Page 64 of All Hallows Masque

“Fuck,” Death whispered. “Then you’ve made your choice. The mirror will devour her.”

My nostrils flared and my panic transfigured into rage now I had a target for the storm of emotions. I launched myself at the ornate silver mirror, furious enough that a wave of shadows poured ahead of me, slamming into the surface of the mirror a second before I did.

“Tor, don’t!” Pain shouted. “We don’t know if it’s—”

His voice warped, dullened and distanced like a yell heard from underwater, and then I slammed into something solid and gold. Fuck. I jerked back—and my head cracked into cold, cold glass.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach as I turned, dread skittering down my arms like insect’s legs, and I knew, even before I turned, what I would see.

The room I’d just been in. My wife, no longer bound to the chair but swept into Death’s arms where she would always be safe. Pain lunging towards me, alarm on his face. And then a small, greying blonde woman who looked as shell-shocked as I felt.

I was inside the mirror.

And as I fought, as I rallied my shadows to slam into the glass, to crack and fracture and find a weakness, a truth settled in my chest.

There was no way out.

38

Misery

If Cruelty thought thirty-seven animated topiaries would be enough to keep me from my wife, she was more delusional than I thought. I shot across the sky in full-death form, ignoring the shiver of electricity that warned a storm was coming, and dove fast, grabbing the head of a plant woman and ripping it off. Anything else and a missing head would take it down, but of course this couldn’t be that easy. She kept coming, and didn’t appear to care when I ripped off her arm, either. Or when I grabbed the core of misery inside her and pumped it full of enough magic and despair to kill her. Probably because she was a fucking bush.

“How do we kill these things?” Wrath yelled, catching my attention long enough for me to watch her kick her leg high, heavy boot planted in the chest of a short, squat topiary man. “They just keep coming.”

I grabbed hold of the misery in the centre of each of the topiaries and snapped my hand out, my hands no more than bones I curled into a fist. It should have hadsomeeffect. There was something inside them that was vaguely living. I should have been able to kill them.

“Uh, a little help,” Madde shouted, a freckled hand shooting up from the middle of a convergence of topiaries. They’d swarmed him.

“Shit,” I hissed and lashed across the garden towards him, trailing rage and shadows. Each of these things had a core of misery, suffering, and pain, but they didn’t respond to my power. Animated, but not alive. Still, the magic giving them the ability to walk and attack was enough to have Madness surrounded by three plant creatures, roots and gnarled hands pulling at his clothes.

“My shadows won’t work,” Madde said with a snap in his voice. He wrenched at the branchlike hands that had ensnared him, roots wrapping around his arms and binding his feet to the floor. “See,thisis why I need my lioness. If Cat were here—”

I dove from the sky with a rattling scream that would terrify all mortal beings, shadows streaking the air with smoky darkness, piercing the throats and heads and stomachs of the topiaries holding Madde captive. It had no effect.

“Fuck,” I spat, and grabbed an arm, snapping it off instead. They couldn’t hold Madde without arms, could they? Madness caught on quick, and the second I freed his hands he grabbed at the leafy limbs, cutting them off at shoulders.

“My shadows don’t work either,” I said, meeting his eyes. Not that he could see mine; my face would be as dark as a void within the deep hood of my cloak, not a single feature on my face. I was bones and shadows and little else.

“Then how do we take them down?”

“We need to hold them off long enough to buy the others time to find Cat.”

“And Pain, don’t forget about him,” Madde said with the air of a teacher chiding a student.

I clicked my tongue in a haunting sound that made humans piss themselves from fear. Madde rolled his eyes and ripped his legs free of the roots, blasting a powerful stream of shadows at the remaining topiaries. Their leaves shuddered in the wind caused by his magic, but were otherwise unaffected. Time for a change of plans.

Shadows had no effect, and my misery was powerless against them, but I’d been trained in battle arts and combat for hundreds of years. When an arm came towards me, leaves rustling with the movement, I shot my hand out, snapped the hand off at the wrist. My bony hand wrapped around a fistful of branches in the plant woman’s face and ripped them free.

“Well shit,” I muttered, lurching aside as she came at me again. Apparently they had no eyes, and couldn’t be blinded.

“Someone is controlling them,” Hunger yelled over the sound of Madde’s sudden war cry. He’d painted streaks of mud on his face and now attacked the topiaries with a kamikaze rage and two cutlasses formed of darkness.

I rose into the air until I could see Hunger. He’d knotted his long, black hair into two braids that hung down his back; a topiary girl no older than thirteen had wrapped her hands around one, yanking his head back as the tall, serious god of hunger drove his fist into the verdant face of a portly topiary man. His expensive suit had enough rips and slashes in it that I winced.

“There must be a link from these creatures to their creator,” he yelled, his attention snapping to me as I soared across the garden and dropped from the sky to grab the topiary girl. She was as stubborn as Tor, and I gritted my teeth within thedarkness of my cowl as I fought to unclench her branch-like fingers from his hair.

“Thanks,” he said solemnly when I finally got her free, not feeling too remorseful at throwing the teenage plan halfway across the garden. I blinked when Hunger grabbed the head of the portly man and snapped it off. Like the one I’d fought, the man kept coming, his hands reaching, grasping for Hunger’s throat. “Can you sense anything within them? I’m trying to find a kernel of magic, a powerful object, a crystal—anything. But there’s nothing.”

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