Chapter 6

There was a disturbance, like a tremor along a violin string usually still. A soft humming sound in a place of eternal silence.

I squinted out the bay window at the castle grounds and strained my hearing for anything out of place. There was nothing except Misery's prairie dog yahooing in her freshly cleaned gilded enclosure.

Sometimes I fantasised about touching that creature a little too long, letting slip a little death magic, and freeing myself of the yowling that woke me every morning when I'd slept poorly. It was an empty threat; I loved Miz too much to hurt him. Besides some days she was the only thing keeping his sanity patched together when Tor and I couldn't reach him.

I rubbed my eyes and wondered if I was hallucinating the disturbance. Maybe the role of Death had finally driven me to madness. Or perhaps insomnia and exhaustion had. But I could still feel it—the tremor, the thrum, the alarm.

Something was happening right now, in another place, far above. And for some unfathomable reason its thread reached all the way here, into the domain of the death gods.

I rose from the padded window seat, sending my magic out through the world, searching, searching—and paused.

Upstairs, Misery's prairie dog was yahooing again, but at the end of the tether someone was screaming. Multiple people.

And many were going to die.