Page 51 of All Hallows Masque

“Enough!”I snapped, a sharp coil of anger in my chest. My nostrils flared, words landing like punches even on me. My parents had always been a little absent, a little distracted, but they were good parents. Good people. Not like this bastard. And yet, the words found a weakness, found the part of me that wished I’d fought instead of cowering. If I’d fought Cruelty from day one instead of trying to trick her, would all this be over now? Maybe I’d be dead, or maybe we’d be free.

“Enough,” I snarled again—and saw it, the slow curl of darkness in the corner of my eye. Barely visible in the gloom of my iron coffin, but there. Hope rose like a buoy inside me, and my stomach fluttered. “You shut the fuck up,” I shouted, the shadows getting clearer, darker. I could almost see the swirlingshape of them, and I might not have known how the hell to use them, but I felt better for their existence.

“Cat,” Pain rasped. A warning I ignored.

“Hey!” I banged the side of my fists against the cold iron. “Pick on someone your own size, you prick. You call him a coward, but where are you, huh? Hiding where we can’t see you. Come out where we can see. Face me.” I bared my teeth, nothing remotely similar to a smile. “If you dare.”

It was a gamble. I knew Cruelty was twisted and fucked in the head, but she was a woman of staunch pride. The insult to that pride should provoke her.

But the man’s voice fell to silence instead of coming closer to me. Silence fell, thick enough to choke me, and I waited, waited for Cruelty to laugh, for her blue eyes to appear right in front of my coffin, waited for—

“Who are you?” a wary, feminine voice demanded, and my whole body jerked. My fists, my elbows slammed into the cold iron. Honey. That was Honey’s voice. “How did you get in my room?”

“Oh god,” I choked out. I shouldn’t have provoked Cruelty, or whoever the hell was inside this room with us.

“What do you want?” Honey breathed, weaker, her voice shaking. “If it’s money, take my jewellery box. Or my purse is right there.”

A familiar voice replied, sly and amused. Cruelty. I covered my ears but I couldn’t shut it out. Tears stung and flowed from my eyes, and it became hard to breathe.

“I don’t want money,” Cruelty laughed. “I want your face, your voice, your mannerisms. I want tobecomeyou.”

I pressed my hands harder to my ears, but there was no escaping it.

I was trapped, encased in icy iron, and I had no choice but to listen to my best friend as she was murdered.

31

Cat

Ilost track of how much time passed. At some point during the endless hours, I decided it wasn’t Cruelty in here with us. She wouldn’t have gone so long without laughing, without a snide comment, without an explosion of anger. This was something else. Something primal and dark and old, something whose power slunk through the room and made the few shadows I’d managed to call up scatter like smoke against a fist.

I might have had a few drops of death magic, but this thing had unlimited power. And it used that power to rake up every traumatising event I’d tried to suppress over the last few years. Worse, it used it to torment Pain. He’d been silent for hours now, and I couldn’t stand it. Where was the cheeky, smiling flirt who’d coaxed an answering smile from me?

I’d tried talking to him six times, all failed attempts, and I was reaching the end of my tether. I needed to hear his voice,just once, because the deep, penetrating silence in between bouts of torture were so quiet he could have been dead. I could have been alone with an ancient monster. But it was more than that. The idea of his death filled me with the same flinching horror as the thought that I’d get back to Death’s domain to find everyone I loved gone.

“Pain,” I breathed into the silence. The quiet wouldn’t last; whatever tortured us, whatever prowled and swirled like smoke through the room, would resume its screaming. “Talk to me.” When there was only silence, I begged, “Please.”

Fuck. The memories that thing had dragged him through, all the trauma it had forced him to revisit, had ripped the life, the spirit, out of him. I needed to hear him—a sigh, a groan, anything. My hands shook as I pressed them against my cheeks, my skin cold against my heated face.

I didn’t know where it came from. It was like a bolt from above, the most random and unexplainable melody rolling through my mind. I blamed Madde entirely. He’d been singing it incessantly.

“We’re no strangers to love…” I sang, raspy and raw. It didn’t matter. This was all I had, and I wasn’t about to stop now. I didn’t care if I angered the ancient thing or earned Cruelty’s wrath. I couldn’t stand the silence. Couldn’t stand the chance Pain might have died in here. “You know the rules, and so do I.”

Only stillness answered me, but I forged on through the next few lines, making up the words when I didn’t know the exact lyrics. My voice began to thicken, and tears gathered the longer silence hung dense in the air, but I choked the words out.

“Never gonna give … you up.” I pushed back a sob. “Never gonna let you down.”

“Oh god,” a groan came from across the room, and one sob collided with two until I couldn’t sing, couldn’t even breathe for crying. Broken, wrenching sobs cut my breathing into painfulshards, and I gasped, over and over, my hands trembling against the cool iron around me.

I wasn’t alone. He was still alive.

“Cat,” he rasped. “Cactus. Take a breath, darling woe.”

“I thought—I thought—”

“Shit,” he whispered. “No, I just—went somewhere else for a while. I’m back now. Why were you singing that god-awful song?”

“Hey,” I protested with a shattered cry.

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