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He disappeared the same second I spoke, winking from existence like he’d never been here, only a glimmer of dark smoke on the air.
“We won last time,” Death reminded me, easing the glare from my face with slow, gentle caresses of his thumbs. “We’ll find out how she returned and win this time, too.”
Tor winked back into existence with Peach clutched between his olive-gold hands, her black eyes gleaming with love and excitement. Tor tolerated Peach, meanwhile she was infatuated with him. She probably liked his rough voice, too.
“Here, take your child,” Tor huffed, wrinkling his nose in a way that brought a smile to my face. I cradled Peach in my arms, the thrum of her heartbeat and the warmth of her against my chest immediately settling me.
“What complication?” I asked, eyeing Death as he leaned against the back of one of the green leather chairs arrayed around the fireplace.
“I felt a tremor four hours ago, something linking this realm to the mortal realm.”
I stiffened, breath catching in my throat. I hadn’t been to the mortal realm since… since it all ended. I didn’t want to go back.
“Wait for the good part,” Tor said, his brown eyes bright with amusement, excitement, or scorn—it was hard to discern which.
“I went to investigate,” Death continued, sliding his hands into the pockets of his trousers, casual and relaxed. I didn’t buy it. I knew Death when he was languid and at peace and this wasn’t it. “And I found four dead teenagers, a burned ritual site, and—”
“What?” I demanded when his words hovered, unfinished. Peach made a startled sound; I relaxed my breath, dragging air into my lungs. Calm, calm.
“Nightmare has risen again, her cult likely involved.”
I knew it. I could feel her, feel the ripples of her poison brushing my skin, roiling against the inside of my skull.
“And she used the deaths of those teenagers to not only restore herself to the realm of the living, but to curse anyone in the vicinity of her ritual site. Fifty-one of them to be exact.”
“Cursed how?” I asked tightly, jumping when Peach nibbled at my finger in a request for snacks; I stroked her in a compromise, distracted by the pressure gathering in my chest, the dread hovering over us like a dark cloud.
“From what I could tell in a brief examination,” Death said, turning around one of the many golden rings he wore, “it was during a Halloween party that Nightmare returned. The students of Ford medical school were in costume to celebrate the occasion.”
I flinched at the name. Ford. So she was still on Ford’s End after all these years.
“Nightmare’s curse turned them from costume to reality. They’re cursed to become whatever appearance they took last night.”
“So werewolves will howl at the moon,” Tor explained with great amusement, “reapers will hunt souls, and vampires will want a little blood snack.”
“And the bride of death…” Death trailed off.
I jerked forward a step. My ears went fuzzy, muffled. The bride of Death? “What?” I breathed, faint.
Death spun his ring faster. He didn’t look at either of us. Oh god, it was over. After hundreds of years, we were over, just like that. Nightmare had finally done it, finally found a way to truly break me.
He said, “One of the mortals was dressed as Death’s bride, and since costumes have become reality…”
“You… have a wife,” I breathed, staring at my oldest friend, my oldest love.
“Which brings us to the important question,” Tor said, giving us an unusually sombre look, his mischievous eyes newly grave. “Death, if you had to pick one of us, me or Miz, who’d be your best man?”
I tried to shape my lips into a smile. But Nightmare was back—on Ford’s End, where it had all ended. Or not ended at all. And I couldn’t ignore the pull in my soul, wrenching me all the way back there.
“You’re not coming out of this well,” Death told Tor with some amusement. I couldn’t understand how they could joke and fuck around in his office like the world wasn’t ending all over—
Tor’s arm hooked my neck, dragging me into a hard hug. His lips mashed to my temple. “Don’t worry. We’ll come out of this fine, you’ll see.”
But not only was Nightmare back, she’d created a link, either accidentally or intentionally, between a costumed mortal and Death. Between her and us. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that a trap was closing around us, its edges sharp and eager for blood.
“You’re wrong anyway, Miz,” Death said with a strange mix of calm and humour. My heart skipped when I met his eyes. “We’ve done everything as a team for hundreds of years, so I don’t have a wife. We have a wife.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
