Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MISERY

I t started eight hundred years ago. I'd been Misery for so long I'd lost count of the years, inflicting turmoil and suffering on anyone I met, only my fellow gods immune. Now, I'd call the period of listlessness and melancholy that swallowed me for two hundred years depression, a condition that could affect anyone and was nothing to feel shame about or guilt over. But guilt and shame had always been too easy to summon. I'd called that time the Woe.

It was the Woe that led me from Death's domain, where I was loved and treasured but depressed, to Earth. To prove I could sow something other than misery.

Fate, the universe, magic—whatever you called the higher power that watched over all, it had a sick sense of humour. In the castle, I was a noble, respected and feared as a god, with anything I could ever need at my fingertips. Fruit and spices and the finest tea leaves. Death even gifted me a gaiwan so delicate and expensive I could have only dreamed of owning it when I was alive. Before I was killed, before the betrayal of my only friend stabbing me, very literally, in the back gave me the power of Misery.

It was luck—bad or good depending on how you viewed it—that made me Misery. Betrayed, murdered, with my soul steeped in misery at the very moment the previous Misery died. I never found out what happened to the goddess who was Misery before me, but it was almost impossible for a god to die. I had to wonder if she'd been betrayed, too.

Fate's sick sense of humour was why I entered the mortal realm a god with every finery I could desire and landed on worn cobblestones in the clothes of a beggar. I wanted more than the constant woe I felt, more than the misery I forced others to feel by my very nature, and fate gave me more. I got streets that smelled like literal shit, rumbling carriage wheels that splashed me with gutter water, and humans that sneered at me as if I hadn't appeared from nowhere. They weren't accustomed to seeing someone in shabby clothes in such a prestigious village, or maybe being Chinese was what shocked them. It certainly shocked a few tongues loose later, when a kind, blue-eyed, dark-haired woman pulled me out of the gutter and into a life of even more glitz, glamour, and privilege than I'd experienced in Death's domain.

It was a drug—the wealth, the balls, the diamonds and pearls, the richest wine in goblets adorned with jewels that were so beautiful they could have been set in any necklace, any crown. And the most beautiful jewel of all was the woman who took me in, introduced me to her family, and was so lovely I could call her nothing but my sister. Her brothers, too, became my brothers. Her parents, my parents.

I had only hazy memories of the time before I was Misery, but I remembered disapproving glances and the weight of expectations shot my way when guests weren't looking. We weren't nobility, weren't even wealthy, but my mother acted like she was Wu Zetian, Empress of China. The Fords were nothing like that. Judgemental, certainly, and privileged as one would expect for a family who owned an entire island. But warm. Kind. I marvelled as Guinevere Ford set her hands on either side of her son Theodore's face and told him she loved him.

It wasn't my first experience of love. Hundreds of years with Death and Torment had taught me the grace and beauty of loving someone else, the quiet joy and exhilaration of being loved. As a child, I'd watched my friends' parents exchange tender embraces and loving words with them, a twist of jealousy in my chest. But living with the Fords was my first brush with familial love. Because that's what I became: family. As loved as Rosalind, Percival, and Baldric. Even if no one could ever be as loved as little Joanna. She was only four when darkness suffocated any happiness I'd had. When the Woe returned.

I felt it now, the heavy, oppressive cloud of depression weighing my chest, pushing my shoulders down, draining all my energy and strength. And why shouldn't I wallow in bed all day? I was a tool of Nightmare. Fatal to the people I loved.

Every last member of the Ford family died the last time she took control of me. I couldn't let her take Tor and Death from me, too. She'd already taken Cat.

Cat, who was smart and sharp-tongued and beautifully kind-hearted. Cat, who I missed so much it was like a thorn gouging deeper every day. Cat, whose suffering and pure, relentless misery I felt grow every day and could do nothing to stop from my self-imposed prison. Cat, who hated me.

I rolled over in bed and stared at Peach where she sat on a pile of clothes in the corner, foregoing her expensive enclosure. She stared back with either concern, confusion, or an eagerness to be fed. Probably the latter. Any affection she had for me was what I'd deluded myself into believing.

"I can't even blame any of you for hating me," I told her, choking on the words. "Not when Nightmare can get to me at any time. Not when she—when I killed Byron."

I wanted to go to Cat, wanted to take her misery away, give her peace, but I'd need to touch her for that, and even in her sleep I knew she'd never welcome my touch. Not when these hands stabbed her friend.

You can fight her. Please. Please don't do this.

I pressed my hands over my ears and screwed my eyes shut. But that only made her screams louder. Byron was dead at my hand. Rosalind, too.

It was only a matter of time before someone was next.