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“You, too,” he replied, gathering enough power to make the floor tremble, the carpet pulling itself from the wood, nails flying free.

I grabbed Death’s wrist and waited until Cruelty was distracted by a double-ended attack, then wrapped us in darkness and jumped past her.

We hit the carpet where it was still attached—for now; Passion’s magic surged down the hall and into the foyer where the shadows had dropped us, rushing ever closer.

I didn’t bother to search the foyer; I strengthened the shield Death already had wrapped around us and headed for the stairs. Death was right behind me, silent and tense. I knew he’d used more magic on that shield than normal, knew he was still weak. I could sense it, gnawing at me.

“Why upstairs?” he asked quietly.

“Well, Passion’s magic isn’t ripping up the flooring up here for one,” I replied in the same tone, scanning the foyer above, sending out feelers to pick up any hint of power. Cat was here; she had to be.

“Can you sense her?”

“No.” And I didn’t fucking like it. “I think something’s blocking me.”

“And me. Violence?”

“He’s certainly capable of it,” I agreed, my upper lip curled back.

We reached the second floor and enough magic slammed into me that my shift came instantly.

I hovered over the ground, draped in darkness and death, the world lit in a grey haze.

My senses were stronger like this, which made it a little fucking suspicious that I couldn’t get even a glimmer of my wife’s soul. Where the fuck are you, Cat?

“Which way?” Death demanded, his dark hands curled into fists as he eyed the left corridor, then the right.

I angled my head towards the left, the ragged ends of my cloak skimming the floor as I pushed out more power, my whole awareness searching for even a glint of torment and suffering and—

A deafening blast came from the other side of the landing, and I whipped around to see a door slam into the wall, then disintegrate into ashes. Inky smoke poured from the doorway it had occupied, thick and rapidly condensing, wrapped around a figure.

“That way,” I corrected, and Death and I surged towards the smoke-shrouded figure.

I was ready for Violence, ready to match his twisted brand of sadism with my own cold fury.

If he’d laid a single fucking finger on my wife, harmed a single millimetre of her body, snapped a single damn strand of her hair, I would eviscerate him and leave nothing behind.

I moved as fast as wind in this form. It was a matter of seconds to cross the distance, to surge like lightning at that figure, thrusting skeletal hands through the cloud of smoke like it was nothing and wrapping my hands around his thick, meaty throat—

Um. Scrawny throat, actually.

A fist drove into my solar plexus. A bright eruption of pain sent me sprawling across the wall opposite the dark cloud. That shouldn’t have been possible. No one could punch me in this form; I was barely corporeal. But mother fucker it hurt.

It hurt…

A rattling laugh filled my chest, and it hurt to laugh, but it felt damn good too.

“Been working on that right hook, I see,” I remarked, reaching for my human form and landing on two feet on the carpeted hallway just as the dark cloud parted enough to reveal a familiar face.

Gentle and kind, a soft face that filled with relief as I watched, though his green-brown eyes remained shadowed and dull. 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 to us.

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 who had to have attacked us with this sudden pain. Because the alternative… If this was Cat’s suffering…

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.”

“I’ve never seen this part of Darkmore before,” Pain confessed. He added, “Seeing being relative, obviously. It’s not see -seeing, more getting an impression from my shadows and—”

“Pain,” I interrupted sharply.

“Right, right, time and place,” he agreed. “Death, how you holding up?”

“Fine.” But there was strain in Death’s voice, and that threw fuel on the fire of my worry.

I needed to find Cat, track down the others, and get us the fuck home.

Between us, we had enough power to shield the castle, or we could go to Madde’s home.

I didn’t fucking care as long as we were all together and Cruelty and her sick fuck of a brother could get nowhere near us.

“How much power have you got, Pain?” I asked, buffeted by my shadows as I ran faster. 3 “Getting to Cat won’t be easy.”

“A metric shit tonne,” he replied, not even sounding out of breath at the fast pace. “Every time they … when Cat … it gives me power. I fucking hate it, but it gives me power.”

“You can use that to help us get her out,” Death said, half growling, half comforting.

I didn’t have the mental capacity for comfort right now, only ripping apart every last threat to the people I loved.

“There!” I opened my eyes, blinking them into focus and startling as I found a short corridor that dead ended ahead of us in a single red door. My gaze went right to it and the pain behind my ribs cut out abruptly.

“They know we’re here,” Death said warily. “Shields up.”