Chapter 43
Cat
“Violence,” I snarled, my teeth bared as I read the note. “This is him.” I locked eyes with Miz, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. Madde wouldn’t meet my eyes. “If he’s trying to lure us out, he has the upper hand.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Death agreed, draped in so much dark magic it was impossible to tell his legs had turned to fog—both of them now.
“But if we can attack him where he thinks he’s safe,” I said, catching Tor’s eye to check he was still on board, “we’ll have the advantage.”
“You know where to find him?” Madde asked with a grin, dropping a pair of pink heart-shaped sunglasses down his freckled nose to look at me.
“I have an idea,” I replied. “Where did you get those?”
“I always keep them with me for emergencies,” he replied. “Here, we can match.”
I expected an identical pair of sunglasses, but what he handed me were throwing knives with heart-shaped handles made of pink metal. I laughed, touched and my anger skipped. “Perfect. I can use these to threaten Wil.”
My husbands reacted as I expected—outbursts, raised voices, and a point blank refusal to let me anywhere near the bastard that tried to kill me on the chessboard. But when it was clear I wouldn’t be deterred from the path, they reluctantly summoned the horses and we were off.
I spun my new knife around my finger, a knot winding tighter in my gut with every minute and hour we rode across the domain.
This time, it was in a new direction, winding through glens and hills dominated by sprawling towns but emptied of all people.
Spirits would return to these places; the summoning stone had already begun calling them back, and when Violence was dead, we could repair the others.
I refused to give any thought to what we’d do if Violence couldn’t be killed.
He could. Joanna said as much. Rosalind wouldn’t have wasted her afterlife helping me if he was invincible. Neither would my friend have given me this to-do list, this hope, if Violence couldn’t be beaten.
But the list proved a source of anxiety; I kept taking it from my pocket to look at those two final lines.
5. A pained heart returned.
6. A kiss to save a death.
We’d fixed everything else, but what was the point when Death was still dying and Violence had Pain’s heart? He could make Pain tell him anything. It hurt me that we’d had to bind his hands.
“Wrath’s handling the processing of whatever spirits make it here,” Pain said as we rode down the winding cobbled street through another village, the houses as pale as ghosts around us, their timber beams and thatched roofs stark black.
“She lives just up there.” He pointed with a shadow at the large, Tudor-style house that overlooked the village.
“She usually handles the worst spirits, the most violent or unrepentant, so she’s got the cells for it. ”
I glanced at him. “Wil’s in a cell?”
“After what he did to you, damn right he is,” Tor growled, clicking his tongue at Lanai when she shied away from—her own reflection in the window to her left. “That’s you, you idiot.”
“Tor, don’t speak to her like that,” Miz scolded. “Don’t listen to grumpy Tor, Lanai, reflections are scary.”
My heart melted, softening the prickly edges of my anxiety, and I smiled. At least until a harrowing scream came from the Tudor house on the hill that our cobbled road wound up to.
“Could be nothing,” Tor commented, but he sat stiffer on Lanai’s back and his expression turned sharp, ready for battle. “Maybe Wrath saw a mouse.”
“Maybe her hair colour faded,” Madde breathed with acute horror, his blue eyes wide.
Another scream came, this time male, and my stomach knotted. “That’s not Wrath this time.”
“No,” Death agreed, nudging Mort closer behind us. “Something’s wrong. Hurry.”
The thatched roofs blurred into a nest of darkness and twigs as we raced past, the shadow shires’ hooves eating up the cobbles at a speed no mortal horse could achieve.
The higher we rode above the village, the more the air thickened with a coppery tang.
Not just the earthy warmth of our surroundings, or the echo of smithed metal and burnt bread from the buildings below us.
Blood. Lots of it.
“You need to unbind me,” Pain urged, shadows dripping from his shoulders but far weaker than usual, his magic reduced to a trickle. “If we’re riding into something bad enough to make spirits or a goddess scream, I need to be at full strength.”
“Sounds like something Violence would say,” Miz remarked, his gold eyes sharp, jaw clenched as another scream rent the air, this time female again. “Do what you can with the magic you have access to; we’re not untying your hands.”
Pain swore under his breath but didn’t fight the matter. It hurt—that I couldn’t speak up on his behalf, because Miz was right; that I couldn’t ease Pain’s mind when he must feel so utterly unsafe. It hurt.
I sent a brush against his soul, wrapping myself around him the way I engulfed Death’s soul in mine, and Pain’s breath hitched.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, clearing his throat. His mouth flickered with a weak smile. “This is nothing. I once dropped my PS1 down the stairs and that really hurt. This is nothing compared to that.”
“Because you dropped it on your foot?” I guessed, apprehension crawling across my shoulders as the big Tudor house spread out ahead of us, two-storey and beautiful but made into a threat by the screams. A harrowing yowl raked down my spine, and goosebumps burst to life down my arms
“Directly on my big toe,” Pain confirmed, keeping his smile by sheer effort as the man’s scream turned ragged and died.
I swung off Fuzzball’s back and paused to stroke her neck. “It’s going to be fine,” I told her as she shifted her weight, her eyes big as she looked at the house. “Nothing to worry about.”
I didn’t think I eased her fear, but we didn’t have time to spare, so I tightened my grip on my new knives and followed my husbands into Wrath’s house.
I didn’t know much about the pink-haired pocket rocket, but she’d come to save us when Cruelty held me and Pain at Darkmore, and she had my loyalty for life for that alone. Plus, she was a sarcastic woman and us snarky girls had to stick together.
Nothing prepared me for what we found when Miz led the way through a foyer panelled in rich wood, decorated with both golden chandeliers and gothic sconces.
Then down a hallway lined with paintings adorned with thick gilt frames, the carpet lush and crimson, every piece of furniture sturdy and well-made, with enough dings to tell me it was as old as the house appeared.
We found Wrath in a dining room with ceilings so low I could reach up and touch the thick beams. The floor beneath our feet was polished and dark, reflecting the intricate mouldings of the long dining table, the two spirits tied to high-backed dining chairs upholstered in decadent ruby, and the pink-haired madwoman brandishing a spork.
She turned at the movement of us piling through the doorway, obviously confused to see us, her brow knitted. But her face split with a grin when she spied me.
“Butcher!”
I blinked, then smiled. “Are you removing eyeballs with a plastic spork?” I asked, frowning at the people tied to dining chairs—one man, one woman. The source of the screams. Judging by the dark marks painted across their ghostly skin, she’d been at this a while.
“Well, not technically,” Wrath replied, waving the spork. “You can’t really make spirits bleed, and their eyeballs reappear after a while, but I have a special little trick, so it still hurts like fuck.”
“I don’t ever want to know what that special trick is,” Pain remarked, though he was smiling and the colour had returned to his face.
“Don’t lie, you’re jealous of how much pain I can inflict on ghosts,” Wrath quipped, then stopped when she took a proper look at him, stabbing the spork in his direction. “What’s with the kinky bindings?”
“It’s not kinky,” Pain groaned, his ears turning pink.
“Violence,” I answered for him, and the temperature in the room dropped to match my icy tone.
“When I get my hands on him…” Wrath hissed, kicking the chair her female victim was bound to when she began to whine.1 “What did he do?” she asked Pain, gripping the spork so tightly her knuckles whitened.
“Took my heart,” Pain admitted quietly.
“That slimy, pox-ridden piece of shit,” Wrath spat, driving the spork into the ghost woman’s throat in anger. The spirit’s scream sputtered as she struggled, choking. “How do we kill him?”
The fact that she was in, immediately, with no convincing or questions, made my heart swell.
Heedless of the spork, I crossed the polished floor and hugged her.
“That’s why we’re here,” I told her. “You have someone in your dungeon?” My voice went up at the end to make it a question, but why I questioned if Wrath had a dungeon, I didn’t know.
The woman was de-eying ghosts with a spork, for gods’ sakes.
“You want to torture someone in my basement?” Wrath grinned and squeezed me. “Say no more, butcher, say no more.”