Chapter 19
CAT
When we got back to my room, it was to find two students in blood red uniforms standing opposite the door.
Cruelty might have let us go, but we were now guarded.
I snarled at them, the beast running hot in my blood, but Death quickly ushered me inside.
He’d regained his strength in the past hour, but it didn’t stop me glancing at him every few moments.
Hours later, I’d finally stopped pacing the rug on the floor, and now I sat at the small desk, doodling absent lines on a scrap of paper with a fountain pen I found in the drawer.
It was solid gold and encrusted with diamante and gold filigree, and I was keeping it.
Although, if it gave me one more buzz of static, I might relegate it to a life in the drawer.
I shook out my fingers as it zapped me for the second time.
“Soooo,” Madde said, leaning against the table beside me.
He’d changed clothes and now wore a pair of my short pyjamas.
They were purple and white striped silk, had little ducks all over them, and the sight of my husband wearing them made me smile.
“There’s another way to break that shield.
Nasty thing, made of blood and bone and a scream of someone close to death.
I got through one once, but it nearly sent me insane. ”
“Nearly,” Miz drawled, leaning against the headboard of the bed beside Death, a pale eyebrow lifted.
Madde stuck his tongue out at him. “But there’s a way to break through it; I found it in a book the old Madness kept in a stuffy box in the library. I bet I could summon it here.”
“I bet you couldn’t,” Pain disagreed, sitting on the windowsill as his shadows filled the cracks in the old window, guarding us. “This place is locked down harder than Fort Knox.”
“Have you ever been to Fort Knox?” Madde enquired saucily.
Pain flicked a shadow to snap at his ankles. “It’s just an expression. Contrary little shit.”
Madde’s smile grew. “Contrary little shit. I like that. I’ll add it to my CV.”
“You have a CV?” I asked, leaning into his side.
“Not yet. But now I’ve got something to add to it.” He gazed down at me, his eyes bright and glittering. “How do you think I should format it?”
“Format? You mean you’re not going to handwrite it in a glittery pink gel pen?”
He swooped down and kissed me so suddenly, so thoroughly that my head spun a little and my heart got all out of sync. “You are the most wonderful, stupendously perfect woman in the known universe.”
“I am…?”
“No one comes close,” he confirmed with a hard nod, his eyes so vivid I saw constellations within them. “Ooh!” He held up his finger like he’d had a revelation. “I should rail you senseless.”
A laugh punched from my chest. “Later.” I leaned forward to kiss the swath of his chest exposed by the V neck of the pyjamas. “Can you try to summon that book, so we can break the shield and bring Tor home?”
“Carefully,” Death added. “If we risk angering Cruelty again…”
“Got it.” Madde nodded seriously, shaking out his arms, then dropping into a lunge. “Avoid Cruelty turning Tor into a blood splatter painting.”
The visual made me jerk, my heart spiking into my throat.
“What are you doing?” Pain asked, a furrow between his brows. “This looks super weird through my shadows, just so you know.”
“I’m warming up,” Madde said, sinking into another lunge in my silky pyjamas, the shorts riding dangerously high. “Duh.” He jumped up and punched his fists forward, and whirls of darkness burst to life around his hands. “One magic spellbook, coming right up.”
My anxiety sharpened when the smile fell from Madde’s face, that rare seriousness replacing it.
I crossed the room, my fingers knitted together as I watched his hands move, his shadows expanding and contracting.
Miz hooked me closer with an arm around my waist, pulling me into his lap on the bed and locking both arms around me.
“It’ll be fine,” he reassured, kissing the top of my head. “We’re not in danger by summoning a book. We might be in danger if Madde doesn’t know how to use the damn thing.”
“I can hear you,” Madde sang, but he didn’t take his eyes off the magic, narrowed in concentration.
A minute later, he dropped his arms with a deep sigh. “I can’t get through. Sorry, my lioness, I can’t summon the book. But! I can do it from memory. I promise we’ll get Torment back, even if he’s grumpy and glares too much and will ruin the vibes.”
“You can remember what the book said?” I asked as Madde claimed my chair, sitting backwards with his arms resting on top. “Are you absolutely sure, Madde? If this spell goes wrong and you get hurt—”
He left the chair in a blur of shadow and jumped onto the bed, crawling up to kiss me. His old books and honey scent wrapped around my senses like a hug. “Don’t worry, my lioness. My mind is a vault.”
“Your mind is a bouncy castle,” Miz snarked, and it hit me that he kept bickering not because he was irritated with Madde but in the way Tor and Miz always bickered. And my heart literally melted.
“Hell fucking yeah it is,” Madde replied, grinning from ear to ear. “One of those pink princess bouncy castles, with four inflatable towers.”
I ran my fingertips over the lines of his face, tracing every freckle dappled on his cheeks and nose. “What are the words of the spell to break the shield?”
“Oh, it’s not a spell spell. It’s a concoction. A recipe. A potion of all sorts of goop. Grave dirt, blood, fog, swamp water, and a burial item. We have to add them all to a pot over a shadow pyre and let them bubble until smoke forms.” He shrugged and laid his head on my chest. “It’s pretty easy.”
Death laughed softly. “Shadow pyre is one of the hardest kinds of magic to accomplish. It’ll take weeks to harness the ability—”
“Oh, I can do it,” Madde said, his jaw cracking with a yawn. “I’ve done it loads of times.”
I watched Death blink in surprise. “It’s an immensely powerful kind of magic,” he said, giving Madde an odd look.
“Nah.” Madde wiggled to get comfy.1 “It’s a piece of cake.”
When Death and Miz exchanged a look, I put together that easy and piece of cake weren’t words usually applied to a shadow pyre.
I carded my fingers through Madde’s red hair, letting his weight and all my bonded ones’ closeness seep into me, easing the shakiness I hadn’t been able to escape since Cruelty caught us, and I was sure we would all die.
“So,” I murmured, another weight slipping from my chest when Pain turned from the window and joined us on the bed.2 “Tomorrow, we’ll collect those ingredients and make the potion, right?”
“It might not work,” Death said but reluctantly, like he didn’t want to take this hope away from us. I reached over Madde’s head to touch his face, and he turned his head, laying a tender kiss in my palm. “But we’ll try. We won’t stop until Tor is home safe.”
Cruelty and Violence knew that. They knew we’d never leave without Tor, so they had us right where they wanted us, tied up in their twisted academy game. Tor had been right there on the other side of that wall of magic, just beyond the door. We almost had him back.
“Try to get some rest, little bride,” Death murmured, folding my fingers into his and holding both against his chest, against the heart that had stopped only hours ago. As if he knew I needed to feel it. He hadn’t left me, hadn’t slipped away forever.
“You swore not to leave me,” I whispered, swallowing the lump in my throat.
He held my gaze with grey eyes so soft with love, an expression just for us, never for anyone else.
He was the unrelenting force of death, inevitable and final, but he was our family, our love, and the foundation that held us all together.
And we came so close to losing him forever, to never seeing those adoring eyes, never seeing his pure sunshine smile or feeling the aching intimacy of his embrace, his touch, his kiss.
I pressed my lips together when they quivered.
“I never will,” he vowed. “I never will.”