Page 18

Cat

M y nineteenth birthday began with a nightmare.

I felt Death in my dream, knew he was just out of reach, that if I stretched out my fingertips just another millimetre they would brush the warm wool of his coat, but no matter how far I ran or how fast I pushed my aching body, I couldn’t reach him.

And when he turned, it wasn’t my husband at all.

All the warmth drained from my body, goosebumps rushing to my arms as my eyes connected with the sinister gleam of Doyle’s stare.

I shot upright in bed with Death’s name on my lips, gasping in the dark, the goosebumps from my dream covering my arms and legs.

I wrapped my arms around myself as I choked down air, the velvet brush of the covers as abrasive as a razor on my sensitive skin.

It was instinct to reach for my darkness, to call out to Madde for comfort and connection.

I hit a brick wall so hard it bruised, a small cry puncturing the silence of my room. I locked my jaw in a failed attempt to stop the hurt quiver in my bottom lip. My link to Madde was gone. I’d never hear his voice caress my mind, never feel the silken glide of shadow and darkness again.

I was on my own, my bond with his darkness killed by the ritual at the masquerade.

By those bastard robed figures. By Doyle, and no doubt his brother.

But who was the third? I remembered there being five figures at the Halloween party; what happened to them?

An easy guess would be that Poppy had been wearing one of the cloaks, and I killed her, explaining that absence. But who else?

“Happy birthday to me,” I muttered, my knees pressed to my chest and only the moonlight to witness me flick a tear off my cheek.

I couldn’t sit here and obsess over that dream the way I’d obsessed over my dream of Misery, the one I was convinced had been real, so I climbed out of bed, found slippers and a long sapphire-blue robe that reminded me too much of Madde’s eyes, and made my way slowly, quietly through the house.

Like the last time I ventured out of my room at night, it was utterly silent, the pervasive, threatening atmosphere of Darkmore strangely dormant.

Or maybe that was Cruelty’s magic I usually felt, crushing all the oxygen from the air until I was faint and a sense of foreboding crawled down my spine.

Maybe the house no longer felt like a threat because she was sleeping.

Although it was hard to imagine someone like Cruelty sleeping. She probably spent the dark hours of night planning new ways to torture me.

I reached the conservatory easily, though I kept expecting her to jump out and incapacitate me with pain like she did with the fountain when I tried to run.

I’d managed to convince her I was just jogging across the grounds, but my skin was still pink and sore where the fountain’s violent water had burned my skin.

The tonic she gave me had healed the worst of the burns, but the evidence was all over me.

A physical warning not to step out of line, because she could so easily cause me pain—and cause the same to my husband.

To Death.

Real or not, the dream with Miz had cemented my belief that the man Cruelty held captive was Death. He was here somewhere, locked up and afraid. But I would find him. I didn’t know how, but I would.

The dark plants seemed to lean towards me as I entered the conservatory, but that was just my overactive imagination talking.

I wrapped the dressing gown tighter around myself and padded down the aisles made by tall flowers and deep, verdant plants that brushed my arms with waxy leaves.

More comforting than forbidding. I let my shoulders fall and expelled the tight breath I’d trapped in my chest as I scanned the conservatory.

I was alone. No one watching me or waiting to attack.

I sank to the cold stone floor in the middle of the conservatory beside a purple hyacinth so dark it was almost black and petunias that shone ghostly silver in the moonlight. There was something about sitting with the plants, surrounded by their tender quiet and dark beauty, that brought me peace.

My birthday didn’t feel quite so bleak, especially as a casa blanca lily unfurled its white petals to my left, strangely bright and out of place among all the black flowers.

A pure, defiant light among the darkness.

I held the sight of it close to my chest and nodded, as if the flower had spoken and told me not to give up.

“I won’t,” I breathed, turning my face up into the cool ray of moonlight that slashed across the floor from a glass pane in the roof. “I won’t give up until Death is safe.”

Determination chased away my loneliness, and by the time I opened my eyes I felt better. The moonbeam still shone on me, like benefaction from a goddess, a good one, not like Cruelty or Nightmare—

Wait.

I scrambled onto my knees, frowning at the silvery light cast across on the floor, catching on the edges of an oval-shaped whirl etched into the stone. It looked almost like an eye, the spiral at the middle forming the pupil.

“What the hell?” I whispered, leaning closer and pressing my fingers against the eye, my breath trapped in the back of my throat as I expected a hatch to unlock at my touch.

“Well, that’s anticlimactic,” I muttered when the stone proved solid. I shook my head, laughing at myself. “Cruelty didn’t build this house; there’s not going to be a…secret hatch,” I finished breathlessly when I spotted another eye a few feet away.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding,” I said, climbing to my feet and staring at the floor. I looked ahead of the second swirl and, holy shit, there was a third. “It’s a trail.”

A secret path, only revealed under the moonlight.

A little shiver went through me, but it was of excitement instead of trepidation for once. I hurried to follow the curving path of spiral markings while the moon still shone down on the conservatory, my breaths loud in the silence.

There were twenty-one of them in total. By the time I found the last three it was obvious they led towards the solid wall at the back of the conservatory, where vast, waxy leaves splayed from a tall, potted monstera, obscuring the bricks.

I gently pushed the leaves aside, and my heart skipped when I saw a thin seam in the wall, following the edges of the bricks in … holy fuck. In the shape of a door.

There was enough of a gap that I could curl my fingertips around the edge and pull at the door, but it didn’t budge. Damn. It had been here for years; what if it was wedged shut?

“Come on,” I groaned, throwing my weight against it, tracing my fingers over the edge of the door for a handhold, a secret doorknob, a—

I screamed when the door swung inward all at once, my momentum sending me to the floor on my hands and knees. Pain cracked through my wrists, my knees, and I inhaled sharply, cradling my hands to my chest as a shadow fell over me.

My stomach knotted. I slowly lifted my head, and realised very quickly that I hadn’t managed to open the door from the outside. Someone else had opened it from the inside.

I saw the shape of him first, towering and imposing, a powerful body draped in black clothes, a hood pulled over his head, concealing every part of his face except a weak, butt-chin and a mouth that flattened into a sudden line of irritation.

“Holy shit,” I said, too loud. Fuck, I needed to drop my voice or Cruelty would hear me.

Although maybe that was a good thing; she was less likely to kill me than this bastard.

Murderous intensity and menace rolled off him in waves, making my bones lock, my hands curl into fists.

“You should know Cruelty considers me her bestie, so killing me would really piss her off.”

The flat line of his mouth twitched. “Noted.”

I tried to peer beyond the hood into the darkness, to see who he was. Because this wasn’t Death. It wasn’t any of my husbands. The man towering over me was the Stalker.