Chapter 46

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CAT

" Y ou don't know what he's like, Cat," Phil said in a voice twisted up with distress, stirring me from sleep. My head pounded a striking beat, but I kept my face still, listening as she spoke. "He's scary when he wants something. The face he puts up is all a fa?ade, but I promise I never faked anything. It killed me to lie to you, to lead you away. I really wanted to be your friend, but he knows about the money I took from the charity bank account and he threatened to tell everyone. I know he meant it. I'm so sorry, please don't hate me. This isn't so bad right?"

My head hurt so viciously it was like being struck by an anvil every two seconds, my shoulders screamed with some unknown injury, and I had to live with the knowledge that my friend had hit me over the head. So yeah, it was so bad.

Who was the he Phil was talking about? Someone else I knew? God, I trusted Phil. She was bubbly and sweet and genuinely caring, and it was like a stake driven through my heart that she'd hurt me like this.

"I have to do what he tells me," Phil went on. It sounded like there were tears in her voice. "I'm sorry. I hope you can forgive me." I froze when gentle fingers pushed a lock of hair from my face. "I have to leave. I'm so sorry, but I have instructions. But you can get through whatever he has planned; you're a fighter."

And she was dead to me. If she was going to leave me to his mercy, whoever the fuck he was, she was no friend at all. It occurred to me that Alastor could be the one blackmailing her to hurt me, kidnap me, and leave me here to do whatever he planned to me.

Cold dripped down my spine. I had to get out of here before he came.

When Phil moved back, her footsteps scuffing the ground, I opened my eyes and rapidly surveyed the place where she'd left me. I lay on a cold concrete floor, the walls made of the same grey, austere material, and skeletal metal shelves held jars and bottles and vials of things I'd rather not identify. Ice trickled down my spine. I had the sense that I'd been thrown into a mad scientist's laboratory.

The joke I'd made about the island of Dr Moreau when we took the ferry to Ford's End all those months ago came back to me. The sound of Phil's footsteps knocked me out of my frozen fear, and I jumped to my feet, seizing a solid metal test tube stand from a wooden table covered in scratches and dings and Bunsen burners. I didn't allow myself to hesitate; I launched myself at her, swinging the hunk of metal.

The dull thud of metal meeting flesh was satisfying revenge for what she'd done to me. "You think you can just dump me here and leave?" I didn't recognise the laugh that left me, but I did recognise the flow and rush of violence in my soul as my darkness rose.

Make her scream. Make her beg.

Working on it, I replied, not pausing to wonder if I was truly going mad. If hearing voices was the first sign of madness, what was talking back to them?

"I'm sorry," Phil cried, stumbling back and clutching her head where I'd slammed the hunk of metal into her. 1

"Not good enough," I snarled, my darkness flowing faster, reaching further. My hand was steady on the test tube stand as I raised it again; Phil flinched back. "Do you have any idea what could happen to me, wounded and unconscious on the floor, like some kind of fucked up offering? I could be raped. I could be killed."

Phil recoiled again, her back hitting one of the tall shelves full of jars and bottles. Some contained liquids in varying colours. Some contained… other things. Floating, opaque shapes I didn't want to recognise as organs. Phil didn't seem to care that jars of lungs and livers touched her. The only thing on her tanned face was horror and apology. I ignored the latter, hardening my heart.

"I don't have a choice," she breathed, tears streaking her cheeks. Her glossy brown hair was ragged, her cheeks splashed with colour. Good. She should be afraid.

Another laugh slipped from me, darker than the last. "I've heard that before. You were blackmailed, you didn't have a choice, your secret was going to be leaked. Newsflash—you did have a choice, and you chose to protect yourself and leave me for dead. We're not friends, Phil. We're not even enemies. You're dead to me."

She flinched like I'd struck her again, and the sight of her fear only made my heart beat faster, skipping beats inside my ribcage. What right did Phil have to fear? I was the victim she'd hit over the head and dumped on the floor in some fucked up laboratory.

I ignored the way the jars on the shelves were going fuzzy at the edges, the room beginning to sway. Probably the hole in the back of my fucking head.

"Was it you?" I demanded, jerking forward a step. Phil shrank back, stumbling away from the shelf of organs towards the open maw of a dark hallway. "Were you the one who summoned Nightmare? Did you swap your Halloween costume for a robe that night and summon her with that fucked up ritual? Are you the reason Mason, Rone, Orwell, and Milani are dead?"

"No!" Phil's eyes were wide with panic and a trickle of shock, her hands raised to protect herself from me when I advanced with the hunk of heavy metal in my hand. The rack was smeared with her blood, and I imagined it was hungry for more. "No, I swear. I didn't have anything to do with that; I was cursed just like you!"

I shook my head in disgust. "You might not have resurrected her, but you helped her kidnap me. Do you have any idea what she'll do with me?"

Use me against Death and Miz and Tor. Twist my mind until it snapped, until I couldn't be saved. Then probably throw me in the lake to slowly decompose.

"No, it's—I'm not working for Nightmare," Phil said, her voice a squeak. "I swear, Cat, it's not Nightmare. I've never even seen her—"

I shook my head, an eye roll making the low-level headache in the back of my skull flare into something vicious. Fuck, I shouldn't have done that. "Are you really so stupid? Just because Nightmare didn't deliver your orders doesn't mean they aren't her orders. You just dealt with the go-between."

Phil's face drained of all blood. She backed up another two steps towards the hallway; I let her. "No, this is about the money I stole. This isn't about Nightmare."

"She collects secrets, Phil," I said, thick with condescension, ignoring the third eye Phil now had between her usual two. 2 "She uses them to blackmail good people. Like Byron. But Byron would never have knocked me unconscious and left me for dead."

No, he just murdered Erika and led Dean Fairchild to his death. I swallowed hard, my throat sore. There were very few parts of me that weren't sore. My shoulder throbbed wickedly, and my old ankle injury had reared its ugly head. I was a walking poster for blunt force trauma.

"I'm sorry," Phil said in a small voice, not making excuses, just shouldering the blame as she should.

"Where's my brother?" I asked tiredly, my rage ebbing. I knew when it flowed back, I'd want to claw the skin off her skull, but for now I was just exhausted and tired of being betrayed over and over. I couldn't trust anyone, and this proved it. Even my closest friends would sell me out to keep their secrets—and everyone was harbouring a secret they'd kill to keep.

"Your… brother?"

I exhaled a growling breath. "Yes, my brother. The one Nightmare kidnapped. The one I've been trying to find before she can kill him, which is probably why she made you hit me over the head and bring me here. Where. Is. He?"

Phil took another step back, and this time I matched it, my shoulders bristling even as my head pounded a dizzying beat. "I don't even know your brother. I swear, Cat, I don't know where he—"

"Wrong answer." I surged forward so fast the room blurred into one grey smudge and drove the test tube rack into the side of her skull so hard that it knocked her out in a single blow. I watched her collapse to the concrete floor and didn't bother to check for a pulse. If she lived, I'd let my gods deal with her.

Dropping the heavy rack to the floor, I stumbled over to the wooden table, leaning against it as the room swirled and blurred around me. The jars of luminous liquid and bottles of dark substances were even more unsettling viewed through a blurry lens. In flashes of clarity between bouts of dizziness, I saw that the table was surprisingly clean, the distillation equipment on it neat and orderly, the shelves and racks well organised. Someone was clearly using this space, and they took pride in keeping it tidy.

"Fuck," I grunted, tentatively reaching for the hot, pounding pain on the back of my head. Yup. My fingers were coated in sticky blood. "I really hope someone on faculty knows how to treat a head wound."

Not that I could trust any of the professors either. I couldn't trust anyone. My circle of friends I could rely on had shrunk to Honey. Even Wil, snarky, loveable Wil, couldn't be trusted. That thought made my heart hurt. A sharp pain went through my chest when I looked at the crumpled form of Phil on the floor.

My anger had receded. I hoped she lived, just so I could yell at her and break her nose.

I swiped a tear from my cheek, wondering why even my wrist ached. The answer came when I took an experimental step forward and pain flashed up my ankle into my leg. Right. Phil had got me to this building somehow, and something told me it hadn't been with me slung over her shoulder.

"Well. Now I know what it feels like to be dragged through the woods." Hell—that was what it felt like. A gasp broke free as I walked around the table, searching for any hint of my brother. The pain from my ankle was like a sudden explosion of fireworks, only this wasn't pretty. It was a sharp, ugly thing, and I was forced to limp my way across the room, squinting through dizziness and startling when I found a door set into the wall beside a shelf full of non-human organs. I wondered if a nearby farm was missing a few livestock. But one of the hearts floating in dark liquid was too big to belong to even a cow.

"Don't think about it," I whispered to myself, making slow, painful progress to the door. "Just don't think about it."

I didn't want to know why Nightmare needed bits and pieces of people and animals. I might have expected gruesome demonstrations and dissections when I came to med school, but this was a whole other thing.

The door opened with a creak that raked my fragile nerves and I jumped, peering into the room beyond. It was a similar size to the first room, but lit with green light instead of fluorescent white, and instead of one huge wooden table, there were two metal operating tables. The long wall on the right was full of shelves like in the first room, but each shelf sagged under the weight of test tubes full of deep crimson liquid I wanted to believe was anything but blood. There must have been two hundred of them.

I swallowed and glanced away, skirting over the metal tables that sent a deep chill through me, and frowned at a small desk in the corner, the Mac and state of the art centrifuge sitting on it incongruous with the Victor Frankenstein's lab aesthetic. It drew me closer 3 and I peered in confusion at the three vials loaded into the centrifuge—each full of that dark red substance. I narrowed my eyes to make them focus as I lifted one of the vials, peering at the label on the glass tube, my heart lurching when I recognised the name.

Orwell Ford.

What the fuck was Nightmare doing with a fucked up lab containing blood samples of a dead guy? And more importantly, who did the rest of the blood belong to?

I limped back to the doorway, scowling at the big table in the first room as it confirmed what I remembered. A distilling flask was set up over a burner, liquid passing through a long glass condenser, before dripping into a beaker. What the hell did Nightmare need this equipment for? What was she distilling? I eyed the liquids in each flask—it started a rosy red and ended up luminous yellow. I couldn't make sense of this. Nightmare dealt in threats and power, not science.

I shook my head in confusion and immediately wished I hadn't when I swayed into the doorjamb. "Fucker!"

"Cat?" a distant voice called—male and familiar. My head crashed and then leapt.

Virgil.

He was here.