Chapter 2
Cat
Aspill of cold doused my skin in goosebumps and I shuddered, frowning as my heart threw itself against my chest, my breathing sharp in my chest. Strained. “I’m… afraid of him,” I noted. “Also, apparently I know he’s a him.”
“Control that emotion,” Ender barked, stalking into the fog and gesturing for me to follow. “Do not let it free.”
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered, but I tried to push back the prick of ice and terror. “You’re not afraid of someone you can’t remember meeting.”
It ate away at me, minute by minute. I couldn’t remember anything. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know my dreams, my fears, my anxieties, my loved ones. I had been someone, and now I was no one.
“Count yourself lucky,” he sniped. “He’s a bundle of laughter and feel-good emotions, as you can guess. I’d delete the bastard from my memory if I—”
Ender staggered back with a snarl so guttural and hoarse that I shivered hard.
He swung his flail into a swell of mist to his right and I startled when a grunt of pain answered.
When Ender dragged the flail back, there was a man attached to it.
Massively built and tall, with a face honed by callousness.
Violence was a strange name for a man, and yet it fit this one perfectly.
I didn’t see what struck Ender the first time, but now I saw the shadow hurtling for him like an axe.
I shoved him out of the way and angled my shield to intercept the axe, gasping at the feeling of it meeting my magic.
Not the impact or collision; the slimy, cruel feel of the man whose magic it was.
I knew this magic. No memories rose to the surface, but the feeling was back, only more intense. Absolute fear, glazed with a layer of frost until my teeth wanted to shatter and I had to clench my fingers around my shield and weapon to stop them shaking.
That scent had returned, too, but stronger. Astringent lemon and sickly mint. It was coming from him.
He killed me. I didn’t know how I knew, only that the certainty hit my mind and lit up like a firework. He killed me. This blank-faced psychopath whose eyes lit up with genuine joy when I repelled his magic.
“This is interesting,” he remarked, his eyes sliding over my body like a sheen of grime.
The shaking in my hands travelled up my arms, spreading like rime over the delicate silk of petals until they wilted, until something inside me curled up, compacted into a tight ball, and then died.
The strange peace I’d felt here with Ender rotted into a corpse. I didn’t remember, but I knew how it felt to die. I could feel the slice of a blade across my throat, could almost grasp the second when death came for me, ripping me away from—something. A home, a person, a purpose.
The fear was a spark of fire compared to the volcanic eruption of my rage.
“Cat!” Ender yelled in warning as the fury coursed through me, merging with my fledgling magic until it roared.
My crude sword sharpened, its lumpy shape sharpening into defined edges, Exile’s watery light gleamed off its razor-sharp tip.
My shield, too, transformed into something impenetrable.
I shook with the force of magic that burst to life inside me, and when Violence sidestepped Ender’s flail and lashed out with a dark strike of power, I drove into its path.
It was easy to knock aside his magic. Easy to angle the sword at his chest, to leap across the scant distance and sink the sword all the way to the hilt in his gut.
“I’m not sure whether I’m disappointed you’re still here or relieved. It would have been such a shame to lose screams as satisfying as yours.”
He clearly expected that to make me falter, but my memory was still a black hole so I ripped the sword from his stomach and plunged it into his thigh. He didn’t blink, even though he ought to be in excruciating pain, but his eyes did shift over my head when a howling cry came from the distance.
Ender grasped my arm and pulled me away; I cried out when my sword remained in Violence’s leg. “Time for plan B,” he muttered.
“My sword,” I complained.
“Dissolve it and make another,” he huffed. “And don’t wander this time, unless you want your arm ripped from its socket.”
“…No?”
“Right answer.” He grunted, swinging his flail into Violence’s head to knock him back as the screeching grew louder, closer.
“What is that?” I demanded. The fear that had burgeoned when Violence’s scent hit my senses built, gathered speed and volume.
My chest struggled to contain it, and the wild, emotional thing that crouched inside me seemed to feed on it.
A burst of dark clouds erupted from my shield, hanging in the white mist around us and seeming to pulse.
“Cat,” Ender warned.
“You wanted clouds. You’ve got them.”
“Control it.”
“How?” I hissed, the closer that screeching came, the worse my grasp on the fear became.
“What is that?” Violence demanded in a flat voice, twisting in the direction of the shrieking howls. “What else lives here?”
Ender blinked, owlishly innocent. “No clue.” He flicked me a glance I knew meant get ready after so many lessons under his tutelage.
I sucked in a sharp breath, holding my shield closer to me, my eyes on a swivel as the sound swelled as if a pack of wolves hunted us through the obscurity of the mist.
It wasn’t wolves that burst from the swirling mist; it was hands and claws and teeth made of the fog. Those sharp-tipped fingers grabbed Violence, five hands gripping his body so tightly I expected them to draw blood.
“Time to run,” Ender said, breathless as he grabbed my upper arm and hauled me after him.
Behind us, Violence rumbled a warning at the ghostly hands clutching him.
It swiftly became a roar of pain that kicked my pulse into overdrive.
Oh, I had a pulse again. There’d been nothing at my wrist, no thrum of blood at my throat.
If only I’d known all it took was monstrous hands pushing through the fog on either side of me, I might have done this earlier. 1
“Faster,” Ender urged. “You don’t want to know what happens when these things grab you.”
“Where are we running to?” I panted, throwing my shield up when an arm tore through the fog to my right, reaching for my throat.
“There’s a part of Exile where the fog doesn’t reach.
We’ll be safe there if—” He lunged suddenly left, avoiding the claws that aimed for his chest. Safe seemed a very relative word, but I’d take anything that kept these disembodied arms at bay.
It was as if the mist had been watching, waiting for a chance to kill us all this time. As if Exile itself had grown limbs.
“Almost there,” Ender panted, right as a hand shot across the mist. Cold wrapped around my ankle and tore me to the ground between one step and the next.