Page 1 of All Hallows Fate

PROLOGUE: THE CRUELTY IN THE FLAME

I’d been here for centuries. Lost in the in-between places around Ford House as the world slipped past. As the years slipped past. I saw it through a veil of silver and fog, like warm breath clashing with the icy air that consumed the island every winter. I couldn’t feel that cold anymore, nor did my breaths turn the air to fog. Neither did I breathe.

But I watched.

I watched as the house was left to disrepair, as layers of dust piled on top of chipped paint and my favourite furniture. I watched as the elements attacked the building with such severity that roof tiles whipped across the overgrown grounds. Fragments of slate strewn across gardens my legs could remember racing through, my bare feet could remember the tickle and slash of grass blades as I chased my siblings.

I watched as the abandoned house was scrubbed of dust and grime, the furniture walked out, piece by piece, and bundled onto the back of a rumbling car. I’d watched those appear one by one on the island, too—carts steadily replaced by blocky cars that belched dark clouds of smoke.

Fashions changed with them, a blur of different styles for every year until I lost track. I lost track of the year, too, but I knew the world was at war. I heard some of the uniformed men and women talk about it at length, laid up in starched cots in our old dining hall while grim-faced and kind-eyed nurses moved among them. The sight of those rows of beds stayed with me for years after they emptied, their occupants sent home, returned to the war, or simply gone. I stayed away from the woods during that time, though I knew the bodies were buried there.

Later, I’d realise those bodies gave her power. Fuelled her particular brand of evil. The woman who snuck her way into my family and killed all of us. I’d waited all this time to see her again, to exact justice for my family. I’d watched, and waited, and witnessed the steady rush of time, all so I could kill her the moment she dared return.

But when she did return, killing her proved… difficult. My hands had forgotten how to hold a weapon. They’d forgotten how to be hands, in fact, after so many years of being mist. I’d forgotten how to walk, floating like steam over the ground, weaving around the buildings erected around my home, one by one, until they were full of light and learning.

I was too weak, too spectral to stop Nightmare as she rose that All Hallows night. I watched every scream, watched shudders of pain and frozen death throes. I watched pupils in the strangest clothes perish or kill each other, one by one, until the student body was halved. I watched the curse spread like a disease until even those not present that night became her pawns.

And all that time, I willed myself stronger, urged my fingers to brush the bark of trees, to touch the cool wood of bench seats in lecture halls. Until finally I was able to pick up a pen lost for centuries in a trunk, shoved into the attic in what was now called Milton Hall. It took me three weeks to push back the catches on the trunk and open the heavy lid. Took even longer to grasp the pen lovingly cast by my eldest brother, and carry it painstakingly across the campus grounds into the room I’d watched her move into. Not her, not the worst kind of nightmares given flesh. The bride. The one married to death, to Caishen.

I watched him the most, whenever he came to Ford’s End. I couldn’t stop watching him. Sometimes I thought he suffered the most out of all of us. We were the ones who died, but he lived every day with ghosts.

I watched as she found the pen. The wife with a mask of death and hair whiter than a spirit. And I saw it, finally: a path to revenge, to getting my family justice. Nightmare was dead, but the ones who controlled her actions like the strings of a puppet were still alive. They thrived, schemed, collecting power like dragons collected treasure. I would ensure they died screaming for all they’d done.

So I reached for that pen as the bride began to write, and I slipped through the filigree designs, sifting through the seams of its construction, no more than air. I would be whatever it took to claim my revenge. I may not be able to kill them myself, but I could show the bride how to do it.

I hoped she made it bloody. I hoped she made it excruciating.

1

Cat

Inarrowed my eyes at my companion as I summoned my fifth flash of dark lightning. “You’re not god,” I voiced a thought I’d had for days.

I only knew it had been days, and not years, because he told me. So-called God. Not that he looked like any god I’d ever seen depicted before. He had dark, floppy hair instead of long, white locks, and his tan face was stubbled rather than bearded. It was also twisted with a foul-tempered scowl most of the time.

“You’re the one who called me God,” he retorted, throwing his hands up and shaping the white fog that surrounded us on all sides into a shield, repelling my lightning. “Don’t make it my problem.”

I glowered, reaching for the endless pool of magic in my chest, unspooling a thread, moulding it into the shape I wanted: not a bolt this time, but a spear I flung at his head.

He twisted out of the way, letting the spear disappear into the flowing fog all around us. It pricked at a memory, this endless mist, but like everything else in my past, I felt only a ghost of it before it was ingested by the fog. Or by the death Ender told me I died. Every now and then, I could still feel the cold edge of a blade slice into my throat, but the event itself was a black hole in my mind.

“Ender,” he grunted, ripping a chunk of fog from the swirl to his right to stop the five daggers I hurled at him. “My name is Ender.”

I tilted my head. “And what do you end, Ender?”

“Huh.” His smile was slow and genuine. “You know, all the people that’ve passed through here, no one’s ever asked me that before. Not that anyone remembers coming to Exile, obviously. Just your husband and that pretentious Eckhardt prick. Although, maybe I ought to use the word he taught me to describe him. He certainly deserves being called a cunt.”

“I don’t know what or who that is.”

“Ah, ignorant bliss,” Ender sighed, batting a lock of hair off his forehead. “Count yourself lucky you’ve never met the bastard. He’s more of a prick than Misery.”

“Hey!” I complained—and froze, a deep furrow carving between my brows.

Ender grinned. “Remembering?”

“No, I—” I shook my head, hair dancing around my shoulders. It was a shade of colourless white, stained pink in places like I’d died from a head wound. But I definitely remembered the feeling of my throat being slit. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“Muscle memory, probably. The pathways are still there in your brain, they’ve just been rewired a bit differently after death. Give me a cloud.”