Chapter 49
Cat
Violence’s roar of pain had my chest aching with relief. The scales fell from his hands, and I tried to leap forward to free myself. But the hands gripping my shoulders tightened, bruising.
“Kill her,” Violence snarled.
My heart stopped, and didn’t resume. But I was dead, and my heart no longer needed to beat.
The injustice of it enraged me as I turned my face and locked eyes with the bright panic in Pain’s. “It’s okay,” I told him, trying to smile. “It’s okay.”
But his soul screamed, and my own shrank, withered, ached within my new body. I would fix this. My magic went haywire, snarling for justice. I would fix this.
“I love you,” I breathed, and grabbed his right wrist in both hands, snapping the bone before he could anticipate my intention.
My hands slid through mud before my fingers closed around the scales, the metal warm, as if the magic’s fury burned within the usually frigid gold.
The second I touched them, power raged from the morganite, blasting Violence back when he tried to stand.
He hissed, an ugly snarl on his face, but there was no missing the tremor of magic around him.
And in the distance, a familiar screech raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Creatures. How did he have creatures at his disposal when we’d shielded their new home at Pain’s lodge?
I angled the scales up, slamming a burst of judgement and death magic into Violence as he struggled to his feet. A cruel smile played across my face when he fell back to the bank of the lake, but it dropped when Pain drove into me, crushing me into the mud.
My blood ran cold when his hands circled my neck and squeezed. Violence would really make him kill me. I threw my head back, my skull colliding with his nose hard enough that blood perfumed the air, but his grip didn’t loosen on my throat.
“Hold her there,” Violence rasped, his voice as hoarse as I knew mine would be if I could ever speak again.
From the corner of my eye, I saw him climb to his feet, his expensive suit streaked with mud.
The silvery spirits formed a protective circle around him, as they’d encircled the Wake, but these faces I knew from my lectures—Devlyn, Rebecca O’Neill, and the Professor whose name I couldn’t remember while face-down in the mud.
Jane, whose bedroom had been across the hall from my original room, and Katie, her girlfriend.
Hollister Seabrook, whose best friend was the one who called a press conference in the dining hall about her lost bracelet.
These were Ford students. People like me. Victims. The manipulated and the implicated. And now they were all dead.
Were their families waiting for phone calls?
Did group chats sit empty, with whole friend groups slaughtered by these gods and their twisted plan?
Did my mum check her own phone for updates from me and Virgil?
Did she wonder why we’d been so quiet? Or had Dad told her about his history as a god before Neglect brought him to this cursed island?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how much she knew. The less, the better.
“I should thank you,” Violence remarked, as if he wasn’t covered in muck. “If your useless husbands hadn’t ripped a hole in the veil of life and death to reach you at Darkmore, I never would have amassed so many spirits.”
Madde’s voice rose in a sharp cry of pain that cut off abruptly, and the creature in me went feral.
“Let them go,” I growled, deeper, rougher.
I bucked against Pain’s hold and managed to slip free, but as long as Violence had his heart, he’d get in my way.
With a pang in my chest, I flicked my clawed hands and snapped a net of death magic and crackling shadow over him, pinning him against the banks of the lake.
“Let my husbands go. You have what you want—the domain answers to you.”
The sheer number of spirits was proof of that. They massed between the trees, ringed the entire shape of the lake until there was no part of Rosalind Woods that didn’t glow silver.
My eyes locked with a tall, stiff-backed ghost woman with sleek hair and furious eyes. Kill those pricks. The words were reflected in Darya’s eyes, an echo of what she bade me to do in Cruelty’s fun house of endless doors.
But how could I kill Violence when nothing I did weakened him, and even Joanna’s advice had amounted to nothing? When he had more power than any of us? I couldn’t kill him.
All we could do now was survive his reign.
“You want us to swear fealty, to bow to you as king of the domain?” I breathed, shaking with wrath and panic, my creature thrashing within the bindings of my immortal flesh. “We’ll do it. I’ll kneel here and now.”
I saw it—the spark of dark glee. The hunger to see me do just that. He might have accepted my proposal if chaos didn’t erupt at that exact moment.
Creatures—twenty of them, all with huge, bearlike bodies but with racks of horns or tusks or talons. Predators, cultivated and twisted into the ultimate killer.
The scales grew red hot in my hands—I could reverse what was done to them like I did to Virgil’s friends—but as Violence’s spirits held my husbands in place, I saw what would happen.
Death gods were weak when scratched or bitten by any creature, their venom enough to block death magic.
They wouldn’t just be in pain at the spirits’ hands, but weak enough to kill. And Violence would kill them.
I froze when they ploughed through spirits, not caring that they walked through the dead, and my heart tripped back into beating. But I would fight. I pulled up a storm of death magic, hauling cloud after dark cloud until I shook with the effort of restraining it.
And then like a ship’s bowels engorged with a flood, I burst. Not only the magic that crashed into spirits and gods and creatures, but me. I burst apart at the seams.
For the first time since I died, I landed on four jaguar paws and roared my fury in the face of my enemies. But my paws were bones pecked clean by vultures. My body was light, only half draped with flesh, but it was rife with magic.
I was more powerful in this form. My true form.
I watched Violence notice it, too. Watched him realise that even if I didn’t have the strength to kill him, I could do serious damage.
My scales had fallen to the mud, but they still throbbed with rose gold light, and the dark storm that had burst from me hung in the air. Livid. A killing magic.
Hope—it was hope that choked off my air and cinched my chest. It was hope as sharp, birdlike screeches pierced the air and the winged, horned, taloned creatures appeared.
It was hope as fire blasted on the other side of the lake, and there was Duncan, wielding a flamethrower that immolated spirits where they floated.
It was hope as Joanna’s brusque voice cracked through the growls and shrieks behind us, and Violence’s expression tensed.
I should have realised fear wouldn’t make him sloppy, but sharp.
One moment he stood by the lake, the next he was beside me, kicking aside Pain where my net kept him pinned in the mud. Brutal hands fisted my hair. Magic so cold it burned knocked my elbow aside as I tried to drive it into his gut.
“You shouldn’t have invited the goddess,” Violence snapped, as if that word burned his tongue on the way out. “I would have killed you swiftly, Cat.”
I knew that for a lie. I was very intimately acquainted with his particular brand of pain, and I knew as a dark coil of magic began to corkscrew into my chest, this suffering would be worse.
We hadn’t just failed. We’d been crushed. And now my suffering would be eternal.