Chapter 4
Misery
Blood spilled through my fingers, dripping onto my clothes as I knelt beside Cat, a horrible silence filling my head, numbing my chest. It was her blood, but I felt my own life seep out of me with every drop through my fingers.
It had been minutes since Violence ripped a hole in her throat and threw her at Death, as if she was trash to be discarded and not the most precious person in all the universe. As if she wasn’t my entire world.
“He’s gone,” Tor said bluntly, hoarse from the furious scream that tore out of him in the moments after Cat’s death was confirmed. “Violence. He’s gone.”
I blinked, the only outward sign I’d heard him.
Inside, there was nothing. Silence. Harsh, ringing silence.
If I’d been faster, if I’d harmed Violence, weakened him, even seconds earlier, Cat would still be here.
Breathing, fierce-eyed and furious, like a woman from myth, a Valkyrie to be feared and respected and never underestimated.
But my Valkyrie was dead. My universe was collapsing in on itself, the black hole of grief devouring everything within me.
I’d known grief before. I’d lost two families, and never recovered from either loss. But this? The light of my life, the light of all our lives… A broken, choked sound escaped my squeezing throat.
Open your eyes. Open your eyes.
It was an incantation that repeated in my head over and over, but Cat never heard me, never even fluttered her lashes. Where she’d gone, she couldn’t hear us.
“We need to get to the domain,” Pain said in a gritty voice. “If her spirit is there, we can find her.”
Death didn’t react to the words, our lifeless wife clutched tight in his arms. Her blood was cold now, the flow of it merely a trickle from her saturated clothes, from the spill that had soaked into his braids, stained his chest.
It was everywhere, the sense of it assaulting all my senses, the taste of rot shoving down my throat, the scent of it burning my nostrils, plucking at the place in my chest where my magic lived—death. It was everywhere. Dousing the air like humidity, inescapable.
“Why the fuck is she still here?” Tor growled, and rushed to his feet, his hand glancing over my shoulder. I didn’t feel the usual comfort that thought brought. Didn’t feel anything.
“Why the fuck are you still here?” he yelled, darkness pooling around him as he stalked across the chessboard, the backdrop of Ford still stained by dregs of the fading sun. Everything had happened too quickly for me to process, the moment sticky, slow.
I watched Tor drive himself at Cruelty through a haze of numbness, marked the way she stared at Cat, splayed in Death’s arms, painted with so much blood it made my stomach turn.
Cruelty didn’t fight as Tor shoved her back, a stream of furious magic slamming into her chest, her shoes sliding across blood-streaked, corpse-strewn squares of black and white.
Forcing her back, I realised, to where Cat’s father stood, the shellshocked expression on his face giving way to something as hot as a sword from the forge. There was a knife in his hand, his knuckles white as he gripped it, staring at Cruelty with murder in his eyes.
“It didn’t work before because the kill has to be his choice,” Neglect murmured, crouching beside me and hovering a hand over Cat, inky magic entwined with her fingers.
“I’m so sorry. After everything, it’s so unfair that your story should end here.
” I didn’t shove off her hand when it rested on my shoulder, her other on Madde’s as he stared and stared, unmoving.
“There has to be a way,” Pain said, the only one of us who spoke. “You must know a way.”
“All the usual ways,” Neglect sighed. “You could try them, of course, but there’s no tether left between Cat and this world. At best, you could tether her to the domain. But you’d have to find her spirit first.”
“We could do it,” Pain said, his voice ringing with determination. I wished I could feel that emotion, wished I felt anything at all.
But my wife was gone, ripped away, dead. And I swore a part of me had died with her.