Page 64 of All Hallows Fate

I knew I wore every bit of love I felt for my husband on my face. It overflowed my heart until my whole chest ached with it. “We find him,” I agreed. “And then we smite the bastard from existence.”

“So brutal,” Tor said in a purr, not caring that Miz’s sister watched us.

I gave him a chiding look, but the half-smile fell from my face when something reached into my chest and tugged hard. Like a tow line wrapped around my rib, pulling me out of the vision.

“We have to go,” I said urgently. “Sorry, Rosalind. Use the pen to speak to me again if you find Violence. I’ll try to bring Miz next time—”

The tug came with more insistence, and when I stumbled forward, it was in the courtyard of Death’s castle. Miz caught Tor as he tripped forward, and Madde’s arms flung around my middle, squeezing tight.

“We need to find Wil,” I said before I could lose my nerve. “Death, where would his spirit have gone?”

“We have bigger problems than that, little bride,” he said apologetically, hidden within the hood of his robe.

“This came,” Pain said, sending a scrap of paper on a tendril of shadow. My heart caught in my throat, but it wasn’t a dark green envelope.

Back stiff, I took the paper and read it. My stomach coiled and twisted. It wasn’t from Violence; it was from Orwell.

I need your help. The mirror at Ford is fucked and magic is seeping out of it. Students have gone apeshit. Villagers are turning on each other. If you don’t get here soon, they’re gonna kill us all.

43

Cat

“Violence,” I snarled, my teeth bared as I read the note. “This is him.” I locked eyes with Miz, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. Madde wouldn’t meet my eyes. “If he’s trying to lure us out, he has the upper hand.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Death agreed, draped in so much dark magic it was impossible to tell his legs had turned to fog—both of them now.

“But if we can attack him where he thinks he’s safe,” I said, catching Tor’s eye to check he was still on board, “we’ll have the advantage.”

“You know where to find him?” Madde asked with a grin, dropping a pair of pink heart-shaped sunglasses down his freckled nose to look at me.

“I have an idea,” I replied. “Where did you get those?”

“I always keep them with me for emergencies,” he replied. “Here, we can match.”

I expected an identical pair of sunglasses, but what he handed me were throwing knives with heart-shaped handles made of pink metal. I laughed, touched and my anger skipped. “Perfect. I can use these to threaten Wil.”

My husbands reacted as I expected—outbursts, raised voices, and a point blank refusal to let me anywhere near the bastard that tried to kill me on the chessboard. But when it was clear I wouldn’t be deterred from the path, they reluctantly summoned the horses and we were off.

I spun my new knife around my finger, a knot winding tighter in my gut with every minute and hour we rode across the domain. This time, it was in a new direction, winding through glens and hills dominated by sprawling towns but emptied of all people. Spirits would return to these places; the summoning stone had already begun calling them back, and when Violence was dead, we could repair the others.

I refused to give any thought to what we’d do if Violence couldn’t be killed.

He could. Joanna said as much. Rosalind wouldn’t have wasted her afterlife helping me if he was invincible. Neither would my friend have given me this to-do list, this hope, if Violence couldn’t be beaten.

But the list proved a source of anxiety; I kept taking it from my pocket to look at those two final lines.

5. A pained heart returned.

6. A kiss to save a death.

We’d fixed everything else, but what was the point when Death was still dying and Violence had Pain’s heart? He could make Pain tell him anything. It hurt me that we’d had to bind his hands.

“Wrath’s handling the processing of whatever spirits make it here,” Pain said as we rode down the winding cobbled street through another village, the houses as pale as ghosts around us, their timber beams and thatched roofs stark black. “She lives just up there.” He pointed with a shadow at the large, Tudor-style house that overlooked the village. “She usually handles the worst spirits, the most violent or unrepentant, so she’s got the cells for it.”

I glanced at him. “Wil’s in a cell?”

“After what he did to you, damn right he is,” Tor growled, clicking his tongue at Lanai when she shied away from—her own reflection in the window to her left. “That’s you, you idiot.”