Page 10 of All Hallows Trick (Sick and Twisted #3)

CHAPTER NINE

MISERY

T here was a howling, drumming rage inside my head and I should have ignored it, but anything was better than the memories trying to rise up and choke me. I’d barely survived them the night of Byron’s memorial, not only because I was the one who killed Cat’s best friend but because I’d been there. The old Ford house. My home. The house where I’d lived with the Fords, where they died, one by one, at my hand. I’d built a wall of obsidian around the memories, but they always found a way through. I locked down a flinch now as Cat led us off the road and into the woods towards the tin-roofed cottage where Nightmare had experimented on students.

Come on, Cai, don’t be a misery guts. Say you’ll go to the dance with me. Percy and Theo won’t come with me, and Baldric is too pompously busy, as always. You’re my last hope, Cai, say you’ll come.

Rosalind’s voice cut so deep I expected my chest to weep blood. I killed all of them under Nightmare’s control, but I didn’t remember the others. Rosalind… I remembered every moment. And it was ripping me apart.

So, it was a lot easier to focus on the fiery emotion urging me to burn Madness from the inside out, to flay his skin meticulously with my magic, heightening every last second of his misery until he would rather die than look at my wife again.

I should have been focused on the search for the antidotes, and I was—I hated the fear I saw in my Cat’s face, hated the self-loathing I recognised in her storm-grey eyes—but my emotions were in too much of a mess to concentrate. So I planned Madde’s murder, over and over, while Virgil kicked open the door to the small cottage and Tor summoned a flicker of shadow. Madness called up a whole fucking deluge, the show off.

“Overcompensating?” I asked sweetly, hanging back as Tor and Cat followed Virgil into the place where so many had been tortured and experimented on and, no doubt, killed. It was a horrible place, the pain and suffering hanging in the air until I could taste the blood. I should have been ashamed of the power that gave me, the way I felt stronger than I had since last night.

“Threatened?” Madness threw back with the same sugary acid. He looked delighted at the prospect.

Yes. And I didn’t fucking like it. “She is my wife.”

“Our wife,” he countered with a shit-eating grin. “Better make peace with that, Mizzy boy. I think she wants to keep me.”

“Unless she keeps you in a cage, it isn’t happening,” I hissed, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t reach her as we crossed the threshold, the sense of misery and death even more concentrated than I remembered. Not that I’d been conscious of the power lingering here last time; I’d been a little more concerned with the fact my wife had become a jaguar with ram’s horns, claws, and killer teeth.

“Ooh,” Madde said, his constant optimism grinding my nerves, “like a puppy?”

I gave him a heavy look.

“You know, how mortals keep puppies in their cute little crates? If it’s like that, I am so game. You should see the amenities some of these puppies have on Instagram, it’s like a little puppy paradise in there.”

He said it so genuinely that I wanted to smack the smile off his face. “You,” I snarled, casting a look around the cottage, my hackles rising at the blood soaked into the ground, both visible and invisible, “are not a puppy.”

He pouted.

This was what I forgot about Madness. He wound me up, pissed me all the way off, but it was very difficult to get truly angry at him because he just didn’t accept it. He acted so ridiculous that my anger bounced off him like water from a duck’s back. And that made me even more pissed off. I wanted an argument, dammit.

Glass crunched under my shoe and I looked down, seeing the fragments of test tubes on the floor.

“There’s nothing here,” Cat told us, appearing in the threshold to the other room, doing a fair attempt at hiding her panic. But I saw it in the stiff way she held herself, in her hands were pressed flat to her thighs. My jealousy faded just long enough for me to cross the room and pull her into me, hugging her hard.

“We’ll find the antidote. Or we’ll make it. Or you’ll learn to live as a kickass jaguar. It’s not the end of the world, my universe.”

Her arms came around me tight enough to make me inhale sharply, a sudden flare of pain in my ribs. No, behind my ribs, between my heart and stomach. “I don’t want to be a jaguar forever. I want to be me.”

I tucked her head under my chin, holding her and pretending I wasn’t in strange pain. “We’ll figure it out.”

The warmth of her, the pressure of her against me, the squeeze of her arms, it all combined to take a weight off my chest. The jealousy still itched, but it didn’t burn.

“We’ll figure it out,” I repeated, because no way in Hell was I about to let my wife be terrified for the rest of her life. If killing Nightmare would have ended this, I’d have faced my fears and confronted her in an instant, but this was already done. A change at the biological level was hard to reverse.

I’d never heard of anything like this happening. Death gods could occasionally bestow magic on mortals, giving them temporary or permanent abilities, even lengthening their lifespans, but changing them from human to animal? It was unheard of, and I’d been around for hundreds of years. Nightmare had found a way to achieve the impossible using science, not magic. Or was it both? I squinted at the room for any hint of power hanging in the air, but everything looked normal to me. Not that I was an expert in this shit.

“Does anything look out of place to you?” I asked Virgil when he re-entered the room. “Anything that could hold or store magic? Or even extract it?”

“Until yesterday I didn’t even know magic was real,” he replied, a shadow chasing through his eyes, the expression on his face making him look ten years older. “But I’ll have a look. I’m a third year student not an expert, so you should get someone with more experience—”

“Bad idea,” Madness chipped in, lifting a test tube with silver tongs, a pair of goggles over his eyes. “We shouldn’t tell anyone outside our little circle about this. We don’t know we can trust them.”

“For once, I agree with the psychopath,” I sighed.

Cat snorted, her warm breath fanning across my neck and sending a shiver down my spine, arousal pooling at the base of my cock. “Like you’re not a psycho, too, Miz.” She drew back to give me a pointed look. “You two have a lot in common. You’ve both been stalking me, for example.”

“And you sound incredibly blasé about that,” Virgil muttered, pushing aside books and equipment to look inside cupboards and on shelves.

“She’s right, Miz,” Madness said, waving the empty test tube like a white flag. “Let’s be besties.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I’d rather drink acid.”

“Orange juice,” Madde replied with a firm nod, and no further explanation.

My brow furrowed; I gave Cat a questioning glance to which she shrugged.

“Orange juice has citric acid in it,” Tor said gruffly, brushing a hand down my back. “There’s a strange sort of logic amid all the insanity.”

“Thank you very much.” Madde sketched a bow. “Ah shit,” he sighed when the test tube fell, shattering on the floor. Cat flinched into me, turning her face into my coat, and I shot the bastard a glare as I held her to me.

“You’re fine, you’re safe,” I soothed, curving my hand over the back of her head the way Death did to comfort her. She wilted against me like I’d seen her do for him, and my heart physically strained to fit the sheer amount of love I felt for her within it. “It’s just an empty vial and Madde being a dick.”

“I know,” she breathed, but she began to shake in my arms.

And I couldn’t have my girl shaking with fear, so I slipped a hand into my pocket and opened the handy little app on my phone. It only took a few taps before her body jerked against me, her eyes flying up to mine, wide with shock and reproach. I kissed her forehead, a smile tugging at my lips.

Actually, this was exactly what I needed. Jealously tortured me, so in return I should torture my wife with the vibrator she wore for me.

“Beautiful?” Tor asked, squeezing her shoulder when Cat buried her face in my chest. I kept the vibrations low enough that no one should hear, but they were clearly enough to feel good because Cat’s fingers bit into my arm through my coat.

“I’m fine. I just need a moment,” she replied quickly, a beautiful strain in her voice.

“I’ve got her,” I promised him solemnly. Cat gripped me harder, like she was trying to hurt me. I suppressed a smile.

“I’ll help Virgil search this place,” Tor offered, his eyes lingering on her, but they gentled when he met my eyes, trusting me to take care of her. I’d tell him why she was really trembling later. He’d probably give me a dead arm and a wicked grin for it.

“What should I do?” Madness asked, bouncing on the balls of his feet, still holding the tongs.

“Curl up and die,” I replied flatly, holding Cat closer, my thumb slipping a little higher on the controls of the vibrator. Her breathing cut out. The power that filled me was a thousand times more potent than any suffering hanging around this cottage, and I soaked it up as Cat gasped and trembled against me, her fingernails biting into the sleeves of my coat.

“I hate you,” she squeaked against my chest.

“That’s a shame,” I replied, my mouth to her ear. I put the vibrator on its highest setting for a second, letting her feel what it could do, then turned it off completely. “Only good girls who don’t hate me get to come.”

My blood buzzed with it, with her, with the thrill of turning her on here, surrounded by people, none of them knowing a damn thing. I stroked up and down her back, pressing her into me so she felt how hard I was. I was desperate to be inside her.

“Miz,” she groaned. “Please.”

I pressed a lingering kiss to her temple. “Not yet. I want you aching and soaked and desperate when I finally allow you to come. I want you so mindless you’ll do anything I want and love every second of it.”

“Oh god, like the window.”

I laughed quietly, brushing a lock of pink hair off her forehead and grinning when she glared up at me. She’d barely had a taste of what I had planned. It wasn’t her fault Madness was obsessed with her, but I’d punish her for it regardless. And knowing my wife, she’d love every moment of it.

Cat was seething when she finally pulled away from me, a little tremor in her knees that made me smug. Oh, that highest setting was dangerous. I was going to have fun playing with it today. She needed the distraction from her fear, and I needed the control over her. And at least she was trembling with need now, the haunted shadow in her eyes gone as she looked around the room again.

“There’s definitely nothing here?”

“I wish I had better news for you, beautiful,” Tor said, ransacking a set of drawers. “But we’ll take everything back to Madde’s castle. There are scientists in our domain; they can try to recreate it.”

“Try,” Virgil repeated, wiping sweat from his brow as he straightened, looking around the place. “I suppose that’s the best we can expect.”

Cat chewed her bottom lip, the sight sending a vicious throb through my cock. I told it to calm the fuck down for now because her eyes were troubled again, her shoulders slumping. I wrapped my arms around her from behind, dropping a kiss on her crown. “Is there anywhere else we can search? This can’t be the only place Nightmare made people into subjects.”

Virgil sighed, his gaze distant. “Whenever she came here to check on her little experiments, I never heard her mention another location, but she wouldn’t tell us much. She spoke about other people sometimes—her terrors, her followers, and us, her subjects. And there was a woman she spoke about, she never mentioned her name, but it seemed like she was the one who… did all this.” He waved a hand at the apparatus. “The mad scientist behind the monsters.”

Cat’s flinch travelled through her body and into me. I tightened my arms around her.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean…” Virgil winced, rubbing his scarred face. “I’m tired, that just slipped out. We’re not monsters, Cat.”

“It’s fine,” she said, straightening her spine. Pride filled my chest. My girl was so fucking strong. “So, there’s no antidote here. But—” Her tone changed, her body jolting as if the spark in her brain travelled through it. “But if we find this woman Nightmare spoke about, she might be able to make more.” She moved out of the circle of my arms, ignoring my grumble, and reached for her brother’s hands, squeezing both. “There’s hope, Virgil. For us and the others.”

“Speaking of,” Madness said, appearing out of nowhere and making us all jump. “All the cells are empty. Disturbing much?”

I watched tension begin to tighten Cat’s posture again, starting at her neck, then her shoulders. Unacceptable. I needed the bright spark back, the hope.

“Deal with that later,” I said, giving the bastard a pointed stare. “For now, we have hope, and a lead to follow.”

Tor snorted, an insufferable smirk pulling at his mouth when I looked at him. He was wearing that fashion crime he called a leather jacket. I’d never tell him it looked damn good on him. “You sound like a detective.”

“Oh, I love Poirot,” Madde said genuinely, his eyes bright with excitement. “Or Miss Marple. Any Agatha Christie sleuth really. That’s a great word, don’t you think? Sleuth.” He repeated it with emphasis, elongating it, “Sleuuth. Sleeuuuuth.”

“Madde,” Cat laughed softly. I was irritated to learn his crazy shit distracted her from her fear as well as my promises or sexual torment. “You’re right. Let’s become sleuths and find this scientist.”

For the first time in days, I heard real strength enter her voice, the effect of it on her body language evident.

“You know what else I love?” Madde asked suddenly.

“No one ask what,” I huffed, looking around the room again, hoping we’d missed something, a new box of vials hidden in plain sight. There was nothing.

Silence stretched out like toffee. Virgil sighed and asked, “What?”

“Midsomer Murders!” Madde announced, and began to sing the theme, adding words where the song had none.

When Cat laughed, I switched on the vibrator at the fullest setting and watched her stumble.

The glare she shot me when I turned it off was vicious. It warmed my heart.

“While we’re in Ford’s End,” she said, scowling from me to Tor, “there’s something I need to do.”