“Pushes it deeper,” Pain finished bleakly. “Yeah. Any ideas?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I had nothing, but Madde chose that moment to burst into the room with his arms full, distracting me from the bleak response I’d been about to make that without knowing the origin of the magic, or how exactly it had attached itself to Cat, we could do more harm than good. And that we might have to use brute force anyway and hope we could repair whatever injuries we gave her. Because there was a chance Cruelty could use that collar to track us. Hence the violent ward we’d surrounded the Bridestone House with.
“I found these in the town nearby,” Madness said, a manic gleam in his eyes and his energy frenetic. “A fleece blanket with mallards all over it, very important fluffy socks, a new phone, a diamond ring, a cat plushie, and an iced latte. The latte might be bad; I didn’t really understand the machine.”
“How did you get those?” Pain frowned, drifting over to stand beside Cat’s chair, a shadow-wreathed hand finding her hair, stroking slowly. “Aren’t all the shops shut?”
“Well, yeah.” Madde shrugged.
Great, now we were thieves.
“My lioness?” Madde said, his voice smaller, quieter. “Did you hear me? I brought you gifts to make you feel better.” He tenderly laid the fleece over her, arranging a tortoiseshell cat plush beside an expensive-looking ring box and a new phone. I confiscated the coffee before he could try balancing that, too, and absently took a sip.
“What syrup did you put in this?” I asked, screwing my face up.
“All of them.” Madde’s eyes were wide and guileless. “She needs sugar, for the shock. Have you sensed Tor yet?”
“No,” I answered, my voice suddenly rough. “We haven’t.”
And all the gifts in the world weren’t going to rouse Cat until she was ready to come back to us.
I didn’t know how to bring either of them back to us. That question kept echoing in my head, relentless.What do we do?
CHAPTER 3
PAIN
“Be honest,” I said, bracing myself. “I can take it.”
“It looks like it’ll rip your finger off.” Madde’s tongue stuck out as he concentrated on the thorns digging into my finger, hidden inside the ring Cruelty forced on my finger when she caught me in the garden at Darkmore Manor. A twin to the choker she forced on Cat.
“I should be able to grow it back,” I hedged, a veil of shadows projecting the image of him frowning in the stone kitchen in Bridestone House into my head. “It’ll hurt like a bitch, though.”
Madde prodded the ring, and I had a vivid image of him as a kid poking a dead squirrel with a stick. He looked at my finger the same way a kid would look at a squirrel carcass. “Are you absolutely, definitely, a hundred percent sure?”
About him ripping my finger off? No sane person would be. But as long as I wore this, we were even more at risk.Catwas even more at risk. So I gritted my teeth and nodded. “Do it.”
“Okay dokey.”
He tore the ring off while I was laughing at his response, and the sound twisted into a strangled howl of pain. Every tooth and thorn on the inside of the ring gouged my skin, ripping right down to the bone. Tears pierced my eyes and rushed down my cheeks. The pain was so bad itburned,overtaking every other sense in my body. You’d think the embodiment of pain wouldn’t experience pain himself, but nope, karma was a bitch that way. It did give me a trickle of power, though.
“That went well,” Madde said with a grin, lifting up the ring to peer at the bloodied mess inside. A strip of my skin dangled from it. I ripped my shadow away, not needing a clear visual ofthat,thank you very much. I dry-heaved and tried not to acknowledge the exposed bone in my finger.
“You and I have very different definitions of the wordwell,Madness.”
“You’ve still got your finger,” he pointed out, contemplating the ring. “If we melted it down, we could make a wedding band for our lioness.”
“Cruelty could still use it to track us,” I disagreed, shaking my head, tears flung free. I sucked in a bracing breath and reached for my power, wrapping a tourniquet of shadow around my finger.
“Ooh, do you want some of mine?” Madde’s dark wisps of magic joined mine before I could even speak, but it was easy to swallow my irritation when I knew he was manic with fear at Cat’s unresponsive state. I thought I saw her fingers twitch earlier when Miz murmured something to her, his body wrapped around hers, but her eyes were still vacant, her expression slack.
Death said she needed time, that she’d been through more than any mortal mind could handle in the space of a few short months, and I knew he was right but… a foreboding feeling hovered over me like a storm cloud, casting a shadow I couldn’tshake off. A constant feeling of cold slithered down the back of my neck.
“What exactly is in that chest Miz brought up?” I asked, casting a tendril of shadow towards the sitting room where a fire crackled and Cat slouched in the same chair as last night. She hadn’t slept. Hadn’t blinked. “Is there anything that would get that collar off Cat?”
“Oh! Good idea.” Madde held his palm flat with the ring in the centre of it. He gave no warning at all before black flames whooshed and devoured it, melting the band to molten ore. The edges of each flame turned blue and green like an oil slick, then the liquid metal burned up to nothing. He cleaned his hand on the checkered pink skirt he wore over black jeans. “Let’s go find out. But if there’s anything cool in it, I’m calling dibs.”
I dreaded to think what he categorised as cool. Something told me it wasn’t a Game Boy Colour.
