Page 1 of All Hallows Trick (Sick and Twisted #3)
PROLOGUE: THE WATCHER IN THE DARKNESS
I t wasn’t often that someone could call him from the depths of his castle. The sheer level of brutality required to make even a drop ripple through his ocean of darkness was… unfathomable. He was a death god, but death could be found everywhere. It was pedestrian, as common as breathing. But this kind of death, the kind of violence that sent ripples through him like a shiver down his spine, could never be called common. It was delicious.
He’d felt it three years ago, on the seventeenth of June. It was the crack of insanity that caught his attention first—the break. It always came before a death this dark. A splinter of the mind, or a fracture through a heart, or a crack so severe it divided psyches into before and aftermath. It was the latter that happened with his lioness, a true and total break. She was pushed and pushed until she snapped, and the snap was so profound that it severed her into two people—before and after.
He’d watched from the dark where she’d never see him, even if she sensed his presence. That splash of insanity in his darkness gained his full attention, so he’d gone to her, to watch, to witness the glorious death she dealt with his own eyes.
And it had been glorious indeed. His breath quickened even now when he recalled it.
He’d never seen darkness wrap around a woman quite so quickly, never seen so much rage pour out of someone in dark eyes and gritted teeth and ragged, heaving breaths. He’d known the boy threatening her, blackmailing her would die days before the shadow of Death arrived. He’d lurked in the darkness watching the girl spiral, watching her trip closer and closer to madness’s embrace with every hour that passed, her hands pulling at her hair, stress making her eyes wild. It was a wildness that made him so goddamn hard.
No man can harm you without consequence, he whispered to her mind, stroking her with a tendril of darkness. Shouldn’t he be as afraid of you as you are of him? Shouldn’t he be pushed to breaking too?
Even as she slept, her hands curled into fists, her body restless, beautifully wrathful. The watcher sat at the end of her bed and never took his eyes off her, feeling his heart quicken with thrill and a slow, dark curl of obsession. Something about the violence coiling inside her called to him. It would be a beautiful explosion. He couldn’t wait to taste it.
It was almost worth the horrific death that made him a god, almost worth all the pain and betrayal and trauma. Deep down, she was every bit as dangerous and broken and mad as he was. And while he’d sensed broken mortals before, there was something about this one.
Anyone with a heart of such ugliness has no place in this world. He should be struck down, should die screaming for mercy.
He could picture it, the images so vivid, and his breath caught in his throat. Would she strangle him? Slam the heavy base of her lamp into his skull? Throw him down the solid stone steps at the back of her home?
His blood will spill and he will die screaming. The ripples through his darkness assured him of that. She was fracturing, every little stress piling up until he could taste it.
She didn’t disappoint. As two gods watched, one oblivious to the other, the girl, his lioness, his Cat, finally snapped and bludgeoned her blackmailer to death. His head caved in, blood and brains strewn across the dark lawn behind her home. And still she drove the rock into him, until her hands were stained, drops of rich crimson adorning her face with ethereal beauty. Fury and insanity twined into gorgeous gold in her eyes. And his heart thumped faster, the obsession growing.
Beautiful and deadly. And mine.
The ripples she’d made in his darkness became a tidal wave, and he shuddered, a thrill going down his spine as she caved her tormentor’s head in. Mine, his heart decided, her darkness a siren song to his power, her fury never-ending. She would never be a woman to break, never a woman beaten or diminished or small. A force of nature. A wild creature with a wealth of violence in her heart.
He would never expect her to hide that violence or cover it with a harmless mask; he’d never expect a lioness to don the guise of a sheep. He would love her as she was, with blood on her hands, teeth bared, and her whole body shaking with vengeance and justice. And he would be safe in her shadow. No one could hurt him again.
Perfection, he breathed, stroking a hand down her soul, and the light and dark of her, the pitch black and bright sunshine melded into one. Kindness and cruelty lived side by side within her, and at the feel of her welcoming his darkness instead of rejecting it… his breathing hitched.
I belong to this woman, he decreed, long before Death crept from the shadows and strode to the blood-covered girl in the grass, long before Nightmare and Halloween and a curse made her their bride.
She was his. And every part of him belonged to her. And it was time they all knew.