Page 65 of All Hallows Game

When she said nothing, I shook, cold spreading through my chest, spiked with panic.

“What did you do?” I shouted, my voice snapping across the hills, spooking the crows into the air.

Check your car, she replied. And know if I find you acting against me again, the consequences will be worse.

Check my car? What had she done to my car?

On the heels of that remark was relief so profound I sobbed. She’d damaged my car, but only my car. I could cope with slashed tyres, scratched paintwork, and even smashed windows. It was only a car. No one I loved, no one I—

A heartbeat thumped in my ears, out of sync with my own, strangely slow. I brushed the tears off my cheeks and scanned the hill for Nightmare, jumping when that ba-bump came again, undeniably a heartbeat. Was it hers? Would she drive me mad by forcing me to hear her heartbeat? It was too human to belong to the crows watching with beady eyes, unmoving from their perch like watchers doomed to never intervene.

I swallowed, pushing back to my feet and eyeing the top of the hill. I needed to search it, to be sure Virgil wasn’t here, but the heartbeat grew louder, driving through me, scraping against my nerves.

If I kept searching, Nightmare would do far worse than wreck my car.

“Fuck!” I snapped, ripping myself away, forcing myself to turn, to descend instead of climbing the hill. Virgil could be up there, but if I took a single step closer, I knew Nightmare would make him pay for my insolence.

The beating grew louder, taunting me, until chills began to crawl down my arms. Check your car, Nightmare said. She didn’t say she’d done anything to my car. What if the heartbeat I could hear belonged to my brother? What if he was dying in my backseat?

I broke into a perilous run, my feet slipping on the snow-slick grass, my thighs protesting as I swerved and slid over the uneven ground, faster and faster as momentum pulled me down the hill I just worked my ass off to climb.

What if it wasn’t Virgil? What if she’d taken my mum, too? Or what if I got there and it was Dad bleeding on the Urus’s leather? I blinked back tears and saw Tannie’s rainbow fingernails digging into the seat, clawing on for dear life as he bled out, the life slowly bleeding from both his body and his eyes.

“No,” I gasped, a tremor in my knees as I ran faster. I hit the hard ground twice but pulled myself back up and ignored the sharp throb through my ass and knees, not daring to stop. The heartbeat echoed around me, a sick reminder of the noise I heard when Nightmare killed at the Halloween party, absorbing their lives so she could return from wherever she’d been locked up. Wherever my death gods had imprisoned her.

Ba-bump, the heartbeat went, louder, drumming through my skull, my body, until I felt the vibrations of it. Nightmare wanted me mad, wanted to break me, but I couldn’t let her. If I broke, she won. She wouldn’t stop her crusade against Death whether I was alive or not, but all this fighting would have been for nothing. I wanted to watch her pay, wanted to see her suffer, wanted to rip out her bleeding eye and crush it beneath my boot, and that wasn’t even the darkness talking.

Ba-bump. Every throb of that heart was a taunt, a reminder that I didn’t know whose heartbeat I heard, didn’t know who Nightmare had hurt. Oh god, what if it was Honey? What if I’d be forced to watch both my best friends die only weeks apart?

Hot tears bled down my cheeks, my throat so tight it closed up, but I ran faster, picking myself up every time I hit the ground. My jeans were soaked by this point, my whole body aching in protest.

Almost there, almost there…

Ba-bump, ba-bump.

“Shut up,” I rasped, trying to block the noise from my ears. But it was everywhere, all around me, inside my head. I started to wonder if it was even real, or if this was just another of Nightmare’s tricks.

I finally skidded down the last slope and hit the road. My legs nearly gave out again as I stumbled to my car, the lime green paint standing out against the jade and ivory of grass and snow, the worn tarmac of the winding road. Somewhere close, the ocean battered the cliffs, never ceasing its desperation to drag me down.

“Not today,” I rasped, staggering across the road to where the boot of my car had been propped open. “Not today, not today.”

The sea wouldn’t take me. Nightmare wouldn’t break me.

I frowned when I saw an open box sitting in my boot beside my spare tyre, just big enough to hold a book. My feet dragged, my body weary but also reluctant, dreading what was inside that box. I knew without a doubt it wasn’t merely a book.

Ba-bump, the heartbeat thudded in my ears, and I stopped dead as an icy suspicion went through me. The polished mahogany was big enough to hold a heart. My hand flew to my mouth, fingertips shaking against my cheeks as fear took control.

I didn’t know how I made it the last three steps to my car, where a single glance through tear-stained eyes showed a smear of dark, dark red. One blink was all it took to clear my vision, to show the heart that sat inside the box, surrounded by blood splashed on the wood, arteries and veins hacked off by a serrated blade.

“God,” I choked out, the only word I had, horror and dark icy fear paralysing my mind.

I stared at the heart, gory and violent, and wrenched back with a scream when it beat. Ba-bump. Oh god, oh god. The heart was beating. Cut out of someone’s chest, left in a box for me to find, and still beating.

Whose?

I needed to know, needed to find whose body was bleeding out without a heart, needed to reach my gods so they could use their powers over life and death to put this heart back and—

In the act of reaching for the box, to take it to the domain, to save whoever Nightmare had taken from me this time, I caught the edge and the box snapped shut with a bang. I flinched hard. The low-level trembling in my body exploded into vicious convulsions of fear, my teeth knocking together.

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