Chapter 52
Cat
It was unsettling enough to wake up after being killed—the second time—but even more so to see the most powerful god you’ve ever met unconscious in the mud beside you.
If Violence was strong enough to take out Joanna… I didn’t want to know how badly we’d failed.
He was distracted so he didn’t notice me regain consciousness. But on the other side of the shields Violence had put up, I saw Neglect, Passion, and my dad notice me. I locked eyes with Dad, so many words passing unspoken between us.
When this was over—if this was ever over—we needed to sit down and talk about the curse, my death, and his past. But I saw it in his desperation as he fought to get through Violence’s magic. Orwell was still knocked out; whatever magic Violence had put in that shield, it was nasty and cruel.
Go, I tried to tell Dad with my eyes. He’s going to kill everyone here, but if you run, you’ll survive. Go!
But his mouth flattened, his jaw locked, and he spoke to Neglect in a way that did not look like a retreat.
The next moment, all our attention snapped to Moth when she bellowed a scream until her voice broke. A ragged pulse going through my body, panic racing through my heart.
Moth was glowing, but instead of a bright emerald light like Joanna’s power, this was as dark as a void in deep space.
And yet it shone, the way I remembered weapons shining in the hands of chess pieces only days ago.
A corona of black power surrounded her, gleaming like polished jet.
It flared somehow brighter, sucking in light, when Moth screamed again.
I couldn’t see what Violence was doing to her from this angle, but I saw the look in Moth’s eyes—flat and empty. Resigned. As if she already knew there was no way to stop him. As if she’d tried, over and over, to fight him and failed.
A dark pulse went through my chest, power gathering within me. The injustice of it, the vicious, merciless, unending pain Moth had been through at the hands of this god… I felt it all. Sensed and knew it.
She’d been locked in a dark tower, his captive experiment.
While Poppy turned the students of Ford into her subjects, Violence had found a way to twist and morph and extract magic—from Moth.
Over and over again, until it put that resigned look in her eyes.
As if her pain was inevitable. As if Violence’s power was ironclad.
I dragged my stare from Moth to the gods on the other side of the barrier, all of them now gathered just a few feet away, their magic pooled into a single stream of pure death. It burned a hole in the shield, then spread like flame through a sheath of paper.
I was ready when Violence snapped towards them, his expressionless face shattering with rage. While his back was turned, I pooled as much magic as I could summon in less than a minute, and threw myself at Moth.
My skeletal jaguar form gave way to the soft flesh I knew, and I dropped to my knees beside the pale woman.
My magic cooperated as I tucked its edges around her, cocooned her in it until Violence would have to pry apart the individual fibres of my magic to reach her again. To steal any more of her magic.
My power hummed when it touched her, sensing someone like me—someone who had died, and yet clung to life with her fingernails.
Someone who’d been brought back by a higher power for a purpose yet revealed.
She met my eyes, hers hazy with pain and dull with distrust. But surprise sparked in them when she saw it was me.
I didn’t stick around to interpret that look; I peered at my clawed hands and willed my power to surge, to crest, to grow stronger than it ever had.
This island was soaked in blood. The dead wallowed here like hippos in mud, saturating the ground, the trees, the water of the lake in so much death that all I had to do was sink my fingers into the mud and draw it up.
Violence knew; he began to turn when Hunger appeared from a burst of darkness and drove a pike through his stomach. Hunger threw all his weight into the blow so the vicious hook opened up the bastard’s guts.
As if they’d choreographed it, the other gods converged and pinned Violence with their own weapons—their instruments, I realised.
Not just weapons. Wrath had a baseball bat, sure, but the gods I didn’t know held a mirrored bowl that overflowed shadows like water, a book heavy enough to cave someone’s skull in, a key that opened Violence’s skin and muscle rather than a lock, a pendant that glowed the colour of ink, and a whip that trapped Violence’s legs together, restricting his mobility.
In one hand, I stretched my pool of magic into a broadsword; with the other, I dug my scales out of the mud and watched Violence snarl as their rosy light expanded.
Pain—where was Pain? If Violence had harmed my husband, I would find a way to kill him, bring him back, and kill him again, slower and far more agonisingly.
“The drop.”
I jumped at the rasp—dry, hacking, and followed by a cough. Joanna clawed herself out of the dirt and helped me to my feet, supporting me as the scales sucked up more and more of my magic, eager to finally rid the word of such a monster.
“The drop of life,” Joanna repeated. “Every death god has a kernel of life keeping their souls alive. I’m too woozy to rip it out with any precision, but with the scales, you can do it. Force him to face his final judgement.”
It was rage in Joanna’s hoarse voice. Unbridled fury at what had been done to her daughter, maybe at being forced unconscious herself.
His final judgement. Kill those pricks. My blood buzzed in my ears as I pressed magic into the scales and urged them to find that seed of power animating him.
Keeping him alive so he could inflict more agony on others.
The sheer injustice of him living, free of pain, when others screamed because of his actions, his lack of mercy…
The scales flared so bright I couldn’t see the tops of the trees or the reflection on the lake’s surface. I couldn’t see Orwell’s winged creatures or the Stalkers that must be battling hard not to succumb to the mirror’s madness.
Dizziness made me waver into Joanna, but I didn’t fight it. If this was what it cost to finally kill Violence, so be it. I wanted revenge, deserved revenge for everything he’d done. All the people he’d stolen from me. The peace of mind and sense of safety he’d ground into dust.
Light cracked through his chest, lighting up his ribs, and for a split second his face changed. For a split second, it wasn’t Violence, it was Alastor Carmichael. Honey’s manipulative boyfriend. The piece of shit who stalked and threatened me. Violence…
I didn’t mean to falter. I should have known he’d allowed me to see his other form intentionally. I should have seen it for the attack it was, but still. I faltered.
My grip weakened on the sword I’d moulded from magic, and it slipped from my grasp, whisked into shadow. In the moments it took me to reform it, Violence ripped the god’s key from his arm and—summoned a hammer.
This wasn’t what I’d pictured when Tor told me that Violence’s instrument was a hammer. I’d been picturing something smaller but dense, heavy enough to break kneecaps and shatter jawbones. But this was as tall as Violence was, and the bottom came to a deadly spike that he drove into the ground and—
And every spirit on Ford’s End began to scream.