Chapter 23
Cat
“Put me down,” I whimpered, but Madde did no such thing. Tor and Death exchanged a glance, and then we were all ushered onto the narrow runway down the sheer wall. “Pain, save me,” I breathed, flinching when I caught sight of the drop.
It would be like falling from the top of a skyscraper.
I’d be dead on impact, death magic or no death magic.
I screwed my eyes shut when Madde increased his pace, following Tor at the head of our group.
He was another god that was accurately named, because this was pure torment.
Knowing one false move, one slip, and every bone in my body would break—and Madde’s, because we’d both fall—was a torture so acute that I shook.
“I’ve got you,” Madde promised, his grip secure on the back of my legs, my stomach resting against his shoulder. “You’re safe with me, lioness. I’d vow it with a blood pact, but that would mean putting you down and—”
“Don’t you dare put me down!” I shrieked, but mine wasn’t the only cry that filled the eerie silence. The lack of miners hammering stone became horrifyingly apparent when the overseers screamed. Whatever overseers meant.
Dragon-like cries crammed the cavernous space full of noise until I was sure this wasn’t real. I’d just fallen asleep and my brain had conjured a scene I’d watched in a fantasy film. That was the only explanation for that loud, battle cry, that scraping, shrieking cry for blood.
“Faster,” Death urged.
“No!” I blurted. “Not faster. Slower.”
“Do you want to be eaten?” Miz asked, just behind us.
“No,” I whined.
“Then we’re walking faster. Pain, hold onto me.”
“I hate this, I hate this,” Pain chanted, and it struck me that he was worse off.
No one was carrying him. He had no choice but to keep his eyes open, witnessing the horrific drop and the thousands upon thousands of evil spirits sent here to toil, a fitting revenge for the crimes they committed in life.
How I knew that, I had no idea, but the knowledge was immutable.
I recognised the guilt in these spirits, felt the evil in their fetid souls, seeping wickedness into the air so thick I could almost taste blood when I inhaled.
Evil, my inner judge declared. Cruel, heartless, wicked, psychotic, depraved. On and on, as we descended the ribbon-thin path through the mine, I felt the blackened hearts these spirits had possessed in life, the stain of their deeds so bad that I choked, and I judged each one.
By the time Madde jerked to a halt, I was incensed with it. Livid to my blood and bones. Only the fact that their punishment had already been given, and eternal toil was a fitting price for their immorality kept me on Madde’s shoulder instead of inflicting my magic on each and every spirit.
“Why are we stopping?” Pain demanded shrilly. “Oh god, why are we stopping?”
“Calm down,” Miz muttered. “Breathe. You’re a death god.”
“Even gods can be killed, and look at those things!” Pain’s voice climbed, higher, louder.
“Put me down,” I told Madde when it was clear we weren’t moving.
“Carefully,” I added, clinging to him when he set me on my feet, squeezing my waist as if to echo his promise that I was safe with him.
I couldn’t help but notice his hands fit perfectly in the dip of my waist, fingers splayed over my curves as if they belonged there.
I took a sharp breath and opened my eyes—and immediately wished I hadn’t. “Those are the mine overseers?” I demanded, my voice matching Pain’s.
I thought they’d be spirits, or maybe gods like us, but these were…
like nothing I’d seen before. They were humanoid, but with jet-black bodies flecked with grey as if they’d been cut from the mountain around us and formed into the shape of three men.
Three too-long, stretched forms that made me shiver, something wrong about them that made the remnants of mortal Cat bleat in terror.
Wings carried them through the air, shining with the same black substance as their bodies, reminiscent of a bat’s wings but stone where there should be delicate flesh.
When their wingbeats brought them closer, too close to avoid, I saw their eyes glowed with a spectral white.
“Intruders,” the creature in the middle spoke.
Longer and bigger than the others, with a wider wingspan.
The voice was male, as if a male spirit had been placed in the stone body, but his face was a blunt, imperfect rendering.
A crude carving rather than a master’s sculpture.
It made the effect of his mouth opening unsettling, and that was before I saw the sharp stone teeth.
“We cannot intrude on our own domain,” Death disagreed, his voice different—deeper and rough.
When I looked at him in surprise, it was to find a flowing robe and nothing more.
What hid within that black cowl? Did he still have a face, did he have a skull void of flesh?
Or if I reached inside would I find only darkness?
A memory tried to break free, but the creature screeched in offense, ripping my full attention back to the three overseers flying over us, penning us in on the narrow path.
It would take very little effort for one of them to grab us and tear us from the path. My stomach dropped, and I pressed myself against the wall at my back, breaths sawing in and out of my lungs.
Pain flattened himself to the wall beside me, a curl of shadow brushing my jaw. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Blind puns?” I demanded breathlessly. “At a time like this?”
He snorted. “Never an inappropriate time, darling woe.” He clasped my hand and feathered a kiss over each knuckle. “I won’t let you fall. I have three dozen shadows ready to form a net at the first sign of slippage.”
“I don’t think slippage is a word,” I said, my voice thin as the overseers roared again.
“We will give you one minute to retreat,” the spokesman said.1 “In acknowledgement of your status,” he added to Death. “You will not be given longer than a minute.”
“We need a coil of iron. Give us that, and we’ll go.”
All three overseers screeched.
“The audacity,” one hissed.
“To ask what isn’t theirs,” another snarled.
“You will leave,” the middle creature snapped. “Now. Or we will hunt you through the mine and use your blood as fertiliser.”
I was suddenly very glad I hadn’t asked what was being mined here. That was none of my business, and I’d happily stay ignorant forever.
“This is my domain,” Death growled in a voice that rattled and rasped. “This mine sits in my land and is occupied by spirits because of me. I can just as easily unmake this place as I made it.”
And unmake you, the implication was clear. Dark, possessive glee swirled in my chest, making my heart beat faster. This man was my husband. This god was mine.
“No,” the creature said with a croaking laugh. “You could not. You, who are sickly and feeble, think to threaten us? You don’t have the strength.”
“He may not,” I said mildly before Death could reply. My head tilted as the predator in me rose, assessing the overseers. “But I do.”
My magic had triggered at my first hint of fear as we ventured into the dark mouth of the mine, and all through the trek down the tunnel it had been building strength, gathering into a storm of judgement and death.
And that was before every treacherous soul in this place assaulted my senses, baiting my power until it frothed at the mouth to judge, punish, and destroy.
It swept through me like the first warning signs of an electrical storm, sparking when the overseer laughed.
“You dare to address me, whelp of a god?”
“What did you just call my wife?” Madde asked in a voice so unfamiliar I didn’t recognise him until he stepped right to the edge of the path, tiptoeing against the fall. No laughter, no madness, no bright, unapologetic passion. This was a plain of ice under a night sky utterly devoid of stars.
“Your wife,” one of the others repeated, wings beating to hold him in place as his rough face turned in my direction. “Is unfit to step foot in a place of such vital power as this. This mine is rife with magic and darkness, unsuitable for the weak mind of a woman—”
Madde leapt off the edge of the platform before the overseer even finished, and I cried out, lunging forward on instinct. Fear dragged me back against the wall when I saw the sheer drop. Well, fear and the tight grip Pain had on my hand.
“Madde!” I shouted, a tremor in my voice.
He landed on the overseer, arms locked around the creature’s shoulders, and he clung there like a barnacle even as the creature fought Madde’s hold.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Tor demanded, throwing out a hand and unleashing a wave of darkness rife with so much suffering, I shrank against the wall, even knowing it wasn’t intended for me. “Get back here, you crazy bastard.”
“One second,” Madde called, climbing onto the overseer’s back as he thrashed, trying to unseat my insane husband. “B.R.B.”
My breath left my chest when he thrust his hand forward and—and ripped out a spine of dark, shining stone. “He—he just—”
“Yeah, that’s his new thing,” Pain sighed, shadows writhing around him faster than before, his grip on my hand unforgiving.
“His new thing is ripping out spines?” I asked sharply.
I was a little faint watching Madde throw the stone spine into the sheer drop below him and grab for the overseer’s wings next, but part of me was purring.
The dark, quiet part of me that craved blood spilling, bones snapping, and organs shredded.
The overseer disrespected me, so Madde punished him, and I loved it.
“Jump back to the ledge,” Death ordered. “Now, Madde. If the overseer falls—”
“I know,” Madde replied brightly, that ice cold thing I’d glimpsed buried once more. “A free rollercoaster ride!”
I thought he was afraid of heights? Maybe insanity trumped fear.
“Madde, be careful,” I urged, my whole body jerking when the stone wing ripped off, only one wing keeping both overseer and my husband in the air.
“Watch your back!” I screamed when the other two winged creatures reached out their long-fingered hands for him. The tips, I noticed, were sharper than the claws that split my fingertips when I got angry. Long, serrated. A brutal promise of evisceration.
My next breath died in my throat, and I found I didn’t need to breathe at all when it refused to kick back in.
Both overseers grabbed at Madde, and I could have sworn every spirit watching from the small caves on the opposite wall leaned forward in anticipation.
Someone was going to die, but who? Did they want their overseers to fall, or hope for their victory?
“Pain, put your net beneath them,” I breathed, my voice hitching when Miz flung out his arm, a slice of dark smoke knocking one of the overseers away from Madde.
The winged creature spun too quickly to stop his momentum and crashed into one of the rounded cubby holes opposite, sending the miner fleeing deeper into the mountain.
A shiver gripped me, making my teeth rattle, and the fine hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. The furious hunger for justice that lived in every cell in my body vibrated at a higher pitch, screaming, howling.
That scent…
Not just stone and blood and damp but… mint.
I barely saw it as Madde ripped off the other wing, kicked off the falling overseer’s body, and landed flawlessly on the narrow path. I only half paid attention as the last overseer whirled towards us and spat a detailed, explicit threat.
“Get down,” I said in a voice so cold it felt like ice on my tongue. And I understood how Madde felt earlier, understood the frozen rage he must have felt. “Get down!”
The second my husbands were out of rage, I erupted, detonating every gathered, rageful burst of magic at where Violence leaned against the entrance to the tunnel, the self-satisfied expression leaving his face when my power crushed him into the stone.