what Astaroth sees.

He steps closer. She doesn’t feel threatened, she is just filled with a sense of impending finality, the way a message in a bottle must feel when, after months or years floating in the sea, it finds itself approaching a rocky shoreline.

“Do you know,” he murmurs, “what happens to a Horseman who abandons her mantle?”

Roisin’s mindful breathing fails to calm her racing heart. She know it’s a rhetorical question she doesn’t need to answer. Deep down, she already knows.

Astaroth smiles—not cruelly, but with the sadness of her mother when she watched Roisin eat a whole, twelve-person cake herself when none of her classmates came to her seventh birthday party.

“They do not become human,” he says softly. “They do not become mortal. They do not fade.” He lifts a hand, palm up, as though presenting her to herself. “They become the echo of what they were.”

Roisin’s pulse stutters and stops. Time is suspended between two beath of her heart as the angel dips his head toward her.

Astaroth continues, voice low and precise. “You stepped out of Roisin the moment you consumed a soul, and yet you have not taken the mantle of Famine. You have become the resonance left behind when a cosmic force steps out of its own shape.”

The Nephilim’s fingers tighten on her shoulder.

Astaroth notices and nods, though in approval or mere acknowledgement of Fate, she has yet to decide. He speaks again and her heart beats in time to his words.

“You are becoming the Fifth.”

The words land like a punch to the gut and Roisin would have fallen to the floor had the Artist not grabbed her and held her upright. Behind herm she can hear Steve drawing a sharp breath, his surprise, and renewed fear, flowing through the air like a wifi signal with no connection. Even the Nephilim, so phlegmatic until now, appears agitated by the observation.

“Theat’s not possible.” The Artist stands up straight, his mortal form almost as tall as the Nephhilim when he straightens his spine and legs. “We were One and now We are Four. We are the Quarters. We cannot be—” he sneers—“Fifths.”

Astaroth’s laughs. “You are so set in your ways, old man. Yes, there were always four. But the world has changed. Heaven has changed. The seals have changed.” He steps closer, voice dropping to a whisper that seems to vibrate inside Roisin’s bones. “And now something must stand between the Horsemen and the humans they once balanced.”