All Hallows Fate (Sick and Twisted #6)

Prologue The Cruelty in the Flame

I’d been here for centuries. Lost in the in-between places around Ford House as the world slipped past. As the years slipped past. I saw it through a veil of silver and fog, like warm breath clashing with the icy air that consumed the island every winter.

I couldn’t feel that cold anymore, nor did my breaths turn the air to fog. Neither did I breathe.

But I watched.

I watched as the house was left to disrepair, as layers of dust piled on top of chipped paint and my favourite furniture.

I watched as the elements attacked the building with such severity that roof tiles whipped across the overgrown grounds.

Fragments of slate strewn across gardens my legs could remember racing through, my bare feet could remember the tickle and slash of grass blades as I chased my siblings.

I watched as the abandoned house was scrubbed of dust and grime, the furniture walked out, piece by piece, and bundled onto the back of a rumbling car. I’d watched those appear one by one on the island, too—carts steadily replaced by blocky cars that belched dark clouds of smoke.

Fashions changed with them, a blur of different styles for every year until I lost track.

I lost track of the year, too, but I knew the world was at war.

I heard some of the uniformed men and women talk about it at length, laid up in starched cots in our old dining hall while grim-faced and kind-eyed nurses moved among them.

The sight of those rows of beds stayed with me for years after they emptied, their occupants sent home, returned to the war, or simply gone.

I stayed away from the woods during that time, though I knew the bodies were buried there.

Later, I’d realise those bodies gave her power.

Fuelled her particular brand of evil. The woman who snuck her way into my family and killed all of us.

I’d waited all this time to see her again, to exact justice for my family.

I’d watched, and waited, and witnessed the steady rush of time, all so I could kill her the moment she dared return.

But when she did return, killing her proved…

difficult. My hands had forgotten how to hold a weapon.

They’d forgotten how to be hands, in fact, after so many years of being mist. I’d forgotten how to walk, floating like steam over the ground, weaving around the buildings erected around my home, one by one, until they were full of light and learning.

I was too weak, too spectral to stop Nightmare as she rose that All Hallows night.

I watched every scream, watched shudders of pain and frozen death throes.

I watched pupils in the strangest clothes perish or kill each other, one by one, until the student body was halved.

I watched the curse spread like a disease until even those not present that night became her pawns.

And all that time, I willed myself stronger, urged my fingers to brush the bark of trees, to touch the cool wood of bench seats in lecture halls.

Until finally I was able to pick up a pen lost for centuries in a trunk, shoved into the attic in what was now called Milton Hall.

It took me three weeks to push back the catches on the trunk and open the heavy lid.

Took even longer to grasp the pen lovingly cast by my eldest brother, and carry it painstakingly across the campus grounds into the room I’d watched her move into.

Not her, not the worst kind of nightmares given flesh.

The bride. The one married to death, to Caishen.

I watched him the most, whenever he came to Ford’s End. I couldn’t stop watching him. Sometimes I thought he suffered the most out of all of us. We were the ones who died, but he lived every day with ghosts.

I watched as she found the pen. The wife with a mask of death and hair whiter than a spirit.

And I saw it, finally: a path to revenge, to getting my family justice.

Nightmare was dead, but the ones who controlled her actions like the strings of a puppet were still alive.

They thrived, schemed, collecting power like dragons collected treasure.

I would ensure they died screaming for all they’d done.

So I reached for that pen as the bride began to write, and I slipped through the filigree designs, sifting through the seams of its construction, no more than air. I would be whatever it took to claim my revenge. I may not be able to kill them myself, but I could show the bride how to do it.

I hoped she made it bloody. I hoped she made it excruciating.