Page 26 of All Hallows Trick (Sick and Twisted #3)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DEATH
M y mind worked at rapid speed even if my magic was sluggish and my body moved like the air was quicksand, I had to force my way through. I’d lost count of how many spirits had died tonight, each one taking a bite out of my strength until I was breathless and drained. Even taking three rushed steps across my destroyed garden towards Cat in her bristling jaguar form sapped my magic until I felt my mortal visage flicker, like a television losing signal.
“I’ll handle this,” Tor growled, pushing me back as if he wasn’t feeling the effects of the five pricks made in the back of his neck—each one from a fingernail. Tiny, inconsequential cuts that should have only been a nuisance. Instead, they took down a death god. He’d crawled into the living room at Madde’s castle. Crawled. He was lucky to be standing now.
“You’ll handle nothing,” I argued, startling at the thunderous rumble of my voice. It was a voice of primal danger and menace, a voice that inspired so much fear that hearts would stop, bladders would empty, and voices would break from screaming as they fled the sight of me. A voice made of true, unending darkness. Shit.
I’d lost so much strength I couldn’t even hold onto my appearance. I knew what Tor saw when he looked at me—a dark cowl hiding every part of my face except glowing white eyes and a hint of the bleached, hollow skull that had replaced my face, my body no longer muscular and strong but skeletal, the bones of my fingers visible at the sleeves of the cloak that draped me, hovering a few inches above the floor.
This was the true face of Death; everything else was just an illusion.
I was usually at my strongest in this form, my power palpable and petrifying, but now it was barely enough to call a single newly-departed spirit to my domain, let alone the thousands I should have called every minute. Fuck. The dead would linger in the mortal realm. Hauntings would increase. Poltergeists would roam free, causing havoc and threat to life. More humans would die, creating more spirits. It was a vicious cycle that chilled my blood, but it turned to pure ice when Cat let out a fierce feline roar and leapt across a shattered flower pot to Nightmare.
“Stop being stubborn,” I snapped at Tor as he kept pushing me back, both of us racing across the garden, footsteps pounding the path.
“You’re one to talk about stubbornness,” he snarled back.
It was an admission of weakness on both our parts, that running. We should have cloaked ourselves in a cloud of magic and reappeared at Cat’s side, but Nightmare and Poppy’s creatures had done too good a job weakening us. Cruelty clearly noticed it because she smiled where she watched us at the edge of the garden, looking like an ethereal ghost in the moonlight.
“Those monsters did a number on you, didn’t they?” she asked with that little smile that mocked us.
“I’ll take her,” Tor said out the corner of his mouth.
“Be careful,” I warned. I already had one love so hurt he’d passed out hours ago and hadn’t woken up even when Tor rushed in to tell us Cat was in danger. Virgil was with him, but with the antidote in his system there was little he could do if Nightmare sent her followers there.
“Oh, she’s fighting,” Cruelty said, her eyes bright as she fixated on Cat who had stopped five feet from Nightmare, both of them sizing each other up. I rushed faster across the garden, ignoring the way breath rasped through me until after a single rattling breath, it cut off entirely. That was fine. I didn’t need to breathe. It took me a moment to understand Cruelty’s meaning—Cat wasn’t fighting Nightmare, she was fighting the magic controlling her.
“Keep fighting, little bride,” I rasped, skidding along a stretch of mud to her side. “You can break through the compulsion, Cat, just keep fighting.”
I’d sent a panicked cry for help to every other death god, but until they got here, if they came at all, I was on my own. I trusted Tor to distract Cruelty—and didn’t allow myself to think about what it might cost him—but I was the lone person between my girl and Nightmare. I’d been here once before, on the banks of the lake at Ford, standing between her and Misery. I thought I’d won that fight, thought I’d banished her so far from any realm that there was no hope of a single scrap of her remaining. I didn’t realise it had been only a stepping stone in her long game. But I looked directly in her mismatched eyes now and vowed it was over.
“You wanted to face me, to bring me down.” I spread my skeletal arms. “So do it.”
Cat let out a small sound behind me, and my heart clenched at the strength in that sound. She was a mortal fighting the goddess of cruelty, and that tiny whimper meant she was winning. I straightened as much as I could, the dark silk of my cloak fluttering around my body as I hurled myself at Nightmare, my last scrap of power coiled into a tight ball of darkness I thrust at her chest.
She evaded easily. My last scrap of power, and I’d wasted it. And judging by the soft exhale of laughter that left her, Nightmare knew I had nothing left. She looked no different than she had that day on the lake when I vanquished her—same poisonous beauty, same grace, same flash of delight in her eyes at our suffering. It was the same power that slammed into me at the slightest flick of her pinky finger, sending me staggering back so hard I hit Cat and dropped to the ground.
The castle and garden ripped away, leaving me in a black velvet space I’d only witnessed once, before I gouged her eye and trapped her in a prison I never expected her to escape.
“Have fun getting out this time,” her cool voice echoed all around me, but I couldn’t see her, couldn’t see anything except—a light began in the distance, little more than a pinprick.
It was the voice that reached me first. Not Nightmare’s this time.
“It’s Dalian,” Edelira, my sister hissed. I felt the imprint of her touch even hundreds of years later, burning my forearm where she’d grabbed me when she raced into the back room of our little house in Cubanascnan.
Dalian. The name struck me like a whip and I spun in the darkness, searching its pitch blackness for him, that heartless brute. My mother had stolen from him after a long campaign of tricks and treachery. Now, I’d call her a conwoman. Then, I knew no different. She was our mother, and she provided for us, and that was all that mattered. Until she conned the wrong man. Until he found us where we’d fled to with all his money. Until he brought a mob of friends and bludgeoned us to death, one by one.
My mother was first. Then Kenia, my youngest sister. Dunia, my middle sister. Edelira and her husband and their four-year-old daughter, until I was the only living member of the Casimiro family. And then they killed me, my lungs punctured by the razor edges of a rake in an undignified death, a slow, brutal murder. Our neighbour hadn’t hesitated to answer my scream for help, and he’d died right alongside us. Eight people, slaughtered in less than an hour.
My mouth opened in the darkness, my voice floating out strong, nothing like the papery rasp my voice was now.
“Get Lur and hide under the bed. Dunia, get in the alcove, don’t come out for anything.”
“You have to run, Jermaine,” Dunia whispered, her brown face bleached of all vibrancy. “You’re the fastest. Run and get help.”
“I can’t—”
A scream made us both flinch, and little Lur began to cry in her mother’s arms while Edelira shushed her. Mama—that was Mama screaming.
“Run! Go!” Dunia hissed. I didn’t hesitate this time. I made sure my sister and niece were hidden, Dunia secured where no one would see her, then I ran into the kitchen where the windows were big enough to climb out of. I barely felt the rasp of stone that scratched my stomach through my clothes, scuffing my skin. I could feel it now, in the thick darkness, as if the graze was brand new. I felt the hot slap of the wind, the way it cloyed in my lungs. I felt fear quicken my heart even if my own lay dead and empty in my chest.
Mama screamed again, fainter as I raced as fast as I could for the house next door. The sudden severance of her scream made my feet falter on the ground, stones digging into my bare soles. The silence was louder than any other sound, so deafening it swallowed even my own frantic breaths.
I forgot my body was in the garden, uselessly prone in a last attempt to protect Cat. I forgot even about the velvet darkness Nightmare had thrown me into and left me to be tormented by my past, my memories. My nightmares.
I knew, in the back of my mind, I needed to return to my body, but the pulse of urgency was like a whisper compared to the next scream. Kenia.
It knocked me back into motion, and I ran as fast as I physically could for help, forgetting all about Nightmare, about Cruelty, about the pale-haired, silver-eyed woman I loved.