CHAPTER 44
CAT
Exhaustion made my steps slow as I dropped down from the thick trunk, landing between the gnarled maze of the tree’s roots with a knotted gold key in my hand. The twenty-first key I’d tried fitting to the locked doors in the corridor, each one failing to open a single lock. Twenty times I’d walked up and down that hallway, my heart sinking with every failure. Twenty times I’d climbed to reach the keys dangling on their golden strings.
This time was no different, but that didn’t stop me trudging my tired, aching body down the hall, pushing the key into each lock, scraps of hope dying with every dull thud it made instead of the neat click of a lock opened.
There was a small pile of failed keys at the end of the hall. When I fit the knotted key into the last door and it stubbornly remained shut, I tossed the key onto the pile and slumped back towards the fae garden and the golden keys dangling from the trees.
Another key, this one small and delicate. Another failure.
Another key, this one blocky and sturdy. Another failure.
Another key, elegant and long, with a heart in its handle. Yet another failure.
If you were stronger, smarter, we’d still be alive, Byron said miserably, his voice floating after me as it had for hours.
“I know,” I rasped, the weight on my chest getting heavier as I dragged my feet over the grass in the fairy garden. What if I couldn’t find the key? What if I searched this place all my life, and never got out? This wasn’t like the numb I retreated into after Violence’s torture, where my men could reach me. This was a realm of nightmares controlled by Cruelty, and she wanted me isolated, afraid, and utterly hopeless.
I climbed the tree and reached out to grasp another key, mostly on autopilot. How long had passed since I came to this place? The minutes had been so endless, they must have turned to hours, or maybe the hours had clustered into days. I hadn’t slept, hadn’t done anything except stagger from forest to key to door and back again, but if I didn’t stop soon, I’d collapse.
One more,I promised, then I’d sleep. Even if that felt like losing, like surrendering to Cruelty’s game. What happened to the chess match? Had I vanished from the board, my move forfeit? Had my bonded ones been thrown into similar games, searching through a maze of keys for one that would open the door to escape?
But what guarantee did I have that any key here opened one of those doors? It would be like Cruelty to give me hope when there was none, to trap me here forever.
I tripped across a gnarled root, a scream exploding into the quiet as I fell forward. Bark abraded my palms when I caught myself on the thick, sturdy trunk, and for a moment I rested my head there against its rough surface and groaned. I ached all over, my hands were scuffed from climbing, my kneespulsed with dull hurt, and my ankle was twisted from a botched landing. Andstill,I was trapped.
I would always be trapped.
If you’d just done what Nightmare told you to, she would never have killed me.
Honey’s voice now. I tried not to flinch, but my shoulders jumped anyway.
Summoning the last dregs of my strength, I peeled my forehead off the tree trunk and reached my aching arms above, curling my fingers around a branch. I ignored the lacerating bite it sank into the pads of my fingers as I hauled myself up, aching, groaning, inch by inch.
Perched on the branch, my seat precarious but the numbness and exhaustion so deep that only a flicker of fear formed at the height instead of my usual deluge, I reached up. Fingers closed around the cool golden key dangling on its gossamer string, and I tugged until it snapped free. This key was thin and delicate, with an eye on its handle that reminded me of the openings of a masquerade mask. My stomach knotted. Was Cruelty watching this, thrilled with my bleakness and hurt?
But when I braced my hand against the branch to climb down, a light flickered across from me, as white as the moon and just as blinding.
The light… the same one that helped Madde when the gargoyles snatched him into the air. My mouth parted in surprise as it bobbed closer, and something about the spherical shape made me cold all over. A ghost ball…? Was this Honey or Byron? Or was this the ghost of my brother, left alone in the domain? Had the bloodthirsty rage of Virgil’s creature side started a fight he couldn’t win?
I swallowed hard, watching the ball float to a key on a golden string at least three branches higher. Its handle was formed bystrands of gold shaped into a 3D skull, its shank long and round, the bit jagged and sharp.
“Thatkey?” I breathed, eyeing the higher branches. The thought of climbing the tree made me so tired I wanted to curl into a ball and not emerge for hours. Maybe I could find a bed of moss in the fairy forest and sleep here for a whole day.
But the light made sure I was watching and hit the skull key again, insistent.
“That’s how I get out?”
The light bobbed, a voice reaching me, familiar but distant. “This one,” it urged. “This one.”
I put down the key in my hand, leaving it on the branch as I got slowly, carefully to my feet. I wrapped my arms around the trunk above. My legs turned to jelly, the ground suddenly far below. The thought of scaling higher had my numb fear exploding into a sudden crash of panic.
The first branch made my legs shake, but I pulled myself onto my belly, splaying there until I recovered my courage. I had to think of my bonded ones, my family, had to remember Cruelty and Violence’s strange obsession with my dad. My dad, who used to be Cruelty but had forgotten every life he’d lived before. My dad, who must have been hundreds of years old.
I’d been able to avoid acknowledging it outside of this place; there’d been no time to sit with my thoughts when we were thrown right into a twisted chess game. But now, after hours or days alone, with only a ghost ball for company? I could do nothingbutthink. And if my dad had been Cruelty before he was given a new life, before he met Mum, before he had me, and Tannie, and Virgil… what did that makeus?Children of a death god.
Lioness…
