Page 83 of All Hallows Fate

He came closer, and caught my hands in his, squeezing. Warm where I’d become as cold as my bond with Death. “But you can feel something?”

“Only ice.” Another tear fell; Madde brushed it away.

“Can you reach inside the ice?”

Could I… “You think there’s hope?” I asked in a small voice, blinking another tear free. The others joined us, and even the gods I didn’t recognise looked distressed to hear about Death.

I squeezed my eyes shut and threw my soul across the freezing divide towards the forest where Death’s soul used to be. It was as if I stood on a solid plane in the arctic, the water frozen for miles around, but trees still thrust up, their leaves dead, branches bare.

Death?

I pictured reaching out, thought of how our bond used to feel, grounding and steadfast and the antithesis of this cold.

Death?

I felt my bottom lip wobble, but ignored it, focusing everything I had on the bond. Reach through the ice, Pain said. So I imagined kneeling on the frozen ground, imagined driving my fist into the solid ice until cracks formed, until my knuckles bled.

Even when my soul flinched, even when pain carved through my head, my heart, and drained what remained of my strength, I dragged my heavy arms up and hit those cracks. The first layer of ice broke, then the next. There wasn’t water beneath the sheet of ice; there was dirt. Earth, hard packed and old.

I dug my nails in and raked it apart.

Snow drifted around me, cold on the back of my neck, melting in my hair as I ripped apart the ground. Piling dirt around me, reaching deeper, digging down, down—

A hand closed around mine. Four fingers pressed into my wrist, thumb on my pulse. Warm—warm, not the frigid ice of a corpse. Brown, healthy, and so alive, not the pallor of the dead. I gripped so tightly my hand hurt, and threw my weight back, pulling with all my might. When a second hand broke through, I clasped my other hand around his wrist and dug my heels into the ground, wrenching harder, desperate—

He tore free of the ground, of the grave, all at once. Momentum carried him on top of me, crushed him into my body, and the sob that ripped from my throat hurt.

I wrapped my arms around Death, wrapped my soul around his, and held on for dear life as the trees around us shook loose their dusting of snow and burst into bright, verdant life.

EPILOGUE 1

Cat

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a chance to sit in front of a mirror and do my makeup. The death mask was the first thing to go. It had left a stain on me, visible to death gods ever since that cursed Halloween party, but now I was a god too, I could peel the edges of that stain from my face and wipe it clean.

I kept the hair, though. A permanent style that never needed bleaching or root touch-ups? Sign me the fuck up.

It was bittersweet, though. To sit at the vanity in my room in Death’s newly restored castle, to take time over my makeup, curling my hair, dressed in a new pair of jeans and my new favourite shirt. To do it alone, when I’d always had Honey and Byron.

The parallels between today and the night of the party were impossible to ignore. There was none of their bickering, none of Honey’s teasing and Byron’s sarcasm to make me laugh. But I could hear my husbands down the hall, Madde singing an off-key opera1 and Miz and Tor arguing heatedly about interior decor in the hallway. Apparently gold was gauche, silver was tacky, and black was too morbid even for a castle in the domain of the dead.

“I defer to your superior interior decorating skills,” Tor said with a heaping dose of snark. “What colour should the hallway be, O Mighty Decorator?”

“Charcoal,” Miz said after a moment.

“Which is vastly different to silver and black,” Tor drawled.

“Vastly,” Miz bit out.

Tor must have smirked or laughed, because there was a thud on the wall outside my room, and I grinned. The visual of Tor being shoved into the wall was clear, and the sudden silence told me everything else.

I finished my makeup with a deep lip stain and stood, grabbing a jacket from the wardrobe. I was convinced my husbands had personally selected each piece, but none of them would admit to it. Neither would they admit to stocking the fridge with my favourite foods, or turning my bedroom into an explosion of cute yellow ducks.

The domain’s magic, they said. Liars.

A shadow slid up my ankle, wrapping around my leg, and a sly smile crossed my face. It had been four weeks since Violence dropped dead to the muddy banks of the lake in Rosalind Woods, and I’d spent the time recovering from expending so much magic, exploring my new magic, and breaking in every new bed and flat surface in the castle. Some not-so-flat ones, too. Madde could get seriously creative with the right incentive.

All my experimenting gave me some fun new abilities. So I slowly slid my hand down my leg and grasped the wandering shadow, stroking it suggestively.