Page 3 of All Hallows Game

“I’m listening,” I muttered, hearing him at the same time I heard her pleading for me to spare her friend.

“Listening but ignoring. Do I need to fuck the truth into you or what?”

I pulled away, almost smiling when Peach dove forward in an attempt to bite Tor. “I don’t know how you can stand to touch me.”

“Nothing has changed between us, Misery.” Tor’s hand snapped out, wrapping around my wrist. It burned, like he was pure and kind and good, and that goodness hissed against the blackened evil Nightmare had infected me with.

“I’m going back to sleep,” I muttered. I didn’t need him to tell me I wasn’t to blame; my hands were the ones that killed Byron. Nightmare’s hands were clean. I was the one who had to wash the blood from them when Tor brought me home. Death had gone with Cat, back to Ford. I didn’t know how she could stand to live there, surrounded by memories, by suffering, by death.

I knew she’d changed rooms, moving far from the room Nightmare made me plant cameras in. My skin crawled thinking about it. A buzz started in my head. I wanted to burrow back into Tor’s arms, but I couldn’t stand to ask for comfort when I was the villain. Only victims deserved comfort.

“Good idea,” Tor said, his stare burning the side of my face. “Sleep. You might want to put Peach back though, you and I both know you’re a restless sleeper. You don’t want to wake up to a Peach pancake.”

He laughed at his own joke, raspy and hesitant but still amused. I shot him a glare. “This is why Peach doesn’t like you.”

“Because I’m witty and charming? It’s jealousy then.”

I kissed the top of her furry head and returned her to the pile of bedding where she’d slept before I rudely awakened her. She gave me a strange look but didn’t protest when I closed the lock and slumped back to bed.

I should have anticipated Tor’s total obliviousness to social cues. Me getting into bed meant he should leave, not climb in beside me and drag me into him, my back to his chest.

“You should leave, I’ll be fine,” I muttered, even as his heat and touch worked through my shields into the trembling, screaming part I pushed down, so far down.

I expected him to hold on tighter. The hand over my mouth was a surprise.

“Shut the fuck up and accept that you are loved, and you have worth, and I’m not going fucking anywhere. We’re not abandoning you because Nightmare got to you again. You don’t deserve that, and I won’t stand for it. So stop avoiding us, stop shutting me out, and stop pretending everything is fine. It’s not fine. Nothing is fine, Miz. We’re scared as shit for you. Don’t make her job easier by doing it for her. You fight, and you survive to inflict all this beautiful misery on her.”

I swallowed hard, a lump in my throat. I screwed my eyes shut.

A kiss fluttered over the top of my head as he dropped his hand from my face. “Thank you for not biting me. Guess you’re not as feral as I feared.”

“Shut up,” I muttered, expelling a deep sigh. “Dick.”

“Dick now? I thought you’d want to wait until morning and get some sleep, but far be it from me to—”

I elbowed him. Hard. Tor only laughed, a low rolling sound that did little to hide his relief. He tucked me closer to him, breath rippling the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

“We’ll be fine,” he promised.

But Tor had no way to know that, and Nightmare had only just begun to enact her vile plan. We wouldn’t be fine. The first phase of her plan had broken my heart and his. I knew we wouldn’t survive whatever she had planned next.

CHAPTER THREE

CAT

My head pounded as someone whose name I didn’t care enough to learn whined about losing the O on her Dior charm bracelet. I didn’t know if she’d been cursed or not, but I almost wished Nightmare would curse her just to stop her high, whiny voice driving through my nerves like a garrotte.

It was the first time I’d come down for breakfast in three weeks. Death usually brought me food, or at least left something if he had somewhere else to be. I guess he had better things to do today. That was fine. I could feed myself. The granola tasted of nothing, and the scrambled eggs were like eating ashes, but I could feed myself.

I shovelled more of the fluffy, creamy eggs into my mouth and wondered when I’d start tasting food again.

“I don’t know how you can eat,” Honey said, dropping onto a seat across the table from me, looking as rough as I knew I must. Dark circles, eye bags, sallow skin, slumped posture, empty eyes. There should have been three of us at this table, and Byron’s absence was like a constant gnawing pain.

Even if most days Byron hadn’t sat with us. He’d been too busy helping Nightmare torment us, helping her kill for power. The texts and threatening messages had stopped, proving it really was my best friend who sent them. I squashed the hurt that sliced through my heart and sank further into numbness. It was a numb that protected me, that made it possible to sit here in the dining hall instead of screaming with rage and grief.

“Autopilot,” I said, sharing a look of understanding with Honey, my only living best friend. Would Byron haunt me, like Darya was able to haunt Ford’s End? Would I see him again, with that guilty, tortured look in his eyes he’d had in the minutes before he was murdered? By Misery. The death god I was now painfully aware that I loved.

I loved all of them, but there was no future for me in their lives. Nightmare had seen to that. So I sat here, in the middle of chatter and noise, and let autopilot rule my body until the eggs were gone and the granola bowl was empty. It was a strange combination to eat together but what did it matter when everything had no taste?

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