Chapter 44
Note to self: when you’re performing a ritual based on a dead language, get very fucking specific with your wording.
I trudged up the stairs of Lawrence House to my girl, weak as fuck after being drained by ghosts for hours, and my head pounded a warning that I was weak. Turned out we should have specified Nightmare’s living followers. We’d paid the price for that little error. Miz passed out, looking pale and fragile, but that was his regular look these days. Death was watching over him, and I was here to watch over our girl. Our wife.
Usually that thought, that precious fucking title, filled me with energy and thrill, but I was too exhausted for that. I wanted to collapse into her bed and fall asleep with my wife in my arms. It would be the first time I’d spent the night alone with her. It would have been nice to not be out of breath when I reached her floor, to have the stamina to give her at least half a dozen orgasms, but I’d be lucky to give her one.
“In the morning,” I promised myself, even my voice weak.
Honestly, fuck ghosts.
I used my last scrap of energy to pass through the door in a cloud of darkness, and grunted on the other side, completely fucking drained. I hated feeling like this. Vulnerable if we were attacked.
Cat was curled up on top of her covers, her eyes open and staring at the opposite wall, and panic paralysed me. She looked dead. But then she startled at the sight of me, sitting up suddenly before she wilted with a sigh when she registered it was me.
“Tor,” she breathed, her voice as husky as mine. Her face was pale and splotchy but streaked with tears, her eyes as empty as the ghosts we’d fought tonight.
“What happened, beautiful?” I asked gently, my own torment forgotten in the face of hers. I kicked off my boots and climbed onto the bed with her, letting the dip of the mattress roll her into my arms.
“We—I—” Her breath caught and then she was sobbing, burying her face in my chest and clinging to me with fierce arms.
In halting, broken gasps she told me what had happened, from Nightmare’s lilting voice summoning her to opening the bag and seeing the dead eyes of her dean staring up at her.
“Not your fault, Cat,” I promised, my lips pressed to her forehead, moving over her skin with each word. The peaches and cream taste of her wrapped around my tongue, but instead of waking me up, she lulled me into a calm that made my exhaustion more evident. “Nothing you did is your fault.”
I wanted to tell her we were working on bringing Nightmare down, weakening her power, but the idea of giving her false hope damn near killed me. But I couldn’t say nothing, not when she cried harder, her tears soaking through my shirt.
“We’ll be with you at all times from now on, okay?” I murmured. “At least one of us will be with you, or watching. I promise.” Death and Miz would take no convincing. “Everything’s going to be okay, beautiful. She won’t get to you again.”
Cat sniffled and nodded. “Thank you,” she squeaked out, making my heart squeeze tighter.
“We thought you were safe in your room with Honey. That mistake won’t be made again,” I swore, my heart beating irregularly. What if Nightmare had ordered Honey and Cat to kill each other? What if we’d been fighting ghosts, and our wife was dead the whole time?
I held her tighter, the thought making me cold down to my bones.