Page 6

Cat

D read wrapped itself like an octopus around my chest the moment I woke, and for long minutes I kept my eyes closed and wished away the entirety of yesterday.

No ominous message luring me to Death’s garden, no Cruelty lying in wait with an offer that was equal parts gift and curse, no Nightmare with her creatures, no attack, no Stalker, no blood spilled and bones broken and screams rending the air.

Nightmare had been trying to draw me away from my mates for weeks.

She managed to achieve it once, but she hadn’t given up even when I went back to them.

Cruelty actually achieved that goal, and drew me away from them by using Miz’s life as leverage, but why?

Nightmare’s goals were her goals. Why did she want me away from my men so badly?

Just so we could be besties, or so the domain would fall?

Today, I needed to find out why, but I couldn’t ask her outright. I had to be clever.

I rubbed the crust of sleep from my eyes and braced myself for the day.

It would drain all my energy, but I had to make her think I was on side, even if I played the reluctant friend role.

Cruelty had to believe I was beaten, that she’d won.

You catch more flies with honey. Mum said those words often, and I knew her advice was sound.

Pain clutched my heart at the thought of her, of my dad, and I was suddenly homesick for two places, for two groups of people.

But I wouldn’t be going back to either of them today.

Today was for Cruelty.

So, I sighed, opened my eyes, and—froze.

There was a flower laid on the navy velvet pillowcase beside me. Long, sturdy stem, bright green petals. A lime-green tulip.

I was sitting in a second, my heart crashing into my ribs.

Death had reached me here, even with the gates turned to mist. How?

It didn’t matter; all that mattered was I wasn’t alone.

Tears burned the backs of my eyes as I picked up the tulip, a smile tugging the edge of my mouth when I saw there was a small cream label tied to the step with string.

Meet me in the kitchen.

I couldn’t breathe, hope expanding so vast it choked me.

It wasn’t safe to be here. Cruelty would be furious if she saw him.

But I was so desperate to feel his arms around me, to wrap myself around him, to lose myself in his warmth and safety and the deep, murmuring heat of his voice, that I didn’t care.

I threw off the lace nightgown and dressed in the clothes I wore yesterday—even bloody, dirty clothes were better than the extremely dated dresses and blouses in the wardrobe across from the bed—and hurried downstairs, the tulip clutched in my hand.

It took me a few tries to find the corridor that led to the kitchen, but then I was bursting through the door, searching the dark green cupboards and overflowing pots of herbs for Death. He wasn’t here. Instead Cruelty stood at the marble island arranging—

A vase of lime-green tulips.

My shoulders sank. My heart crashed.

“Ah, there you are!” she said, her whole face lighting up. Sunlight through the big window caught her blue eyes and made them sparkle. “Did you like your gift?”

Speaking felt like crunching glass and forcing it down my throat. “They’re my favourite.”

“I know!” She beamed. “A good friend should always know her best girl’s favourite flower. Do you know mine?”

“Uh—” I was still grieving the perfect morning I’d been about to have. Death wasn’t here. He’d never been here. “Dark roses?” I guessed. “They’re beautiful but the thorns could easily cut and draw blood. That would be cruel.”

Cruelty’s grin grew even bigger, and she clapped her hands. “I love it! You’re completely wrong, but I love it. You know me so well.”

I knew fuck all about her, but sure, if she wanted to delude herself. More flies with honey than vinegar, I reminded myself, fighting back the crushed glass feeling in my throat, the pressure in my chest.

“What about the flowers in the conservatory?” I asked, approaching carefully, the way I would a wild wolf.

“Smart girl,” Cruelty said, finishing the arrangement of tulips in the clear vase with a flourish. “What do you think?”

“Beautiful,” I croaked, wanting my husbands, wanting to be anywhere but here.

Alright, enough self-pity. Time to encourage Cruelty’s best friend delusion.

“Please tell me there’s breakfast. I’m starving,” I said, forcing myself to sound friendly. If it would avenge Byron and Honey, I could play nice.

“Of course! How do you like blueberry pancakes?”

“Love them.”

“Perfect!” Cruelty skipped to the fridge, the hood of the lace dress she always wore fluttering around her face. “I’m sorry about the mess around the house. Our cleaner’s gone on an extended absence.”

“It’s fine,” I said, barely paying attention. I needed to word things very carefully, so I maintained this bestie facade. “I have a question about Nightmare.”

“My cleverest trick to date!” Cruelty’s response was excitement, not the cagy suspicion I expected. Okay. I needed to remember she was insane. “What’s your question?”

“She compelled Misery and managed to keep that connection alive even decades later,” I said, curling my hands into fists behind the counter where she couldn’t see. “How did she do that? I thought death gods couldn’t control each other.”

“A perversion of magic,” Cruelty said with a quiet laugh, pulling a pre-made pancake batter from the fridge and removing a frying pan from a shelf full of them.

She seemed at home here, like she genuinely spent time in this manor and hadn’t just used it as somewhere to lure me out to.

It was like she brought a friend home. It was messing with my head a little.

“She had his blood, and found a way she could use it with her power over nightmares.” She turned to me, bright-eyed and smiling, like she was sharing a secret or swapping gossip.

“I encouraged all her little experiments, but sometimes even I didn’t know what she did.

I have a theory she dripped nightmares directly into his blood until she was a part of him. How twisted is that?”

She laughed like she loved it.

“That’s my husband,” I said quietly, pulling myself onto a stool for something to do. “I hate the way she used him and tortured him. He didn’t deserve that.”

“You really love him,” Cruelty mused, pouring batter into the pan when the oil was hot. She glanced across at me, waggling her eyebrows. “He must be incredible in the bedroom.”

Bile hit my throat. I was going to throw up. Pretending to be BFFs was one thing, but gossiping about my sex life? Absolutely fucking not.

“He’s mine,” I breathed, dropping my gaze to the quartz island before I choked her. “I’ll kill anyone who hurts him or any of my husbands.”

Cruelty made a contemplative sound. “I’d do the same for my brother, so I understand. And Nightmare’s gone now, so all that nasty business is over. You did a spectacular job of that.” Her laugh filled the kitchen. “What a delightful mess you made of her. Better than I could have dreamed.”

Be friendly, be friendly. Honey, not vinegar.

I pulled my snarl into something smile-ish. “I enjoyed killing her. She deserved it. Eating her was disgusting, though.”

“Eesh.” Cruelty faked a shudder. Or maybe her horror at cannibalism was real. “What did she taste like?”

“Vomit.”

She snorted, like this was normal, like we always spoke about that one time I ate a goddess’s still-warm corpse. “Yours or hers?”

“Mine.”

“Well, forget all about that yucky meal and eat this one.” She put a plate of pancakes in front of me, and as much as I wanted to find my own food that I knew wasn’t drugged or poisoned, turning my nose up at her cooking wouldn’t help this friend charade.

So I cut off a small corner, and when it didn’t taste metallic, bitter, or overly sweet, I doused it in the maple syrup she slid across the counter and dug in.

See, you can trust me, I said with every bite. We’re friends, so you can tell me all your secrets.

“What are we going to do about the gates collapsing?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Cruelty as she sauntered over to a modern coffee machine. “I presume you want to go back to the domain at some point.”

“At some point,” she agreed.

“I want to visit my men,” I said, carefully managing my words. If I said I wanted to leave forever, I didn’t know how she’d react.

“It’s not as easy as just fixing the gates.

” She sighed, and I must have worded it well because her eyes weren’t flashing with rage.

She leaned against the island and met my eyes, unable to suppress a smile.

“The realm itself has fallen into imbalance. Your men have been very, very naughty boys.” Her smile became a grin and she leaned closer, her blue eyes wide as she whispered, confessing a secret that delighted her.

“Every one of us has a role to play. My job is to make humans cruel. Their jobs are to give them torment, misery, madness, and to see them safely to death. But they were a trifle distracted by their pretty little bride.”

She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger and I jumped hard, my heart knocking into my ribs. I managed not to flinch through sheer effort, though the pancakes churned in my stomach.

“What?” I whispered, my voice faint as her words registered.

I distracted them from their jobs? I knew they were supposed to influence humans in the living realm, but I hadn’t spared much thought about what that meant, or how much time it might take.

How much time they gave up from their work to spend with me.

I thought it was an innate, automatic thing.

Even if I had realised, I wouldn’t have expected the realm to collapse because they stopped spreading misery, torment, madness, and death.

“What does that mean? Humans have stopped dying? No one’s in misery or torment? People have stopped going mad?” That was crazy. Of course they were still experiencing those things. Of course people were still dying.

Right?

“Exactly!” Cruelty laughed. “It’s complete pandemonium up here. Mortals need balance—kindness and evil, good and wickedness. It’s the natural way of things. If we didn’t have evil, there’d be too many humans on the planet. We’re death gods for a reason. We’re all things that can bring about death.”

I thought about Madde calling himself Love and wondered if he wasn’t far off. Love could kill people.

“I owe them, really,” she said with a little laugh, reaching across to pat my hand. “It makes it so easy to slip in and make even more mortals cruel. We’ll be right back on track for deaths in no time.”

God, that was depressing. In the absence of misery, madness, and torment, more cruelty would fill the void. We didn’t need more cruelty in the world, but I couldn’t say that to her. “What happens if balance isn’t restored? The realm will be lost forever?”

“Oh, the domain’s already gone.” She waved a hand.

“It started fading the moment Nightmare cursed you, but your absence was the real death knell. I sensed it roll in, that awful white fog. I had such a lovely home in the domain, and the fog swallowed it whole. All my rose bushes and rhododendrons disappeared overnight.”

She looked pensive for a moment. Did she really care more about some flowers than the other gods?

“What do you mean the domain’s already gone. Where did it go? And how do I get there with the gates turned to fog?”

Cruelty sighed, giving me a disappointed stare. “I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with the gates. Look at this house—look at the garden, the conservatory! We have everything we could ever need here.”

Except for my husbands. But I got the sense I’d pushed her far enough today and … wait. “What do you mean my absence is the reason the domain fell?”

“When you pretended to only want Death.” Cruelty took my empty plate and placed it in the sink, along with her coffee cup.

I wondered if I’d earn her wrath for asking to use the coffee machine, too.

God knew I could use caffeine this morning.

I must have looked a little too longingly, because Cruelty laughed and grabbed a deep green mug from the shelf above her head, feeding another pod into the machine.

“That was my idea at first, but Nightmare was especially talented in torturing you. She made it a thousand times worse than I ever would have. I just wanted her to lock Virgil up somewhere to use against you. It was her idea to make him a subject.”

I sucked on a tooth so I didn’t snap at her. Be friendly, be friendly. “The domain’s been falling all that time?” Shit, that was weeks ago. “How?”

“You were cursed to be their wife, Kitty. There’s a bond there between you and the gods and the domain.

When you left… Well, death gods can’t leave.

It’s all in the intention, you see. Little visits to other places are fine, as long as you’re planning to go back.

You never planned to return, so it all fell apart.

Shame, really. They were really pretty rhododendrons.

Speaking of gardens!” She handed me the coffee and gave me an excited grin.

“Drink up, because I’ve got a surprise for you. ”

Her last surprise got my hopes up, then crushed my heart. I glanced at the lime tulips in front of me.

Dread condensed in my stomach at the thought of more surprises.