Page 2 of All Hallows Masque

“We’ll find them,” I promised, angling myself closer to her, my shadows betraying me by running careful fingers through her hair, cleaning the blood from the strands. I tasted copper and magic on the back of my tongue. “We’ll find them, don’t worry.” She didn’t take her attention off Death. I wasn’t sure she even felt my shadows wrapped around her. I turned my head in the direction of the others. “Fear, Hunger, can you track Torment and Madness?”

“As you say,” Hunger said, his voice like thunder. A rush of power swept them away, but most of my consciousness was on the shaking woman beside me.

“Let’s get him inside. Then we can assess the damage,” I suggested, sweeping my thumb over her shoulder again, the sensation of her skin against mine a relief after months of keeping myself away from her. I felt fucking stupid for it now.I should have just come here, told Death, Tor, and Miz that my was bound this sad, beautiful woman who—

Who watched me. I could sense it, feel the soft prickle of her stare on my face. I swallowed, nerves surging into my throat. Neglect provided a distraction when the small goddess elbowed me pointedly, and I jumped to her side to help her make a stretcher to carry Death inside. Shit, he felt weak. I promised her he’d be fine, but I wasn’t sure.

“Don’t drop him,” the stern woman muttered as we lifted Death. I shot an affronted stare in her general direction. I would never. Even if I couldn’tseewhere we were going, my shadows would stop me driving Death’s unconscious body into a wall or carrying him so low that his head smacked off the ground or—

Her breath hitched. The woman whose soul was intertwined with mine. It happened again, and stabbed my chest with a matching pain. When she hurt, I hurt.

“Here,” I murmured,barelycatching myself from calling her darling as I held out my handkerchief to her. She didn’t need to know I carried it with me because I had horrific allergies even as a death god.

“For the tears or the blood?” she asked, her voice as hollow and raw as a corpse, her attention sliding away from me to fix on Death as we guided him around the castle and inside. I fought back the irrational jealousy because Death wasliterally unconscious,but I was greedy for her attention, for her stare, for her touch. Anything.

God, that sounded desperate, didn’t it?

That was what denying my pull to her for months had done.

“Uh,” I said, realising she’d asked me a question. “Lady’s choice?”

Her fingers brushed mine, ice cold. They burned an impression into my skin I knew would never fade. The ghost of her touch lingered, tingling and permanent.

Even as we headed inside, as she pulled away from my side, that burning remnant of her touch remained. I focused on that sensation and told myself to be patient, to be grateful to have met her at all, to have felt her skin under my fingertips, to have her sweet scent of peaches in my lungs.

I sat in the living room and tried not to feel sorry for myself. I should be upstairs with them, making sure she was okay. Well, of course she wasn’t okay, Death was unconscious and Misery was dying and—

There was a tug, a little flare of panic, and a rush of steely determination. Well, that couldn’t be good.

I made sure no one was paying attention and cloaked myself in shadows, appearing around the side of the castle in time to watch her run outside and—

Cruelty. My upper lip curled back. From what we pieced together, she’d been pulling Nightmare’s strings for months, maybe even years. Everything that happened to Death and the others, and the damn realm decaying around us, was her fault. So when she reached out her hand to her. Cat. I’d learned her name in the hour since we got to Madde’s castle. Cactus Bengal-Tiger Wallison. The love of my life was called Cactus.

“Wait,” I began to call out as she placed her hand in Cruelty’s, magic rising so fast I only had a split second to act.

I speared a shadow at the two of them like a harpoon, and when magic swept them out of the courtyard, I was pulled along with them.

I’d either just done something heroic, or made the most stupid mistake of my life.

And as someone who once wore a Jigglypuff costume to my fifteenth birthday party, and not only allowed my mum to take photos but encouraged her to print duplicates and send them to family members, that was really saying something.

1

Misery

When the gates collapsed, Death lurched off the end of my sick-bed like he’d been shot, but it washerI felt. My universe. My Cat. My reason for everything. I’d always been highly attuned to her, and it was even truer now, so soon after a near-death experience. Or post-death resurrection may have been more accurate. Idied,but she refused to give up on me, and somehow I came back. So Ifeltit the moment she vanished. A thread stretching between my heart and hers, tangled but perfect, utterly unbreakable, until it snapped in half.

“Cat!” I shouted, lurching off the bed and pushing Tor aside when he told me to be careful. Sure, I’d been dead half an hour ago, but that wasn’t the fucking point. Cat was leaving us.Hadleft us.

This castle was full of gods, and not a single one stopped her leaving? Rage tore through my chest but panic dogged its heels,quickening my heartbeat. Why had she left? Cat loved us every bit as much as we loved her. Nightmare was gone, unable to torment her, or me, ever again. Death, Tor, and Madness told me as much in the last ten minutes since I woke. It was supposed to be good news. But the domain was falling around us, decay creeping into a place that should have been immune to it. I could feel the decay like ice, leeching the warmth from my skin. But all of that paled in comparison to my girl being fucking gone.

“She can’t have got far,” Tor growled, right behind me as I rushed out of the bedroom and down the carpeted stairs. “She’s only been out of our sight for ten minutes. Iknewwe shouldn’t have let her leave alone.”

“She’s too stubborn,” Madde said, chewing his lip, his blue eyes bright with panic. “She wouldn’t have listened. We couldn’t have stopped her.”

Fuck that. She was my wife; I’d chain her to the damn bed if it kept her safe. She couldn’t be running off when the domain was in turmoil. And so soon after I died, she ought to have been here.

“This is Cruelty,” Tor snarled. “That bitch got to Cat.”

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