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I t was a special kind of suffering to know your soul was intertwined with another and be able to do nothing about it.

I searched for her for months, since that first night when I was torn out of sleep and tumbled out of bed, with sheets tangled around my legs, because of course.

It had been a shock at first to see, then to realise it wasn’t my bedroom I glimpsed but a room crammed full of people dressed in Halloween costumes.

I tasted it then—death, bitter and metallic like blood.

It wrapped around my tongue as I splayed there on my bedroom floor, seeing an unfamiliar room, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening and how I appeared to be seeing through someone else’s eyes.

Of course, while I pondered that, people started screaming.

Others collapsed, their hearts forever still.

Chanting rose from robed figures at the heart of the cramped room.

What was this? A ritual at a frat house?

And why the fuck was I ripped from sleep in the middle of the night to see this?

There was suffering and pain here, sure, and death so thick I could reach out and brush that power, but nothing to explain my suddenly miraculous sight.

People were dying all across the mortal realm, as it was supposed to be, so why bring me here to these deaths?

It was like there was a draw, a tether, a—

“Fuck,” I hissed when I felt it, like a bridge of starlight stretching from me into the distance, arching through the domain of death and through the veil. To whoever’s eyes I saw through. “This doesn’t make any sort of sense.”

Death gods didn’t just get mystical bonds in the middle of the night. This didn’t happen. And yet there was a soul on the other end of that bridge, full of fear so icy, it burned my fingers, made my body shake, safe in my bedroom.

Power swelled, and I knew that power, had felt its slow, insidious poison once before. Had helped my friends rid the world of that evil.

In that room full of costumed people, someone began to chant, “Oh god, oh god.”

“Goddess, darling,” a silken voice replied.

In my room, I gnashed my teeth. “Nightmare.”

She’d done this, made this bond that linked me and someone I never met before. I grabbed for the poster of the bed behind me and pulled myself up, keeping all my attention on that room as fear choked off my air. Not mine. Theirs. Hers?

I tried to reach further, to feel the purpose of the magic hanging in that room like a dark cloud, but I pushed too far and the connection snapped me back into my body like an elastic band.

“Fucking shitballs,” I hissed, rubbing a painful spot on my chest. I tried hurling myself across that bright bridge again but hit a wall, like Nightmare sensed me and shut me out. Or like the woman on the other end of the bond was so terrified, she erected her own walls.

I rubbed my eyes, sending out tendrils of shadow to make sure I was alone in my room. No Nightmare, no other gods, no mortals dressed as sexy nuns, creepy zombies, and I was ninety percent sure I saw Pacman.

With a groan, I hauled myself to my feet and headed downstairs for a coffee. No way would I be able to get back to sleep after that.

It was weeks before I glimpsed her again, but during that time, I’d managed to completely and thoroughly obsess over the woman on the other end of that gleaming bridge of starlight.

She was still wrapped in a shield of pure, impenetrable darkness, but I could sense her there.

Fear and love and endless loyalty. Bravery and anxiety and defiant joy.

With every tiny glimmer of her, I become more fixated.

Until I caught a bigger glimpse, and saw three familiar men. Death. Torment. Misery. My stomach dropped, a twisting pain going through the most fragile parts of my soul. Right. She was already theirs. I was too late.

I told myself to push away those glimpses of her life, told myself not to wait for them, craving them like a hit of oxygen after being underwater, but I couldn’t help it.

She was threaded into my soul now, woven into every part of me, and even knowing it was Nightmare’s meddling at fault, I couldn’t deny that gleaming bridge linking us.

Did she know it was there, or was the wall of shadow so dense she couldn’t sense me on the other side?

I knew what it was: them, shielding her. I told myself to be grateful for that, because it meant she was safe. But it meant she wasn’t mine. She had no idea this tether existed. It felt like a kick to the balls with steel-toe-capped boots.

I shouldn’t have stayed away. I should have gone to her sooner.

It would have been easy—too easy. I knew where Death lived, knew the others lived with him and that she would be there.

But I told myself she was theirs, not mine, and yeah okay I might have wallowed in self pity a little too long.

By the time I realised the flickers of pain that reached me from her were actually a deluge of suffering held back by that dark shield, I wasted months fighting the tether.

When I eventually found her…

She was sobbing so heartbrokenly that each hitched breath and each silvery tear was like a dagger to my soul.

I was across the garden and at her side in an instant, furious I’d waited so long to find her, berating myself for not finding her until I got the plea for help from Death.

This close to her, the soft hum of pain became a battering ram against my senses, filling me with power at the same time it twisted my stomach into a pretzel.

I wanted to pull her into my arms, tuck her head under my chin, and promise everything would be alright, but I had shadows all around us and the impression of her face might have been hazy but I knew there was no recognition in her eyes.

What colour were they? Grey? Blue? Green?

It was suddenly vital that I knew, but I bit back the words when Neglect reached for Death.

“Still with us,” the woman said, raising an eyebrow at the throaty warning that left my lips. “But clinging on through sheer stubbornness.”

He didn’t look good. His brown skin covered in a fine sheen of sweat, a miasma of death hanging over him, and not because he was the physical embodiment of death, but because he himself was dying.

Fuck, I hadn’t realised Death could die.

He always seemed so powerful that death was impossible.

And kind, and good, and generous, and—fine, I had a tiny crush on him.

He was tall and gentle and he let me brush his features with my shadows so I knew he was hot as hell.

A tremor went through my soul. No, I realised with a crashing sensation in my gut.

Through hers. I couldn’t help it; I had to touch her, to comfort the woman who’d become my obsession.

But she was more than a fixation; she was the strength and stubbornness and joy on the other side of that gleaming bridge.

It was completely natural to rest my hand on her shoulder, brushing my thumb over her cold skin.

Too close. I discreetly wound shadows around her like a cloak, heating up the air by degrees until her shivering lessened.

I knew most of it wasn’t from the cold, but because shock had set in.

And she’d just killed a goddess by the looks of the blood around her mouth and Nightmare smeared across the garden.

“He’ll be okay,” I said in my gentlest voice, my heart fucking breaking when she sobbed, leaning over Death with so much agony in her soul that it pierced the dark wall separating us.

“We lost Tor and Madde,” she rasped. My shadows were close enough to give me the impression of glittering tears gathering on long eyelashes.

Fuck, my girl was crying. I couldn’t handle this; I needed to hug her.

But I was a stranger, a fucking stranger, and I fought back the instinct. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

“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’t see where 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, barely catching 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 was literally 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.