PROLOGUE: THE GLIMMER IN THE GLOOM
Icouldn’t tell if the image was a dream or a hazy memory. Slow moving fog stalked us across the grounds of Ford School of Medicine, the brume stained the vibrant red of fresh bloodshed by the sunset. It crept over the grass like a serpent, clinging to the trunks of trees, tracing the towering might of an impenetrable hedge, and veiling the edges of the giant board laid out before us.
Now there was only darkness. Eternal, onyx darkness. I could barely remember the words I’d just thought, couldn’t stitch together their meaning from the sluggish, faltering mass of my brain. What was Ford? Who wasus?
There were no shapes around me, nothing in the dark to tell me where I was, or what had happened to me. I floated as if in water, my hair splayed around me. I couldn’t see it, could only feel it. And I floated there for hours. For decades. Lifetimes.
I blinked, but there was no tickling sweep of lashes over my cheeks. I opened my mouth but forgot how to shape words. There was only the darkness I floated through, and nothing more.
Until a pinprick. A break in the shadow. White light cut like a laser and snared me in its spotlight. The second the glowtouched me, the darkness splintered and gave way to a world of emptiness. A realm shaped at the dawn of time, as empty as the darkest pocket of space, butwhite,not void-dark. Pure, ruthless white. Emptiness surrounded me on all sides. A lonely, blank vacancy where the world ought to be. Where voices and laughter and bright, colourful life ought to be.
I strained my ears but heard nothing. Blinked and saw nothing. Spoke and heard no reply. Where was I?
Whowas I?
CHAPTER 1
MISERY
“Little bride,” I croaked, stroking a pink strand of hair from her face with a numb finger. I couldn’t tell if the strand had been pink all along or if it was stained from the blood Violence drew from my wife. “My universe. Cat, can you blink if you hear me?”
“It’s not working,” Madde stressed, chewing the nail varnish off his fingernails. He was still speckled with mud and blood from battling the animated topiaries in Cruelty’s garden at Darkmore Manor. “She’s not going to wake up. We’ve lost her and we’ll never get her back and—”
“Yes, we will,” Death cut in with iron-willed confidence. But one look in his eyes, and I knew he was as afraid as the rest of us. Cat hadn’t spoken all night, not one word since we got her out of Cruelty’s twisted mansion and brought her here, to a safe house Death kept on Bridestones Moor in Yorkshire. It was like a miniature version of his castle at home, but with a single tower instead of multiple spires, and the furniture inside wasall wrong, the layout different, the styles similar but lacking the comfort.
I wanted to go home, but the realm was nothing but fog and decay. It was a miracle we’d found our way out, but there was no way back, even for death gods. Would Cat come back to us if we found a way back to the castle, with its familiar surroundings, the scents of us embedded in the furniture, in the air itself?
“We’ll get her back,” Death insisted, grasping Madde’s shoulder as he spiralled out of control, trembling, freckled fingers tearing at his red hair. “She’s right here in front of us; she just needs time. She’s been through…” Death’s voice strangled. “She just needs time.”
Silence hung like a scythe in the air. It was Pain who broke it.
“The shields are complete,” he said from the window, his voice flattened until it was perfectly even. The result was robotic.
“That’s something, at least,” Death sighed, kneeling in front of the red damask armchair we’d placed Cat in, the cushions swallowing her until she looked small. “Can you feel if—is she still in agony?”
“No,” Pain replied, shadows rippling into a long column from his hand as he made his way through the room, using them like a cane to avoid the coffee table and the chest of magic shit I hauled up from the cellar the moment we got here. None of it had helped so far.
Pain looked as tired as the rest of us, his curls in disarray, dark smudges under his green-hazel eyes, and deep furrows cut in his brow as he said, “I can feel her through the bond, but she’s… muted. Distant.”
“Shit,” I breathed, a lump cutting off anything else I’d have said. I bowed my head, resting it against Cat’s knees, pressure building in my head. “We agreed to give her time, but it’s beenhoursand she’s still catatonic. And we’re no closer to findingTor.” My voice cracked on his name. Fuck. “Come on, Cat. Come back to us.Please.”
I held my breath, tipped my head up to watch her face, her empty eyes, waiting for a spark of life. But like all the other times I’d pleaded with her, there was no response.
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 necklacestillgouged 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’dloveTor’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—”
