Page 72 of All Hallows Fate

He wasn’t even listening to me. He stroked down the scales and my skin crawled, as if it was me he’d touched. My stomach roiled.

My heart clattered into my ribs when hands locked around my arms. Spirits, was my first panic-quick thought. But when I drove my elbow back, it was into flesh and bone. Into ribs and a soft stomach.

“Hold her there,” Violence said, stroking my scales. My scales. I seethed, the injustice of it making my magic writhe and swell and spike. “I want her to see this.”

“Why?” I blurted, struggling, not brave enough to turn and see who held me, even though I knew. I knew.

“You killed my sister,” Violence spat, his nostrils swelling. “You, your husbands, your father.”

“I’m so sad about that,” I replied, meeting his eyes, my tone melancholy. Until I smiled. “I wish I’d been there to watch the bitch bleed to death.”

He drove forward a step, fuming. But forced himself to stop, and smirked down at the scales in his hands.

Use them. Go on.

“She’d return the sentiment,” he spat. “But I’ll take enough satisfaction from wiping you all out for both of us.”

And he did it. He used the scales. Channelled his violent magic through them until rose gold light detonated from the morganite stone—and lit himself up with magic.

49

Cat

Violence’s roar of pain had my chest aching with relief. The scales fell from his hands, and I tried to leap forward to free myself. But the hands gripping my shoulders tightened, bruising.

“Kill her,” Violence snarled.

My heart stopped, and didn’t resume. But I was dead, and my heart no longer needed to beat.

The injustice of it enraged me as I turned my face and locked eyes with the bright panic in Pain’s. “It’s okay,” I told him, trying to smile. “It’s okay.”

But his soul screamed, and my own shrank, withered, ached within my new body. I would fix this. My magic went haywire, snarling for justice. I would fix this.

“I love you,” I breathed, and grabbed his right wrist in both hands, snapping the bone before he could anticipate my intention.

My hands slid through mud before my fingers closed around the scales, the metal warm, as if the magic’s fury burned within the usually frigid gold. The second I touched them, power raged from the morganite, blasting Violence back when he tried to stand. He hissed, an ugly snarl on his face, but there was no missing the tremor of magic around him.

And in the distance, a familiar screech raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Creatures. How did he have creatures at his disposal when we’d shielded their new home at Pain’s lodge?

I angled the scales up, slamming a burst of judgement and death magic into Violence as he struggled to his feet. A cruel smile played across my face when he fell back to the bank of the lake, but it dropped when Pain drove into me, crushing me into the mud.

My blood ran cold when his hands circled my neck and squeezed. Violence would really make him kill me. I threw my head back, my skull colliding with his nose hard enough that blood perfumed the air, but his grip didn’t loosen on my throat.

“Hold her there,” Violence rasped, his voice as hoarse as I knew mine would be if I could ever speak again.

From the corner of my eye, I saw him climb to his feet, his expensive suit streaked with mud. The silvery spirits formed a protective circle around him, as they’d encircled the Wake, but these faces I knew from my lectures—Devlyn, Rebecca O’Neill, and the Professor whose name I couldn’t remember while face-down in the mud. Jane, whose bedroom had been across the hall from my original room, and Katie, her girlfriend. Hollister Seabrook, whose best friend was the one who called a press conference in the dining hall about her lost bracelet.

These were Ford students. People like me. Victims. The manipulated and the implicated. And now they were all dead.

Were their families waiting for phone calls? Did group chats sit empty, with whole friend groups slaughtered by these gods and their twisted plan? Did my mum check her own phone for updates from me and Virgil? Did she wonder why we’d been so quiet? Or had Dad told her about his history as a god before Neglect brought him to this cursed island?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how much she knew. The less, the better.

“I should thank you,” Violence remarked, as if he wasn’t covered in muck. “If your useless husbands hadn’t ripped a hole in the veil of life and death to reach you at Darkmore, I never would have amassed so many spirits.”

Madde’s voice rose in a sharp cry of pain that cut off abruptly, and the creature in me went feral.

“Let them go,” I growled, deeper, rougher. I bucked against Pain’s hold and managed to slip free, but as long as Violence had his heart, he’d get in my way. With a pang in my chest, I flicked my clawed hands and snapped a net of death magic and crackling shadow over him, pinning him against the banks of the lake. “Let my husbands go. You have what you want—the domain answers to you.”