“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. Wemightbe 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 ruinthevibes.”
“You can remember what the book said?” I asked as Madde claimed my chair, sitting backwards with his arms resting ontop. “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 aspellspell. 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 animmenselypowerful 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 thateasyandpiece of cakeweren’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 intome, 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 Violenceknewthat. 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 beenright thereon 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 cameso closeto 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.”
CHAPTER 20
CAT
The scent of bitter lemon and mint followed me around Ford’s campus the next day, trailing me from Milton Hall to the laboratory where I cringed to think of Poppy developing her serum with the same equipment I used. We’d seen no glimpse of the Stalker army created with that serum and hadn’t glimpsed any of Poppy’s subjects in their beast forms either. But I knew they were here, hiding in the grounds around Ford. Another threat, layered on top of the threat to Tor’s life if we misbehaved again.
I knew Violence watched us. Watchedme,hoping for another chance to lock me up and unleash his power and sadism upon my body. Phantom pains chased me everywhere that lemon and mint scent stuffed up my nostrils, and I had to grit my teeth as the scent concentrated behind me and Miz. The others had snuck away to the lake to collect a vial of its water for the potion that would, if everything went to plan, allow us to simplywalkthrough the shield keeping us from Tor.
I was getting through that shield and to Torment, one way or another. Even if the magic stopped my heart, my ghost would blast through the door and get him out. I couldn’t endure another day with him under their psychotic care.
“Stop worrying,” Misery whispered, golden eyes warming the side of my face as he watched me instead of the professor and students around us. He never took his eyes off me and hadn’t for an hour now. “The lake’s swampy enough to count as swamp water. It’ll be fine.”
As long as that old book of Madde’s didn’t require exact ingredients, because all we had werekinda, maybe accurate.Lake water instead of swamp water. Blood was easy enough, and there were plenty of graves on the island to collect grave dirt. But a burial item? And fog? How the hell would we bottle fog—especially when the day had dawned clear and bright, as if the siblings knew what we were up to and programmed the weather to spite us.
