Page 16 of All Hallows Fate

I frowned. “Yeah. Exactly that. How did you know?”

“I know you, beautiful.” He snuck close enough to kiss me, the briefest brush of his mouth to mine. Only long enough to invoke a feeling of deja vu. I’d kissed him before, had been kissed by him before. “But unfortunately, I have no clothes for you. I bet Miz has something you can borrow; you should go talk to him.”

I narrowed my eyes, getting the distinct feeling I was being managed. “I can cope with airing out my bits a little longer,” I grudgingly admitted.

“Cat.” Tor caught my hand, his voice raw. “Please.”

I groaned in the back of my throat. “I don’t even know you; why should I do what you ask, just because you ask it?” But I wanted to. The desperation in his expression, the naked plea in his eyes tugged at my heartstrings until my feet itched to cross the grass and find Misery.

“Because I’m pretty?” he suggested, making me laugh.

Pretty and handsome and masculine and striking, all at once. I glared. “That’s not enough motivation.”

Oh. Oh, no. His eyes darkened, churning with something that made me suddenly hot.

“I can give you plenty of motivation, beautiful.”

“No,” I squeaked, walking backwards. “I’m good. I’ll go.”

I turned and fled before he could make good on all those carnal promises in his stare, not even sure why I was so spooked.

12

Misery

Iclenched my jaw tight, fighting a wave of emotion strong enough to drown me. I still had Cat’s blood under my fingernails. Her death was branded into my memory: the cold temperature of her skin. The loose sprawl of her limbs. The emptiness of her face. The glassy hollow in her eyes. My hands shook as I held up a blanket of darkness while she changed, but it was impossible to see the carpet of flowers across the valley, impossible to see this new, vibrant, entirely alive Cat when I hadn’t begun to process the desolation of her death.

Looking at her now, even if I ought to be looking away because she was getting dressed and I was a total stranger to her, I didn’t see this Cat. I saw my wife who had died, throat slit, with so much death magic forced into her wound that she died instantly. I saw my wife who died fighting to rescue Peach. I saw the woman I loved, and lost so brutally that it had ripped something essential from my chest.

I was still bleeding, inside where no one could see. And all I could think about were the times I was awful to her. All those cruel words I said when we first met, when I was jealous and afraid she’d steal Tor and Death from me. Those moments should have been soft, should have been handled with so much care because they were precious and finite.

“Thanks,” Cat in the valley said, making my heart lurch and my whole body flinch. “Are you… okay?”

“Fine,” I bit out, dropping the cloak of shadow and turning away. I couldn’t look at her without watching her throat split. Couldn’t meet her eyes without seeing them as lifeless as glass. “I’m fine,” I repeated, with an effort to soften my voice. “Do the clothes fit?”

My clothes. A fact I didn’t miss even as grief ravaged the hole in my chest.

“If you ignore the fact I’m a good head shorter,” she replied, amusement in her voice. “I just rolled the pants up.”

She hesitated, hovering like she wanted to say more. The scald of her eyes on the side of my face made me go still, that wave of emotions building, high enough to rip me into the depths of the ocean and never let me go. To shove my head under until my lungs filled with water, to bury me in a watery grave so no one would ever find me. I’d be alive the whole time, torn apart by grief. Being a death god made me hard to kill, but if anything could do it, it was the spike of pain twisting through my chest.

“Do you need anything else?” I asked, hating how ragged my voice was, how fucking impossible it was to hide. Like Cat being here, looking at me, breathing, was impossible.

I watched her bite her lip from the corner of my eye and my knees turned weak. It was such a familiar gesture, such a Cat thing to do that it hit me right in the gut. Knocked all the air from me.

“What happened?” I demanded, fucking the silent agreement we’d made to dance around her rebirth, her new god status. “After you died, after that piece of shit murdered you—what happened, Cat? How did you get here?”

Her eyes took on a hazy look, so close to the way they emptied as blood surged from her split throat that I went cold all over.

My hands were on her shoulders before I could catch myself, my grip tight, desperate. “Little bride.” My shaking hand found her face, moulded to her cheek, lifted her face up to mine just as her eyes focused.

“I keep trying to remember,” she said, a knot between her brows. Annoyed—she was nettled, enough that I watched the soft lines of her face harden. “There’s a black hole in my memory, and I keep trying to remember where I was before, but I can’t. There was a man—”

A rattling growl tore from my throat. “Violence.”

“No, I—” Her frown deepened. “I think he helped me. Taught me how to be… this. He didn’t attack me. I’m not scared when I try to remember him. But Violence.” Her voice stripped of all feeling. “I don’t even know who he is, but I’m terrified of him.”

“I am going to slaughter him,” I promised, sweeping my thumb over her cheek. “I vow it, Cat. I will obliterate every last part of him until there’s no record that he ever lived.”