Page 43

Misery

I f 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 had some effect. 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, this is 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 the darkness 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.”

“Yes,” I said, “when I first made contact, I felt—”

Something strong ripped me from the sky and a rattling hiss left my skeletal throat as I careened at the ground.

The impact shouldn’t have hurt, but this was still a physical form despite being grotesque and chilling.

I slammed into stone paving slabs so hard a groan escaped, pain ripping across the back of my skull.

For a moment I laid there, dazed. I couldn’t believe one of them had dragged me from the sky. The fucker had ripped my cloak.

“Hey!” Madde yelled, magic carrying his voice so far they probably heard it across the valley. “That’s my brother-husband, you dick!”

I groaned, rolling onto my front. “That’s really fucking untrue.”

I pushed onto my hands and knees—and snarled when harsh fingers grabbed my hair, ripping my head back. I glared up into the leaf-covered face of a man in a jaunty pirate hat. Bastard.

“This is only hot when Tor or Death does it,” I snarled, and reached up, grabbing my hair and ripping it out of their grip.

I had to sacrifice a few strands to get free, and fuck it hurt as they tore free.

Tears lined my eyes and—oh, for fuck’s sake.

The fall had ripped me out of death god form. No wonder the impact hurt so badly.

“Get away from him!” Madde screamed and body-slammed the topiary in the pirate hat. He drove fist after fist into the man, breaking branches and opening cuts on his own fists in the process.

“Madde.” I caught his shoulder. “That’s enough. It won’t keep him down.”

There was a bright gleam of instability in his blue eyes. His nostrils flared. There was a moment when he considered ignoring me to keep beating the topiary man. Instead, he sagged with a soft growl and—and ripped the tricorn hat from his head.

“Madde, don’t—” I began. Pointlessly, because he’d already wedged it onto his own head. I sighed, but a smile tugged at the edges of my mouth. Life was certainly never dull with Madness around. “Be careful; that thing could come to life, too.”

“What if it pokes branches through your skull and into your brain?” Wrath shouted from across the garden where she wrestled with a plant woman in a ballgown made of leaves. “Imagine if you’re controlled by a plant hat, that would be so fucked up.”

“Nope,” Madde blurted, ripping it off his head and tossing it across the lawn. “Nope.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, even with Tor and Death working their way into the manor, even with Cat being tortured. Although … it had been long, long minutes since the last spike of pain. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. What if she—

“Guys!” Wrath shouted with enough alarm that I focused on her and grabbed Madde’s arm to keep him close. “What the fuck are they doing?”

I crossed the paved square to reach her, and Hunger joined us, all of us rumpled and beaten. There was a darkness in his eyes that I didn’t recognise, but it was wiped away by surprise when he looked towards the manor.

“Fuck,” I spat when I saw what had gained their attention. All the topiaries had gathered near the back of the manor, and when I say gathered I mean they were merging.

“I really hate surprises,” Wrath muttered. “Have I told you guys that lately? Just a real surprise hater. Big fan of things being mundane and precedented.”

The mangled topiaries we’d fought stretched out their branches and crumpled leaves and joined together, until they were three times the size and neither male nor female, neither elegantly dressed or naked.

I couldn’t tell where the ones I’d fought ended up, especially when six merged, then ten, then all of them.

“This is bad,” Madde said with a wince, edging closer to me. “If we couldn’t kill them when they were small, how are we supposed to kill a monster topiary? That thing is huge.”

A shiver of apprehension skittered across my skin.

I was so used to calling on my magic to handle any situation that I didn’t know how to fight this.

It was almost as big as the manor, and it was kneeling.

When the green man rose to its feet… Cold gripped me until I shuddered.

It was taller than the manor, as high as the glass conservatory we could just make out from this side of Darkmore.

“What do we do?” Madde demanded, the whites of his eyes showing as he threw a panicked look at me, then Hunger and Wrath.

“Run!” Hunger roared, his deep voice crackling through the garden like thunder.

Like he’d summoned it, like his low voice shook it from the clouds above, rain poured in a sudden deluge.

The sharp scent of it filled my lungs, clearing my panic for a split second until the green man shook its limbs, leaves raining down around us, and it took a mighty step. The ground quaked with the force of it.