Chapter 45
Cat
Iexhaled shakily as we made our way down the aisle of cells beneath Wrath’s house.
We knew where to find Violence. We could take the fight to him, knock him off balance and finally gain the upper hand.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that he was at Ford.
It was where Nightmare killed the Fords and tortured Miz.
It was where Nightmare had come back to life and been Cruelty’s puppet. Of course it would come back to Ford.
“You’re going back,” a raspy, broken voice said when we walked past the next cell. I glanced into it and froze.
Phil.
I was stunned into silence, but my husbands didn’t have that problem.
“Don’t speak to her,” Madde hissed, throwing his arm in front of me and guiding me back. “Don’t even look at her or I’ll grow a shadow beak and peck your eyes out.”
She looked the same, even if her skin now shone with a silvery hue of the deceased.
Same glossy hair in a high ponytail, same athletic body, same pretty face, but her eyes were haunted in a way Wil’s weren’t.
Oh, he regretted what he’d done, or at least the fallout that led to his death, but Phil? She was tortured by it.
And a slow coil of magic within me began to unwind, an ear cocked as my inner judge paid attention. So I choked back the words I wanted to snarl.
“You’ll speak to Wil but not me?” she laughed, a hoarse, dead laugh that plucked at my sympathy. “After everything he’s done?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, gripping the throwing knives Madde gifted me.
“What has he done?” Pain asked, with a softness that surprised me. As if he sensed the hurt we could all see in her haggard face.
Phil shook her head, scoffing. “As if it would make any difference.”
When she retreated into the dimmer part of her cell, I approached the bars. “Phil. Tell us.” Meeting her eyes sent a crash through my heart. I still despised her. She helped distract us so Cruelty could kill Honey. She hit me over the fucking head. “Tell me.”
Phil swallowed, her arms wrapped around herself. “All of Nightmare’s disciples did her dirty work because they were threatened or paid. I did what he told me to. Wil.”
“You said something that night, in the cottage in the woods,” I said. “You said I don’t know what he’s capable of.”
She hesitated, and my magic went wild.
“Tell me what he did,” I said, far softer than I planned to. “I’ll make him pay.”
Phil looked at me, and seemed to notice my new confidence, my new power. She nodded, decision made, and wet her lips. A human gesture that made me even more sympathetic, even as I reminded myself what she’d done, too. But this felt less like an act than what we’d just witnessed in Wil’s cell.
“He held me down and injected me with that serum,” she said, barely audible.
“I fought him, begged, promised him money and anything he could possibly want, but it made no difference,” she laughed, rasping and bitter.
“I kicked and punched and screamed, and nothing stopped him injecting me. And he said—he said he’d let it take me, turn me into a mindless killer who’d eat her way through Ford unless I did what he said. ”
“That piece of shit,” Miz snarled, half turning back the way we’d come, a dark look in his gold eyes.
“That’s why you lied to me, and why you attacked me that night. Why you left me in that place.”
Phil’s guilt went so deep, it was impossible to look at her without seeing it.
“I never wanted to. I wanted—” She shook her head, pulled at the ends of her ponytail.
“I never had a real girlfriend, isn’t that sad?
Ford was the first time I had actual friends who gave a shit about me, not just what my money could do for them.
I wouldn’t have wrecked that if he hadn’t injected me.
” She held my stare, and I wondered if spirits could cry.
“Cat, I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted Honey—”
“Don’t speak her name,” Death warned, his voice rattling, but I brushed a touch over his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know you didn’t kill Honey,” I told Phil, “but you helped Cruelty kill her, whether you knew what would happen or not. You helped get Honey alone, and Cruelty used that to murder my last best friend on this earth.”
“Rude,” Wrath remarked, and I jumped as she skipped down the staircase at the end of the basement. “I thought we were besties. Right,” she said when Tor glared her way. “Not the time. Proceed.”
I ignored her, and the bickering she and Pain got into.
I kept my attention on Phil. Wil threatened her, hurt her, turned her into a creature so she’d have no choice but to obey his orders—Violence’s orders.
I sighed, my anger at Phil turning from a loud roar to a snarl.
Still furious, but lower in severity. She was a victim, too, as much as I hated to admit it.
“The night you dragged me to that place,” I said, holding her gaze, “what did he threaten to do?”
Phil held her middle tighter and shrugged. “Oh, the usual. Let the serum take me. Unleash me upon the village so I’d maul some innocent person. Encourage my bloodlust until I couldn’t ignore the urge to kill. Make me kill my friends.”
I nodded. I’d expected as much.
“Tor, Miz,” I said, facing them. “Can you handle Wil?”
“Quickly?” Tor asked, his expression hard. “Or should we stash him somewhere for a repeat performance?”
“The latter.”
Miz’s smile was sharp. “As our wife wishes.”
I faced Death and Pain. “I need you to come up with a game plan. A way we can get into Ford without Violence knowing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Pain said with a salute and… I realised I was in charge. Giving them orders that they didn’t hesitate to follow.
It felt good.
“I have an idea about how to get in,” Death said from within his dark hood. “Madde, take care of Cat.”
“Sexually?” Madde’s expression brightened.
“No,” I said at the same time as Death.
I caught my madman’s hand. “Madde, I need you to find Joanna. If we’re taking the fight to Violence—and we are—we need her, too.”
“That leaves you alone,” he pointed out, his mouth thinning.
“I want to talk to Phil, just the two of us.” I held their gazes, not looking away first. “I’m Judgement. She can’t hurt me. Trust me?”
Death groaned. “How can I say no to that? Of course I trust you, little bride.” He brushed my cheek with a flicker of magic. “Be careful.”
“No hurting my lioness,” Madde warned Phil who stood inside the cell, watching us anxiously. “Or I’ll suck your bone marrow out with a straw.”
“Oh, I love that,” Wrath whispered, leaning against the stone staircase. “I’m stealing that for my next torture session.”
Madde curtsied. “Why, thank you, and you are welcome.” He met my gaze, held eye contact for a moment. “Be careful,” he said with that heart-stopping seriousness I saw in the mine.
“I will. Promise.” I held out my pinky finger, and smiled when he linked his with mine.
When they’d filtered out, and Wrath sighed and retreated upstairs at the pointed look I gave her, I stretched out a filament of shadow and used it on the lock to Phil’s cell, letting myself inside.
She shifted nervously, and maybe she didn’t realise I couldn’t hurt her now she was a ghost, or maybe she thought I had Wrath’s trick at torturing spirits.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked with a sigh, a heavy weight on my chest. My magic was gathering, swelling, furious.
“I didn’t want anyone to know,” she muttered, eyes on the floor. “They’d think I was a monster—”
“Not about the serum,” I said in my gentlest voice, leaving space between us. “Why didn’t you tell me about what he did after he injected you?”
While she was weak, disoriented, before strength and wild hunger raced through her veins.
Phil took a step back. “Nothing happened.”
“I died too, you know?” I said, finding it easier to say the words the more I said them. “Violence slit my throat on a chessboard in one of Cruelty’s games. That’s when I found out Wil was a fucking traitor.”
Not just a traitor. Violent. A predator.
And a damn good liar, because I just fell for his spiel literal minutes ago.
He might well have had a gambling problem and been promised a cure, but part of him loved manipulating our lives, loved watching people have mental breaks and commit murder.
Maybe he loved fooling us into thinking he was our friend, sharing jokes and sympathetic comments, all the while he was evil.
“Phil.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she whispered.
I reached into a pocket of shadow and pulled out the scales, light already burning in the morganite. “I’m Judgement, which means I can sense when people are innocent or guilty. I have magic that senses injustice and—you don’t need to say it out loud, but I know he assaulted you.”
And all the while I’d trusted him. I’d confided in him, felt safe with him. “I didn’t see him as a threat,” I admitted. “I thought he was harmless and fun. I thought he was my friend—and yours. I’m so sorry I didn’t see the real him.”
I wasn’t sorry Miz had killed Phil, though. I probably should have been.
“He’s a good liar,” she murmured after a while, not meeting my eyes. “I fell for it, too. I thought he was gay, for fuck’s sake. I thought—” She rubbed her face. “I thought I was safe with him, too. I don’t know if he’s bi, pan, or if every part of his personality is a lie to get our guards down.”
“He’ll pay for everything he did.” I held her gaze. “I promise, Phil.” The scales glowed in my hands. “He’ll suffer for every moment of suffering he gave us.”
Phil swallowed. Croaked, “Thank you.”
I slid the scales back into my shadow. “And to answer your first question, we are going back to Ford. They had Tor captive in a mirror, and we found a way to free him, but now it’s spilling magic into the island.”
“The mirror requires a host,” a paper-thin voice came from down the hall, and ice went down my spine.
Another voice echoed it. “The mirror requires a host.” And another, until the whole row of ghost prisoners spoke at once.
Jesus.
“I’ll do it,” Phil blurted, standing straighter. “If someone needs to occupy the mirror, I’ll do it. I owe you, after everything I did.”
“Phil—”
“Let me atone for the lies, for my role in Honey’s death.” She flattened her hands from the fists they’d curled into. “Please. Let me do something to help, instead of hurting you.”
“Alright,” I agreed, a weight off my shoulders. That was an easy fix, at least. Violence would not be easy to defeat.
Across the basement, Wil began to scream.
It went on for some time.