Page 6 of All Hallows Fate

It was everywhere, the sense of it assaulting all my senses, the taste of rot shoving down my throat, the scent of it burning my nostrils, plucking at the place in my chest where my magic lived—death. It was everywhere. Dousing the air like humidity, inescapable.

“Why the fuck is she still here?” Tor growled, and rushed to his feet, his hand glancing over my shoulder. I didn’t feel the usual comfort that thought brought. Didn’t feel anything.

“Why the fuck are you still here?” he yelled, darkness pooling around him as he stalked across the chessboard, the backdrop of Ford still stained by dregs of the fading sun. Everything had happened too quickly for me to process, the moment sticky, slow.

I watched Tor drive himself at Cruelty through a haze of numbness, marked the way she stared at Cat, splayed in Death’s arms, painted with so much blood it made my stomach turn. Cruelty didn’t fight as Tor shoved her back, a stream of furious magic slamming into her chest, her shoes sliding across blood-streaked, corpse-strewn squares of black and white.

Forcing her back, I realised, to where Cat’s father stood, the shellshocked expression on his face giving way to something as hot as a sword from the forge. There was a knife in his hand, his knuckles white as he gripped it, staring at Cruelty with murder in his eyes.

“It didn’t work before because the kill has to be his choice,” Neglect murmured, crouching beside me and hovering a hand over Cat, inky magic entwined with her fingers. “I’m so sorry. After everything, it’s so unfair that your story should end here.” I didn’t shove off her hand when it rested on my shoulder, her other on Madde’s as he stared and stared, unmoving.

“There has to be a way,” Pain said, the only one of us who spoke. “You must know a way.”

“All the usual ways,” Neglect sighed. “You could try them, of course, but there’s no tether left between Cat and this world. At best, you could tether her to the domain. But you’d have to find her spirit first.”

“We could do it,” Pain said, his voice ringing with determination. I wished I could feel that emotion, wished I felt anything at all.

But my wife was gone, ripped away, dead. And I swore a part of me had died with her.

5

Torment

The stand that loomed over the chessboard was still full of students, empty eyes watching impassively as my beautiful wife, my beloved Cat, was murdered. Just players in Cruelty and Violence’s game, like we’d been forced to be, like my Cat was before Violence dragged a knife across her throat.

“Cowardly piece of shit,” I hissed under my breath, my voice shaking, hands shaking, whole body shaking with it—wrath so intense, it encompassed every part of me. Body, soul, and every corner of my mind. There was no part of me left that wasn’t drenched in rage, no part of me that didn’t crave their murder.

I would find Violence and puncture his body with so many holes that he resembled a fucking sieve. I would snap every bone in his body, grind them into powder, and set it to burn on the hills above our castle, where everyone would see the blaze and know what befell those who harmed my loved ones. But first, I would introduce Cruelty to true, unadulterated torment.

The game pieces were tied to Violence’s whim, but the spectators? Those were all Cruelty; I discovered it when I herded her back, stumbling, onto Hugh Wallison’s blade. It sank into her back, invoking a gasp from her poison mouth, and the motionless stand beside us erupted with movement.

Students came back to themselves at once, a dozen withheld screams tearing through the air. Others burst into a run, fleeing through the hole Neglect had blasted in the hedge. I returned my grim stare to Cruelty. She was weakening, Cat’s venom attacking her nervous system.

“My wife,” I hissed, my voice guttural and deep, the shroud of death wrapping around me, turning me into something so far from human, “is dead because of you.”

“I didn’t mean it to turn out this way,” Cruelty breathed, but not in fright—in anticipation. She was getting what she wanted: true death. A second life. Happily ever fucking after. “Cat was never supposed to die.”

“Twist the knife,” I told Hugo, floating closer, my hand skeletal when I wrapped it around Cruelty’s throat.

She was breathless, hopeful as she waited for death. It was satisfying to watch that bleed into pain, into agony, into the finest edge of endless, ruthless torment. My magic coursed through her veins, slashing everything it touched, burrowing into her bones, scything her organs, infesting her until she threw her head back and screamed.

“Is it possible to kill her?” Hugh asked, his voice a ragged scratch.

“Yes.” I flared my magic hotter, pushing it wider, ripping apart her insides to make more space for my magic, her screams endless. Her back bowed; I ripped the plates of her spine apart. She flailed on Hugh’s knife but he grabbed her in a rough hand, holding her up for the torture I inflicted.

It wouldn’t have worked even minutes ago, but with the blade buried in her, with all the bloodthirsty rage driving Hugh’s attack, I felt something in her buckle.

“Stop!” she screeched, twisting, writhing. The colour left her skin, chocolate hair bleaching to snow-white, and her eyes turned the colour of chalk, no pupil or iris left. “Stop. Please!”

“You haunted my Misery, made his life pure hell with Nightmare. You drove him to so much pain and trauma that he blocked off his own magic, and almost died. You forced my wife to kill, ripped apart her peace of mind, murdered her friends, and fucked with her head at every opportunity. So no. I will not stop.”

I turned up the dial on my magic until she screamed, and it seemed to knock something loose in Hugh. Or rather, knock something back into place that had been hidden under the surface for years.

Death magic swelled around him, and the keen edge of a breath cut through Cruelty’s screams for a split second. As if the vastness of power blossoming in him was so great that all other sounds paused in respect. Or fear.

“You were supposed to make it a swift, graceful death,” Cruelty whined, staring at Hugh through eyes streaming bloodied tears, leaving stains down her cheeks. “It wasn’t supposed to hurt.”

No, she wasn’t experienced with pain, was she? She preferred to give it to others instead of enduring it herself. My anger was a fuse winding closer and closer to gunpowder.