Chapter 25
Cat
“How could I forget my own brother?” I cried, aghast as we rode carefully around the banks of a lake overflowing ghost-silver water. “How could I forget Virgil?”
And not just Virgil. I had another brother. The name was almost there, just out of my grasp. The black hole of my memory clung to that name, but I remembered teasing laughter and comfortable bickering and… sequins? Pink feathers, snarky remarks, and heavy eyeshadow…?
It was a sweeter memory than when I thought of Virgil.
I still couldn’t remember everything, and there were whole swaths of my childhood missing, but I knew he came to find me in Ford’s End and was tortured to keep me in line.
Transformed into a creature of voracious appetite and murderous instincts.
Like me, I suspected, though my husbands hadn’t so much as indicated Virgil and I were the same.
But Madde said I was a jaguar, and I felt the hungry creature that lurked inside me. I didn’t need anyone to confirm the truth for me.
I pressed my hand against my chest, right over my rapid-beating heart and the clean shirt Madde leant me this morning. It was purple leopard print and had a cartoon cauldron on it, with the words hocus pocus can’t fucking focus, which about summed up my state of mind.
How could I have forgotten Virgil? After everything he went through in the name of making me suffer, making me obey?
I couldn’t remember who made me suffer, but the knowledge was just under the surface, a hand pushing up through water, searching for the way out.
It wouldn’t be long before it broke free.
I was already starting to remember Ford, that twisted medical school in the middle of the sea. The little I’d remembered was enough to make my blood cold and my panic spike, and I had a feeling it was a drop in the ocean compared to everything I had yet to recall.
Fuzzball turned her head to peer at me, sensing my turmoil, and I scrounged up a smile, stroking the soft fur of her nose. “I’m fine,” I assured her. “Watch where you’re walking. You might be made of death and magic, but a turned ankle is a turned ankle.”
She huffed warm air over my hands, nibbled at my knuckles, and then faced forward. It was the strangest way I could remember being comforted, but it had its own kind of magic. My chest eased, allowing more air, and my shoulders dropped from where they’d been hunched.
Tor said they’d kept tabs on Virgil as much as they could, along with the other creatures who’d been brought here and escaped into the wilds of the domain. That’s where we were going now: the wilds, to round up all the victims of experiments conducted at Ford. All so Violence could weaken Death.
We had to be careful. Not only were these people now wild animals, they could nullify our power with a scratch or bite.
“I’ve been thinking,” Pain said as we reached the other side of the lake and our shadow shires carried us into a dense cluster of black-leafed trees. “Your list doesn’t just say find the creatures; we need to give them a home, right?”
“We do,” I agreed, half wondering what was so wrong with the home they’d claimed for themselves.
But that became apparent when the dense tree path looked out across a wide crack in the ground where moss had covered the earth, and twenty or so wild animals sheltered.
There was water nearby with the lake, and they were sheltered with the trees, but this was no home.
“When all this is over, I want to stay with you,” Pain said, snagging my attention again.
My heart swelled, ached. “I won’t leave your side unless you force me to.
So my estate will be empty. It’s nothing fancy, just a lodge in the heart of the forestlands, but there’s grounds around it.
It could be good for these people, especially if we can find Madde’s scientist.”
“I am a mad scientist,” Madde input, clearly eavesdropping.
“Licking rocks and throwing two chemicals into a pot to see if they explode doesn’t make you a scientist,” Pain huffed, batting Madde with a playful shadow.
“Does, too,” Madde argued.
“Children,” Tor drawled, silencing their bickering. “Pain, are you sure you won’t want your own space?”
“Hell no,” Pain replied emphatically, and this time his shadow grazed me, though the magic was velvety and tender instead of striking. “I’m staying with Cat.”
“Then how the fuck are we going to herd these creatures across the wilds to your house without being scratched, gored, bitten, or fucking eaten?”
“Carefully?” I suggested with a shrug, making a valiant effort to cast off the dark memories that had leached like poison into my mind. Curses and murder and taunting, lilting laughter.
“We have no antidotes left,” Death pointed out, wrapped in a cloak of dark magic so thick I could barely see him atop Mort.
“There’s nothing we can do to bring back their human selves.
If they’re even still salvageable after so long in animal form,” he added with an apologetic glance in my direction.
Visions and snippets of conversation blurred through my mind, quickening my breathing. A dark tunnel, a cell that was so cold the air bit at my hands, a wrathful scream, a bookshelf overflowing with vials of blood—
“Cat,” Miz said gently, easing Verbena closer on my left so he could reach out and cup my face. His hand was warm, so soft against my skin. “What did you see, my universe?”
“Cells,” I rasped, surprised by how raw my voice had been scraped. “Blood and instruments and a table with straps attached to it.”
“The cottage,” he sighed, his thumb sweeping over my cheekbone. “That’s where Poppy made the creatures. It’s where—”
He bit off his words, but I finished his sentence. “It’s where I was made into one, too.”
“You remember?” he murmured, an aching depth of sadness in his eyes even when I shook my head. “Cat, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine.” I cleared my throat. “It made me powerful, right? So it’s fine.”
But even when he let go of me and dropped back onto Verbena’s stately back, that look was still in his eye. Miserable, painful sympathy.
“So how do we convince them to follow us?” I asked, keeping my gaze fixed on the wide, mossy crack in the ground even though my husbands’ stares itched over my skin and I could feel their anguish through the bonds.
That had been happening more and more this morning, flickers of their emotions reaching me, along with sensations and visions so clear they felt real.
A lingering hug of reassurance, the heat of a burning sun, the peaceful quiet of a forest, the radiance of pure starlight, and the kiss of a warm rain. One for each of my husbands I couldn’t help but notice.
“Ooh, I have an idea,” Madde said.
“No,” Death, Tor, and Miz said at once.
“We should at least hear him out,” Pain suggested with a frown. If he thought I hadn’t noticed the wisp of magic he was winding around my ankle, he was mistaken.
“Okay, so we find a really big stick,” Madde began.
“On second thought,” Pain said with a laugh. “Maybe not.”
“No, Madde has a point,” I said, smiling when the madman himself made a heart with his hands and beat it against his chest. “What if we use magic—not a big stick—to force them to run. We could make a tunnel of magic so they can only go in one direction. Literally herd them to Pain’s house.”
I peered into the gorge, struck by how strange it was to find so many different species side by side. A wolf licked its paw beside a sprawled out bear, while big cats wrestled playfully like kittens and an antlered stag dozed in the midday sun.
My breath hitched when my eyes fell on the huge, dark creature walking sluggishly across the gorge. It was as big and muscular as a bear but with enormous claws and huge ram’s horns.
“Virgil,” I breathed, and leapt from Fuzzball’s back, the impact of my feet driving into the ground not even registering.
Shadows gathered around me with eagerness, helping me float past sharp, jagged rocks and fluffy moss the rich colour of jewels. It barely hit my radar that I was flying1 because all my attention was fixed on the bulky form of my brother.
I had a brother. Two brothers. I had family. And one of them was right here, lifting his head as I landed six feet away from him.
My heart lurched, nerves twisting up my belly as I waited for him to recognise me.
Instead, a rolling growl came from his chest. I didn’t have enough time to twist away before he leapt, powerful paws slamming into my shoulders, driving me to the ground. Teeth the size of daggers closed in on my throat.