Chapter 47
Cat
Cool drizzle clung to the mist in the air, raking cold fingers through my hair. I formed a hood of death magic and let the shadow fall over my shoulders and down my back, trailing wherever I walked.
My husbands were in their god forms around me. Bleached bone and rotten flesh and terrifying, empty pits where eyes ought to be. Their voices hissed, rasped, croaked, and their footsteps no longer made a sound as we walked the treelined road from the gates to Ford itself.
We didn’t speak in case we tipped off Violence, but Tor gestured a skeletal hand to our left, and we followed his direction.
Joanna frowned where she walked beside me, her eyes narrowed as she assessed Ford, the only emotion on her face one of calculation.
No emotional reaction to seeing her home again for the first time in god knows how many years.
Her gaze drifted to Miz every now and then, but that was the only indication she was thinking about the past.
I couldn’t escape my past, couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Here was the path Honey and I walked when Nightmare made us dispose of a body.
Through the trees was the road’s end, where Byron, Honey, and I had first stepped foot on Ford’s grounds, with my parents.
Now my two friends were gone, I was dead, and my dad…
he’d had a violent realisation of his past life, and now he waited with the other gods to back us up when things went wrong.
We paused deep in the forest, on the edge of the lake where Wil told my husbands Violence’s base was—in between screaming and pleading while they tortured him.
He was now locked away in a dark chamber far worse than where Wrath stashed him.
For the rest of his afterlife, his entire existence would be suffering.
He would scream, and plead, until the torture eventually wore out his soul and he ceased to exist. For what he’d done, and for managing to fool me again and again, he deserved nothing less.
Ready? I mouthed, wishing I could see into the dark hood Death wore, wishing Madde had eyes to lock my gaze with.1
My husbands nodded, one by one, and got into position. Joanna mouthed, ready.
I took one last breath and pulled the scales from their pocket of magic, sending a pulse of magic into the morganite at the tip.
Responsive to my power, they sucked in the death magic with an eagerness to right the wrongs Violence had wrought upon the world, and pink-gold light blasted from the plates.
Judging power, measuring, weighing good and wicked intent, innocence and pure guilt.
It was a siren song, that magic. A lure, to reach under the lake where Violence had built his warren and tempt him out. Bait. And like the shark he was, he surged to the surface and snapped his jaws around it.
The second Violence appeared on the shore, I struck.
Joanna had spent a long, painstaking hour explaining in detail how to weaken him long enough to kill him.
The first step was to stun him, and the wave of blackened magic that crashed into his skull certainly did the job.
While he was disoriented, I knocked his legs out from under him and shaped my power into a spear.
It thrust through his chest and out his back, punching a grunt from his thin mouth. The scales thrummed in my hand, the metal as cold as a frozen lake, making my fingers burn as the rose-tinted light blazed even brighter. No longer a lure, but an omen.
The scales were the instrument of Judgement, and we had judged Violence guilty.
Another spear drove through his shoulder, a third through the opposite arm, keeping him down, forcing him to endure the pain he put me and so many others through, and—it wasn’t a scream but laughter that rustled the leaves on the trees leaning around the lake.
I made him bleed, made him suffer as he deserved, and he had the nerve to laugh. To throw his head back, his vile, smug face rumpled by amusement. Beady eyes just a size too small alighted on me, and his grin grew, splitting his face in a way that made my stomach tangle.
“Did you think I wouldn’t know what you planned?” he taunted. “Did you think I wouldn’t make preparations?”
Mind games. That’s all this was. I siphoned another fistful of magic and shaped it into a spear at the same time Madde, Pain, Tor and Miz hit Violence with weapons of their own power.
Keep him down, Joanna had told us. Keep him down, keep him weak, and weigh his soul. Once you’ve deemed him deserving of death, Judgement, you’ll be able to end him.
And I had. With the scales in my left hand, glowing brighter than ever, casting the lake and the shore and the old trees of Ford into rosy relief, I judged him as guilty, and I sentenced him to death. Eternal, irreversible death.
But then Tor yelped. And Miz snarled. And I understood what Violence meant by preparations when I angled myself to keep both him in view and… and the spirits gleaming between the trees. Fifty of them. A hundred. More.
They ought to fear Death, ought to obey his command. They shouldn’t be attacking us. Yet when those gossamer hands touched Madde, he bucked and hissed, and pain scythed through our bond.
From Madde, from Tor, from Miz. From Death as five spirits swarmed him. From Pain as a ghostly man grabbed his bound hands.
Joanna—where was Joanna?
Violence grasped hold of the spears keeping him down and pulled them out like splinters, uncomfortable but far from fatal.
My breathing went thin. I thrust the scales forward, unleashing another wash of rose magic. It didn’t stop the spirits, didn’t stop my husbands’ pain, didn’t slow Violence as he climbed to his feet and brushed dirt off the sleeve of his black suit jacket.
“Now,” he said flatly. “Hand over the scales, Cat.”