Page 87 of All Hallows Game

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 closer3 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.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CAT

Icouldn’t scramble away from the door fast enough, gripping the metal gurney and scanning the green-lit room for any hint of where Virgil’s distant voice could be coming from. “Cat? Please tell me that isn’t you.”

Bad idea, lioness, my darkness warned. Destroy the lab, shatter everything Nightmare has worked on, and wait for your husbands.

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