Page 62 of All Hallows Masque

Gentle and kind, a soft face that filled with relief as I watched, though his green-brown eyes remained shadowed anddull. Pain. “You told me it was my weakness, so I took a few lessons.”

“From who?” I grunted, pushing off the wall and rubbing my chest where he’d hit me. He packed a damn punch for a scrawny fucker.

“Fear.”

“That explains it,” I huffed. Fear looked like a screen siren but punched like a seasoned warrior. I’d found out the hard way a few hundred years ago.

“Where’s Cat?” Death demanded, reaching for Pain’s shoulders and squeezing judging by the whites of his knuckles. “Have you seen her?”

Pain’s eyes darkened until the green was almost invisible, unfocused on the wall behind me. “Not for hours. Cruelty…”

“What?” I demanded, all camaraderie dying at that look on his face. Haunted. Traumatised.“What,Pain?”

“She had us both locked up in—fuck, it was bad. We were in iron maidens across from each other—”

“Where is she?”I demanded, my voice sinking deep, rumbling with fury. I couldn’t block out the images that formed, especially when I looked beyond Pain into the dark room and saw the things they’d been kept in. One was blasted apart, a giant hole in the middle, but the other was intact and filled my head with horrific images of my wife screaming, crying, beating her hands on the inside and pleading to be let out. “Where the fuck is my wife, Pain?”

“I don’t know where Cat is,” Pain admitted with obvious distress. “Cruelty took her, she started going crazy, asking about Cat’s father and then she—she said Violence would get the truth out of her.”

“He tortured her,” Death said in a flat, empty voice.

“I know.” Pain swallowed. “I felt it.”

“How—? Later,” Death cut himself off with a hard shake of his head. “There are three of us; we must be able to sense her now.”

That hadn’t helped us when we had Neglect and Passion as back up, but I didn’t point that out. I was already racing deeper into the hallway, listening for her cries, for screams. Death’s magic surged ahead of me, and I fused it with mine. It ripped off the door of the next room, revealing another torture chamber. This one had corpses strung on the walls, too. I searched their faces, but it was hard to see features when they were so gooey. If one of them was Cat…

My throat closed up, prickling heat filling my face, pressure behind my eyes.

“She’s strong,” Pain said with the air of something oft repeated. “She’s a fighter; she’ll be okay.”

Every word he spoke was true, but she was also a human caught in a web of twisted gods. No matter how strong she was, she was Cruelty’s pawn in a game designed to get tous.

I ripped the door off the next room, and Death prised the next one half off its hinges. The obvious depletion of his power had a premonitory warning crawling down the back of my neck, but I surged a shadow of my own at the door. Both doors hit the ground at the same time. Pain and Death checked the one on the right, while I took the left.

“Just a bedroom,” I called back to them after I’d scoured every inch of the place with an obsessive, frantic rush of power. My darkness was shuddering and jerky, as paranoid and urgent as I was. I needed my girl in my fucking arms, needed her back where she belonged.

“Same here,” Death replied, so we moved on, blasting doors apart and searching bedroom after storeroom after bathroom, with the odd sitting room coated in a layer of dust.

“Where the fuck is she?” I snarled, panic wrapping my lungs in so much protective rage that I choked on it. “What if we—”

Agony struck me so severely that I fell into the door jamb, tears blurring my sight of Pain and Death. I heard their cries and grunts, though, and that only incensed my protectiveness more.

“Death?” I bit out through gritted teeth, breathing harshly through the sensation that I was being carved apart, knives driven through my back into my chest.

“I think … it’s Cat,” he rasped.

Every drop of blood in my body turned to ice. I blinked my eyes clear and scanned the hallway, desperate to find a threat, to find Violence whohadto have attacked us with this sudden pain. Because the alternative… If this wasCat’ssuffering…

My hands shook as I flicked tears off my cheeks, every breath a rasping, difficult battle. But I closed my eyes and let the pain take root inside me. I set off running without opening my eyes, letting my shadows keep me away from any obstacles.

“Tor?” Death said tightly.

“Follow me. I think I can—” Another bolt of pain struck hard enough to weaken my knees, but hands caught me, a body rammed itself into mine, and stabilised me.

“Keep tracking her,” Pain urged when I was stable. “That’s what you’re doing, right? Using the pain and the bond to track her?”

“Trying,” I replied tightly, rushing ahead with my eyes closed, my jaw locking when the pain flared. I used it like a map, blindly turning corners, following long hallways until I was sure we’d doubled back on ourselves, her agony growing stronger. Sharper. Clearer. “She’s close.”

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