Chapter 8
Cat
Ilived in the dark. I’d exchanged eternal light and white space for a true, infinite void, and my eyes refused to adjust to the drastic change.
Or there was simply nothing to see in this place.
It was like being under the fog again, but without the peace.
No sound, no movement except my own, no scent, only still, cold air.
No choice but to listen to my own thoughts.
I put one foot in front of the other, moving forward even if I wanted to go back to Exile.
I’d tried that, but there was no glimpse of the veil, not even a glimmer of light to guide my way.
I knew I needed to get back there, knew someone needed me, but the further I travelled through the darkness, the more that sense faded.
I couldn’t remember who was back there. Could no longer remember the name of the white realm.
And after a while, the white realm became indistinct in my mind.
There were six words that repeated in my head, the only things I carried with me from wherever I’d come from. Six words and the paper crumpled in my fist. Trust your bonds. Kill those pricks.
The people who murdered me. I needed them to pay, needed them to suffer. I needed—
I stopped dead, my head cocked. Was that… a horse?
When the whinny came again, echoing strangely, distorted and ghostly, I stumbled forward a step, then rushed into a run. Maybe the horse had come to kill me, to take me to my final resting place, but after an endless stretch of silence with only my thoughts for company, I’d take anything.
“Hello?” I called, running blindly through the dark, my pulse a quickened thrum in my throat. “Is someone there?”
Would the horse’s rider know what I’d left behind? Would they be able to fill the vast chasm in my head where my memories ought to be. Who was I? I knew I was Cat, but who was Cat? Was I wicked and cruel? Was I weak and afraid? Neither of those felt true. Afraid, certainly, but not weak. Angry.
Or maybe that was just who I was now I’d died.
A being driven by rage with a thirst for justice.
That hunger, that inner beast pressed against the inside of my rib cage, desperate to crack its way free, to bleed through slits in my skin and take on a life of its own.
I knew I couldn’t let that happen, remembered an exasperated male voice telling me to grasp control or the power would overwhelm me and I’d pass out again.
I didn’t remember passing out the first time, and that gnawed at me.
Who was the man who’d told me that? Was he back there… the place I’d left? Or was he from before, when I’d been alive? I had been alive. I knew it with a sharp ring of certainty. I’d been alive, and then I’d been murdered. Now I must make those who killed me pay, lest they harm anyone else.
The horse’s cry came again, closer, a soft call this time.
“Trust your bonds,” I whispered, clinging to the words that had drilled themselves so deep into my empty mind that they refused to be dislodged. “Kill those pricks.”
The pricks had to be my murderers. But what if there were more?
What if there were others who needed to face their judgement?
A thrill went down the back of my neck, thrummed like vibrations inside me.
Yes, there were others. The magic hungered for them, salivated at the thought of their comeuppance.
I scrambled to throw a lid on the power as it swelled, seeking a way out.
Trapped, it hissed like a displeased cat, but settled to wait, patiently, for an opening.
“Oh!” I jumped back at the press of a nose to my arm. Tentatively, I lifted my hand, brushing the soft velvet of a horse’s noses. Its warm breath puffed over my knuckles, sending a shudder through me. “Hello.”
I waited for a response from the rider. And waited.
“Do you know the way out?” I asked, casting a glance around the pitch darkness as if more riders would appear, as if they might bear lanterns to help guide my way.
The horse nibbled my arm. “Hey!” When it did it again, I jumped out of the way with a low hiss. It was a sibilant breath that rattled, emerging from deep in my throat. The horse hissed back. “I am not food,” I insisted, despite the nudge the horse gave me, forcing me to stumble backwards.
It nudged me again, almost as if it was herding me towards its flank, and I stopped dead with a frown. “Uh. Do you want me to ride you?”
The horse groaned as if to say finally.
“You’ll take me out of here?”
Another grumbled noise.
“You’re not taking me into the bowels of the underworld, where I’ll be forced into eternal toil and suffering. Right?”
A nudge was my only answer, which was hardly comforting, but I sighed.
Heavily. I was stumbling around in the dark, no closer to the way out than I was to the way back to the white place I could just barely remember.
So I stepped closer to the bossy horse, surprised to find reins, stirrups, and a saddle ready.
“You came prepared, I see,” I murmured, not liking this one bit.
But I thrust my foot into the stirrup and hauled myself onto her back.
Wait—her? “Are you, by any chance, a girl?” I took the bob of her head to be a nod, but it could just as easily have been a hint at me to hurry up.
“I don’t know how I know that. But I’m pretty sure you’re a girl. And I’ve ridden you before.”
Instead of confirming that, she set off walking, the gleaming red of her eyes casting the tiniest bit of light. Enough that I saw her turn away from the direction I’d been going in. Typical; I wasn’t even going the right way.
“I wouldn’t have guessed I was horsey, but I definitely know how to ride,” I told her, needing to fill the silence.
I’d been alone in my mind for too long, and my thoughts had grown thorns.
Every barb gouged my sore brain, demanding answers.
Who am I? Where did I come from? Did I have parents?
Siblings? A boyfriend? A best friend? Was I famous? Was I a hermit? Was I an ornithologist?
I certainly had a strange wealth of knowledge about ducks, so I must be an expert. Maybe that was who killed me. Maybe it was a duck-induced death. But that didn’t feel right, and I could almost grasp the memory of sharp lemon and sweet mint.
“You must have a name,” I said to the horse, patting her neck as she picked up her pace. “I’m Cat. I bet you have a really fearsome name like Dismemberment, or Uppercut.”
She tossed her head, a certain level of sass in the movement that made me smile. “Too gruesome? Of course, you’re a girly girl. You’ll have a cute name. Like Sunshine. Or Buttercup. Your rider should get you pretty bows for your mane, you know. They’d suit you.”
Sunshine-Buttercup stopped and pointedly turned her head, nudging my knee with her nose.
“Oh.” I blinked, digesting that. “I’m your rider?”
She took off again, faster, her hooves eating up the darkness until the crimson gleam of her eyes bounced off the void around us.
“Well, that explains why I know how to ride,” I muttered, my body doing its own thing as she kicked into a sprint.
I knew how to shift my weight, when to sit up and when to drop back down, when to lean flat to her back.
As if someone had taught me. I frowned, the tiniest glimmer of a memory trying to break free, but all I caught was the word beautiful.
Which made sense, because the horse was gorgeous.
At least as much as I could tell in the dark. 1
A pinprick of light split the dark canvas. I tightened my grip on the reins. “That’s the way out?”
She ran full-pelt towards that gleam, her hooves devouring the distance until the pinprick became a window, and then a wide slice of moon-pale light that we ploughed into, through, and out the other side.
Scents broke through first. The crisp smell of snow. The cloying taste of smoke. Earthy trees and dirt.
Well, the good news was she wasn’t taking me to hell, or I’d smell rotting corpses, fire, blood, and brimstone.
Yet when she raced through the slit in the darkness, a land wreathed in mist lay before us.
And it was… familiar. Enough that I knew it wasn’t meant to look like this.
This place wasn’t the white realm I’d left behind.
There was supposed to be colour and community and streets full of lopsided buildings, chimneys puffing soft curls of grey smoke. Not all this… fog.
“I’ve been here before,” I told the horse as she slowed, plodding down the cobbled street, avoiding the craters where cobbles had broken or vanished altogether.
The brick houses were much the same, some missing chunks of stone, others with whole walls collapsed, roof tiles sagging.
Cracked slivers of slate were scattered over the pavement, fog swirling among them.
And every fragment of destruction made my chest squeeze tighter and tighter. Not unease or anxiety. Pain. Seeing this village in ruins hurt.
“Is this where I lived?” I breathed, waving a hand through the eddying fog so I could glimpse what waited atop the cobbled road my trusty steed aimed towards.
“Oh, you really are beautiful,” I said when I got a proper look at her.
She was as black as the void we’d just passed through, with a stately neck, intelligent eyes, and a mane groomed to perfection.
Dark flickers of smoke seeped from her hair, scattered black wisps into the dense fog.
“Should you be leaking black smoke, though?”
I reached out, trailing my fingertips through it, and my chest jolted, the hunger for justice and revenge soaring inside me, stronger than ever. It wasn’t smoke; it was power. A question answered by my own magic.
“I think I loved this place,” I said after a long silence, only the abandoned village below us and the cobbled street leading higher, higher. “I loved it, and seeing it in this state… I can’t stand it.”
A lump pressed against my throat, growing until it hurt, too.
“Trust your bonds,” I reminded myself. Maybe I was bound to this village.
There was certainly enough emotion packed into my chest to suggest it.
My ribs strained to fit everything, the skin over my throat made thin by a lump the size of a golf ball. 2
“I hope you know where we’re going,” I told the horse as the ascent turned ever steeper. A phantom ache burned in my legs muscles, as if my body remembered walking up this hill. I could almost feel the laboured rasp of my lungs, working overtime to suck down oxygen. “I can’t see a thing in this—”
A voice sliced through the fog, cut a slit in my chest, and drove into my heart like a lightning bolt.
“Cat! Cat, where are you?”
“Um,” I said to the horse. “That’s me. Right?”
The horse answered while I was still reeling from someone calling my name. She let out a loud, rallying whinny and put on a new burst of speed, until I had to flatten myself to her back or risk falling off.
“Fuzzball?” someone cried, a different voice, this one brighter, sharper, and alive with emotions. Whoever spoke, it sounded like he’d just been crying. “Guys, that’s Fuzzball. Maybe she found our—”
He cut off when the horse burst through the layer of fog at the top of the cobbled street, and the mist thinned in places, allowing me to see the castle that loomed over us—wrecked in so many places that it looked like the ruins of Whitby Abbey—and the five men who stood in the once-great castle’s courtyard.
They surged as one the moment the horse, Fuzzball, apparently, and I became visible. I waited for the crash of recognition through my chest, waited for enlightenment to pierce the shadowed pit in my mind. But these people were strangers, utterly unfamiliar.
I tightened my hands on Fuzzball’s reins, motioning for her to slow, to stop, and threw up a hand in warning to the men, coils of magic around my hand, wrist, and arm. A threat I would discharge the second those men came too close.
Most heeded the warning, except for a tall, lithe man with a shock of red hair, a myriad of freckles, and a stricken expression, and a shorter man with a shaved head, battered leather jacket, a whole wealth of tattoos, and an intensity to his face that made my stomach tangle.
“That’s close enough,” I warned, proud when the coolness of my voice covered up the sudden mesh of nerves in my belly.
The two men jerked to a halt as if I’d released my magic, looking even more distressed than before. The others crept across the fog-wreathed courtyard to join them, but no closer. Good. I had all this magic and I wasn’t afraid to use it.
“Cat?” the redhead breathed, looking up at me with eyes that sparkled with tears.
“You know who I am?” I asked warily. They might be the family I’d lost, or they might be minions of those who killed me. Power throbbed around them like a pulse, enough that my hackles were raised. I could imagine people this powerful working with Violence.
“Of course we know who you are.”
I narrowed my eyes, my heart a jumbled beat. “Who are you?”
They reacted as if I’d shot them. Recoiling, stumbling back, clutching at chests or throats, other hands curling into fists as if to bear down on the pain of an injury.
My own chest cinched tighter at the sight, as one of the men stood stock-still, his eyes shut, crinkled tight, before they opened and locked on me.
A sad smile lightened the darkness of his expression, though it did nothing for the sallow brown of his complexion.
“We’re your husbands, little bride.”