Page 86 of All Hallows Game

“Miz, take Honey back to her room and make sure no one else hurts her.”

Miz’s face was pale, his eyes wide. “Are you sure you can trust—”

“Yes,” I bit out, my patience losing a fight with the violence howling inside me. “You’ll be fine.” I had no guarantee that Nightmare wouldn’t seize control of him, but no way in Hell was I taking Miz with me to find Tor and Cat when it was painfully likely that they’d been led to the goddess herself.

Another moonlit rendezvous. Another trap. But who’d be the victim this time?

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CAT

“You don’t know what he’s like, Cat,” Phil said in a voice twisted up with distress, stirring me from sleep. My head pounded a striking beat, but I kept my face still, listening as she spoke. “He’s scary when he wants something. The face he puts up is all a façade, but I promise I never faked anything. It killed me to lie to you, to lead you away. I really wanted to be your friend, but he knows about the money I took from the charity bank account and he threatened to tell everyone. I know he meant it. I’m so sorry, please don’t hate me. This isn’t so bad right?”

My head hurt so viciously it was like being struck by an anvil every two seconds, my shoulders screamed with some unknown injury, and I had to live with the knowledge that my friend had hit me over the head. So yeah, it was so bad.

Who was the he Phil was talking about? Someone else I knew? God, I trusted Phil. She was bubbly and sweet and genuinely caring, and it was like a stake driven through my heart that she’d hurt me like this.

“I have to do what he tells me,” Phil went on. It sounded like there were tears in her voice. “I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.” I froze when gentle fingers pushed a lock of hair from my face. “I have to leave. I’m so sorry, but I have instructions. But you can get through whatever he has planned; you’re a fighter.”

And she was dead to me. If she was going to leave me to his mercy, whoever the fuck he was, she was no friend at all. It occurred to me that Alastor could be the one blackmailing her to hurt me, kidnap me, and leave me here to do whatever he planned to me.

Cold dripped down my spine. I had to get out of here before he came.

When Phil moved back, her footsteps scuffing the ground, I opened my eyes and rapidly surveyed the place where she’d left me. I lay on a cold concrete floor, the walls made of the same grey, austere material, and skeletal metal shelves held jars and bottles and vials of things I’d rather not identify. Ice trickled down my spine. I had the sense that I’d been thrown into a mad scientist’s laboratory.

The joke I’d made about the island of Dr Moreau when we took the ferry to Ford’s End all those months ago came back to me. The sound of Phil’s footsteps knocked me out of my frozen fear, and I jumped to my feet, seizing a solid metal test tube stand from a wooden table covered in scratches and dings and Bunsen burners. I didn’t allow myself to hesitate; I launched myself at her, swinging the hunk of metal.

The dull thud of metal meeting flesh was satisfying revenge for what she’d done to me. “You think you can just dump me here and leave?” I didn’t recognise the laugh that left me, but I did recognise the flow and rush of violence in my soul as my darkness rose.

Make her scream. Make her beg.

Working on it, I replied, not pausing to wonder if I was truly going mad. If hearing voices was the first sign of madness, what was talking back to them?

“I’m sorry,” Phil cried, stumbling back and clutching her head where I’d slammed the hunk of metal into her.1

“Not good enough,” I snarled, my darkness flowing faster, reaching further. My hand was steady on the test tube stand as I raised it again; Phil flinched back. “Do you have any idea what could happen to me, wounded and unconscious on the floor, like some kind of fucked up offering? I could be raped. I could be killed.”

Phil recoiled again, her back hitting one of the tall shelves full of jars and bottles. Some contained liquids in varying colours. Some contained… other things. Floating, opaque shapes I didn’t want to recognise as organs. Phil didn’t seem to care that jars of lungs and livers touched her. The only thing on her tanned face was horror and apology. I ignored the latter, hardening my heart.

“I don’t have a choice,” she breathed, tears streaking her cheeks. Her glossy brown hair was ragged, her cheeks splashed with colour. Good. She should be afraid.

Another laugh slipped from me, darker than the last. “I’ve heard that before. You were blackmailed, you didn’t have a choice, your secret was going to be leaked. Newsflash—you did have a choice, and you chose to protect yourself and leave me for dead. We’re not friends, Phil. We’re not even enemies. You’re dead to me.”

She flinched like I’d struck her again, and the sight of her fear only made my heart beat faster, skipping beats inside my ribcage. What right did Phil have to fear? I was the victim she’d hit over the head and dumped on the floor in some fucked up laboratory.

I ignored the way the jars on the shelves were going fuzzy at the edges, the room beginning to sway. Probably the hole in the back of my fucking head.

“Was it you?” I demanded, jerking forward a step. Phil shrank back, stumbling away from the shelf of organs towards the open maw of a dark hallway. “Were you the one who summoned Nightmare? Did you swap your Halloween costume for a robe that night and summon her with that fucked up ritual? Are you the reason Mason, Rone, Orwell, and Milani are dead?”

“No!” Phil’s eyes were wide with panic and a trickle of shock, her hands raised to protect herself from me when I advanced with the hunk of heavy metal in my hand. The rack was smeared with her blood, and I imagined it was hungry for more. “No, I swear. I didn’t have anything to do with that; I was cursed just like you!”

I shook my head in disgust. “You might not have resurrected her, but you helped her kidnap me. Do you have any idea what she’ll do with me?”

Use me against Death and Miz and Tor. Twist my mind until it snapped, until I couldn’t be saved. Then probably throw me in the lake to slowly decompose.

“No, it’s—I’m not working for Nightmare,” Phil said, her voice a squeak. “I swear, Cat, it’s not Nightmare. I’ve never even seen her—”

I shook my head, an eye roll making the low-level headache in the back of my skull flare into something vicious. Fuck, I shouldn’t have done that. “Are you really so stupid? Just because Nightmare didn’t deliver your orders doesn’t mean they aren’t her orders. You just dealt with the go-between.”

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