Chapter 2
DEATH
“We need to get this necklace off her,” I said when it neared midnight, forcibly shaking off my panic and burying it in a six-foot-deep hole in my mind.
We’d cleaned the blood from our wife and treated her wounds with antiseptic and gauze and a glimmer of magic.
We’d massaged the blood back into her limbs, trying not to bring the whole house down in rage over the marks left on her body.
Deep red bruises told the story of how she was bound for hours.
We’d dressed her in flannel pyjamas patterned with ducks in a rainbow of colours I’d been saving for Christmas, but that necklace still gouged her throat, burrowing into her collarbone.
A reminder of how she’d suffered under Cruelty and Violence’s abuse.
A reminder of how Tor was suffering right now, trapped in that fucking mirror. Or had they removed him already? Was he tied up, bruised and bloody? Waiting for us to save him.
I scrubbed my face with a rough hand, dragged my fingers through my braids.
I couldn’t think like that. Tor was strong, resilient, and extremely headstrong.
That obstinate bastard wouldn’t break for anyone.
But that was what worried me; Violence lived for breaking people, and he’d love Tor’s strength. I couldn’t even imagine—
“How?” Pain asked, saving me from the torture of my own mind as he padding across the room in a pair of tartan slippers he found in the wardrobe upstairs.
He’d been obsessively watching the moorland around us for hours, making sure no more threats had found us, creeping up in the dark.
If they did, his magic would snare them and make them experience true, infinite pain. “How do we get it off her?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, hating the words. I linked my fingers with Cat’s, running my thumb over her knuckles, an anchor as she drifted further and further from us. I didn’t know how to break her disassociation, had never had a cause to learn how to treat it. “Every attempt to remove it—”
“Pushes it deeper,” Pain finished bleakly. “Yeah. Any ideas?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I had nothing, but Madde chose that moment to burst into the room with his arms full, distracting me from the bleak response I’d been about to make that without knowing the origin of the magic, or how exactly it had attached itself to Cat, we could do more harm than good.
And that we might have to use brute force anyway and hope we could repair whatever injuries we gave her.
Because there was a chance Cruelty could use that collar to track us.
Hence the violent ward we’d surrounded the Bridestone House with.
“I found these in the town nearby,” Madness said, a manic gleam in his eyes and his energy frenetic.
“A fleece blanket with mallards all over it, very important fluffy socks, a new phone, a diamond ring, a cat plushie, and an iced latte. The latte might be bad; I didn’t really understand the machine. ”
“How did you get those?” Pain frowned, drifting over to stand beside Cat’s chair, a shadow-wreathed hand finding her hair, stroking slowly. “Aren’t all the shops shut?”
“Well, yeah.” Madde shrugged.
Great, now we were thieves.
“My lioness?” Madde said, his voice smaller, quieter.
“Did you hear me? I brought you gifts to make you feel better.” He tenderly laid the fleece over her, arranging a tortoiseshell cat plush beside an expensive-looking ring box and a new phone.
I confiscated the coffee before he could try balancing that, too, and absently took a sip.
“What syrup did you put in this?” I asked, screwing my face up.
“All of them.” Madde’s eyes were wide and guileless. “She needs sugar, for the shock. Have you sensed Tor yet?”
“No,” I answered, my voice suddenly rough. “We haven’t.”
And all the gifts in the world weren’t going to rouse Cat until she was ready to come back to us.
I didn’t know how to bring either of them back to us. That question kept echoing in my head, relentless. What do we do?