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My hands shook as I lifted them to cover my mouth, my legs shaky when I stumbled back. Someone had killed Erika.
I was back in the corridor before I’d realised it, tripping down the stairs to my room—and stopping dead in the middle of the hallway when I realised a black-cloaked figure crouched in front of my door, feeding something under it.
I saw red.
“Hey!” I yelled, all my stress, my grief, my rage bubbling out as I launched down the corridor. My head filled with buzzing and violence, adrenaline burning off my shakiness until I was ready to fight.
The robed figure jumped to their feet, clearly not expecting to be interrupted, and after a frozen hesitation they lurched towards me. I was ready for a fight, ready to beat the shit out of these people who thought they could torment me even if I wasn’t quite sure how to beat the shit out of someone. I widened my stance, lifted my fists.
But the robed figure shoved me aside instead of attacking me, and I lost my balance. I slammed into the wall hard as they fled down the stairs, a sharp ache exploding through my shoulder, shooting across my ribs, until I had to grit my teeth against a whimper. But I sucked in a pained breath and raced after the robed bastard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MISERY
Stalking Cat had become an addiction. It made me feel in control of my own life when everything was falling apart, when even now Nightmare closed her hands around my soul. If I thought I had the strength to fight her after all these years, that hope was swiftly killed when I blacked out.
Just like last time.
So I stalked Cat as penance, watching over her so no one else could hurt her. Keeping her close for selfish reasons, too, the sight of her a balm the way Death and Torment were. My bride. I no longer cared that claiming her was exactly what Nightmare wanted; it was too late for that the second she wrapped her fingers around my throat. Cat was mine, and I’d just have to find a way to stop Nightmare winning.
Even if it felt like she’d already won.
“Where are you going, Cactus?” I murmured, cloaked in the darkness behind her as she climbed the stairs of Lawrence House, looking better than she had in days. There was fire in her grey eyes again, and her back was straight instead of slouched, her clothes free of creases and food stains.1
I hung back, watching as she entered a room on the third floor of Lawrence House, my magic like acid in my veins as I readied to jump to her defence. Nightmare could be anywhere, her followers in any guise. When Cat stumbled back out of the room, her hands pressed to her mouth and face especially pale, I shot past her in a seething veil of darkness, ready to unleash myself on her enemies.
I would break their bones, pull their skin until it tore, carve cautionary tales about hurting my wife on their organs as a message to whoever found them—
There was only a corpse in the room, a recently dead body of a student with blonde hair streaked pink. The comparison to Cat made me uneasy. This could have been her, in her own room, with her own friends stumbling in to find her murdered.
I raced out of the room, frantic to be beside her again, to have her in my sight so I knew Nightmare hadn’t got to her. Any suspicion I had that she’d killed the girl passed when I remembered the shock bleaching her face.
“Where are you?” I hissed, pushing myself to the limits of my speed, nothing but a shadow streaking down the stairs, finally locating my wife as she burst out the doors in the lobby.
“Don’t run, you fucking coward!” she screamed, more animated than I’d heard her in weeks. I reached for her, my shadow stretching across pavement onto grass as she sprinted through the park after a human draped in a black robe, a hood concealing their face. As much as I loved seeing her fire return, I’d have preferred my bride didn’t race after a cult madman without a single weapon in her hand. What happened to the knife Tor gave her? Clearly we needed to give her an armoury of weapons so our wife could always be armed.
Our wife. I liked that more than I had any right to.
She’d hate me when she knew who I truly was, what I’d done. She’d be their wife then, not mine.
“Stop fucking running!” she shouted, her voice both loud and guttural. It went right to my cock, but now was a bad time to be turned on. I followed her across the park, finally reaching her side in a pool of darkness, and I lashed out a thread of power to catch the figure she pursued.
An unexpected chill went through me. My darkness slid off the robed student without grasping, like oil on water. I gnashed my teeth. Anger flared for a second before I realised the tree cover had disappeared above us. I’d blindly followed Cat past Ford House and into the shadow of Rosalind Woods where the lake shone silver.
Ice cold filled my veins. I ground to a halt, staring at that still body of water reflecting the setting sun, serene and quiet. A lie, a fucking lie, the calm was all a lie.
My darkness ripped away and I stumbled forward at the same time Cat breathed, “What the fuck…?”
Because the robed figure had vanished.
“Never real,” I choked out, struggling to breathe and unable to tear my stare from the lake. My eyes burned, beginning to water.
I remembered soft hands on my cheeks, remembered the sharp sting of fingernails leaving cuts exactly like the ones they left on Cat’s cheeks. I remembered the hollow, pleading eyes of my sister, and then her screams as I walked mechanically into the water with my arms around her and carried her all the way to the bottom. I’d already been a death god then, foolishly trying to live a life outside death’s domain. I’d lived and wished I hadn’t.
I could still hear her screaming, hear her pleading for mercy in the moments before I dragged her under the water.
“Miz?” Cat breathed, jumping before she reached for me. I didn’t feel her hands on my arms, didn’t feel anything. “When did you get here? Were you following me? Did you see her follower? They just… disappeared.”
