Chapter 17

Tor—which I discovered was short for Torment—rode me back to Ford and deposited me on the road before the scrolling iron gates, sea serpents coiling around the latch. It was dark, only a few lights twinkling in the village at the base of the hill, but more lights blazed from the buildings deep inside Ford.

Death. Torment. Misery.

Three men who embodied those traits, who were responsible for inflicting them on the world. Death gods.

Hearing those words together—death and gods—was my final straw. I'd jumped off the sofa and strode for the door, meaning to run out the gates and back up the winding road to Ford. But when I flung open the heavy black door, it was a whole other city I looked out on, the sky tinged as red as blood, the buildings all formed of blackened stone and of a style I'd never seen before, angular and sharp, with flat roofs. I wasn't anywhere near Ford's End—the village or the island.

Magic, again, clear and undeniable. A chill rippled down my arms.

"I'll take you back," Tor had offered, following me the instant I leapt off the sofa.

I spun my crown ring around and around my finger, staring at the unfamiliar city. The unfamiliar world? My domain, death had said. I wasn't sure what that meant.

"This isn't Ford's End," I breathed, my ears ringing.

"No, Cat," Tor confirmed gently. "It isn't."

Now, I strode through Ford's gates, not entirely sure how his massive, black horse—Lanai, he'd called her—had ridden out of the domain of death and into the world of the living, let alone how she'd ended up depositing me at Ford's gates.

I wrapped my arms around myself as I walked towards campus, Death's feathered cloak still draped over my shoulders even though it seemed like the sort of thing that should have dissolved the second I was away from him. I felt eyes on me as I walked down the tree-lined path, but it was a relief to know it was probably Torment watching me and not Nightmare.

Those names… they didn't exactly inspire confidence. Tor and Death kept insisting I was safe, but unless I was losing my entire fucking mind, they were like Nightmare. Powerful. So much more than human. Literal embodiments of the worst traits in humanity.1

Wind slashed through the trees and caught my hair, and I shuddered, huddling further into the heavy cloak, the weather not helping my mood. My head was a mess. Either the death gods had fucked with my car and sprung a trap, or Nightmare had been messing with me, chasing me. Probably pushing me to have a mental breakdown like Miz said she would.

Strangely, Misery was the only one I trusted to be honest with me. He didn't soften any blows, didn't skirt around the truth. When he said I was cursed on Halloween by the chanting, the robes, the murders, that crimson light… I believed him. I didn't want to, but I believed him.

"Cursed," I murmured, swallowing the knot in my throat and shaking harder. I blamed it on the cold and knew that was a lie. Nightmare cursed us that night. There had been fifty people around Ford House when red lights exploded from the windows. Were they all cursed?

If I was now the bride of Death, what did that make clowns and ghosts and the guy dressed as a fucking pussy?2

"One problem at a time," I told myself, the wind stealing my words until I barely heard them. My car was still broken down on the road; Tor rode us past it even though I tried to get him to stop. It wasn't safe, he said, as if it was any safer in the campus where I'd been cursed in the first place.

I didn't have my phone; in the chaos of the death gods chasing me on their shadow shires, I'd dropped it, which meant I couldn't call a garage to come tow my car. I needed to get back to Lawrence Hall and borrow Honey's phone or Byron's. Byron… I'd abandoned the apology cake slice. Fuck. That was supposed to make it harder to stay mad at me, and now I didn't have a peace offering.

I rubbed my eyes with cold fingers, feathers brushing my cheek like Death's featherlight kisses had. I pushed back any thoughts relating to the way they'd looked at me, touched me, kissed me. I was touch starved and greedy for affection, so my judgement was clouded. Any normal person would have punched them in the dick and run away.

Fear had frozen me, but so had the sight of the horses, the cloaks, the helmets, and the inescapable fact that they weren't human. There were two Cats now—before and after Halloween. Three days ago, I'd have run at the sight of the riders, but now? I couldn't escape it. Magic, darkness, danger—it was everywhere. I choked on it now, crossing campus in the dark.

Even now, there was a fist clenched around my heart, urging me back out the gates and down to the hill where I'd first met the death gods. Nightmare's curse at work, forcing us together. I sank my teeth into my bottom lip and ignored it. At least it hadn't taken over my body this time. At least I walked the curving road toward Ford instead of being compelled away.

Lights grew brighter, closer, their glow diffused by the fine rain that hung in the air around me, drenching the feathers of my cloak. Relief choked off my air at the sight of it, but I was still wound so tightly, anticipating Nightmare's attack, that I flinched when a soft voice called,

"Cat Wallison? Is that you?"

I halted abruptly, my breathing racing, cold spreading through my body. I wished I had the same power as Nightmare, as the death gods. But I was a cursed human against gods. I was easy prey.

I tensed, one second away from running like I should have when the riders came towards me like a scene from a horror film, but I paused at the figure who emerged from the mist and rain.

"I thought that was you," Carmilla Poppy, my microbiology professor said, a smile curving her eyes behind pillar-box-red glasses as she hurried closer. "What are you doing out in this awful weather?"

"My car broke down," I explained, relieved to see a living, breathing person and not a hellish god. "On the road up from Ford's End."

Carmilla Poppy was a short, petite, forty-something woman with a cropped bob of reddish-brown hair, freckles scattered across a pale, kind face, and an energy that instantly calmed me. It had earlier when I took her first class, and it did now. Her kindness was palpable, and fuck did I need some reassuring kindness right now.

"Have you had to walk up the hill in this rain?" she asked, eyes widening as she reached me. "Of course you have, look at you, you're soaked through. Typical that cars never break down when it's sunny and fair."

I laughed softly, the sound expelling some of my dread and leaving a smile on my face. "It could be worse. At least it's not snowing."

"Yet," Poppy added before I could. "Go on inside. Have you called a tow for your car?"

"Not yet. My phone's dead." And left somewhere between the car and the road because an inexplicable force propelled me towards three horrifying horses with even more horrifying riders, but I didn't say that part out loud.

"The garage won't open until nine tomorrow." Poppy frowned, fishing out her own mobile from the pocket of the pastel blue blazer she wore, an enamel poppy pinned to the lapel. "Tell you what, I'll give Edgar Doyle a call and see if he'll come out to pick up your car. He's an old family friend so I should be able to sweet talk him."

Another knot unwound from my chest. "That'd be amazing. Thank you, Professor Poppy."

She waved a hand. "Carmilla, please. I'm not one of those stuffy professors that demands formalities as a sign of respect from day one. I'll buy that respect with a box of pain au chocolat," she said with a wink.

"I'll hold you to that," I replied, glad there was at least one professor who wasn't, in her words, stuffy.

"Emerson Radclyffe's the one you want to watch out for," she told me, glancing up from her phone—red with poppies all over the case—to give me a wry look. "He's a stickler for rules, tradition, and excessive formalities. And I did not tell you his name is Emerson."

I winced at the thought of the stern, grey-haired white man I'd glimpsed during orientation. "That secret is safe with me. I'm not chancing risking his wrath."

"Smart girl. Now go on inside, get dry and warm. I'll have your car brought in."

"Thank you," I said profusely. "You're a life saver. I don't know what I'd have done without you."

She batted me away with a smile. "Flattery will get you everywhere."

I hurried up the path towards Lawrence Hall, where my room was dry and semi-warm, and was immensely glad I hadn't run into Emerson Radclyffe instead of Carmilla. I got the sense he wouldn't be helping me tow my car so much as getting me written up for disorderly behaviour.

Lawrence Hall wasn't home yet, but relief still hit me when I pushed open the heavy door and made my way past the breakfast hall—empty—and winced at the clock on the wall that must have been wrong because there was no way it was past eleven.

No wonder I was hungry.

With no distractions, my mind wandered back to the party, to Nightmare and the curse and the death gods I was apparently bound to. Married to? I'd been too big a coward to ask how exactly they defined the word bride. Was I engaged to be married, or had the curse already signed the certificate?

They'd been equally sweet and cagy, upfront and secretive. They knew Nightmare—I saw Miz flinch at her name, at her proximity. No way had they told me the full truth, but maybe I should have been glad of that. The bit of truth they had told me was horrifying.

I was cursed.

We were all cursed—Honey, Duncan, Alastor, Darya, and everyone else who'd been there. Byron ran out because his sister called, and I prayed that meant he was spared. Otherwise he'd, what, become a vampire? Hunger for blood?

This is so fucked up.

I might have dismissed it all as bullshit if I hadn't felt the change, the discord within me. And if Honey's words didn't ring, over and over, through my head.

My fur must have been soaked. Her fur, like she was already thinking like the cat she'd dressed as for Halloween.

"Fuck," I hissed, because I needed to say it out loud, because the truth was so bad I couldn't keep the expletive in my head.

I trudged up the steps to our floor, my chest so tight it was like Miz had never wiped out all my anxiety on the ride to Death's domain.

Instead of continuing to my room, I hovered outside Honey's, my hand curled in a fist to knock. But my courage deserted me. I had to tell her. She needed to know. But I didn't want to speak any of it out loud. She'd think I was mad. All the things the gods had told me…

But they still hadn't told me where they tied into Nightmare's plan, why they were interested in me in the first place. Because I was their bride? Or because they were in league with Nightmare?

The answer seemed obvious.

I lifted my hand and knocked softly on Honey's door.