Page 31 of All Hallows Trick

“Your tormentor, lioness. The one who thinks he can break you.”

Oh, god.

“Alastor Carmichael.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

CAT

Ididn’t even want to think about how Alastor vanished so completely that two death gods couldn’t find him. It was a little too coincidental that Madde couldn’t trace him less than twenty-four hours after he’d failed to track the Stalker who watched us in Death’s domain. But Alastor was living. Only the dead could enter the domain.

Honey and Virgil could,a reluctant voice pointed out.

Maybe someone had allowed Alastor to enter, too.

Without protections like the ones around my home, he’d wither and die,Madde interrupted my thoughts, earning himself a swift glare. They were my private ruminations, dammit.Virgil and Honey can only stay because I linked the shields keeping them alive to the castle. The Stalker was out in the city. Only the dead could do that.

I shook my head, walking close to Tor, his arm around my shoulders, keeping me in the bubble of his warmth even as my thoughts made everything frozen with fear inside.

It’s too big a coincidence. Alastor’s the Stalker, I know it.

I felt Madde’s eyes on the side of my face and turned to look at him, my stomach lurching at the harrowing sadness in his eyes, carved into his handsome face, pulling his features down.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, my hand itching with the urge to reach for him. But he wasn’t mine, and I had three husbands, and everything was too strange, too complicated.

He tore his gaze away, staring straight ahead, so much emotion in those electric blue eyes. His throat bobbed in a swallow. “I vowed to kill all your enemies, but the bully got away. I failed you.”

I waited, but… that was it.

“Madde, you didn’t fail me. Alastor’s a crafty bastard. He’s a fucking snake, although that’s unfair to snakes. He’ll turn up again, and… and when he does, you can kill him.”

It was weird to give someone permission to kill another person. Beyond morally grey and all the way into morally black. But I didn’t care. Every hurtful word Alastor had said, every bruise the bastard gave me, it had condemned him. He’d fucked with a girl loved by death gods, and worse, he brought my best friend into it. I wouldn’t cry at his funeral. I wouldn’t even go. And if that made me a bad person, so be it.

“You’re right,” Madde said, straightening his shoulders, a smile brightening his face. For a moment the man looking back at me had been forlorn and tortured and unfamiliar. There was a deep well of sadness inside Madde, and that made my heart hurt. “I’ll kill him next time.”

Silence stretched between the four of us, Miz glaring at the woods as we walked back to the gate and the moors road where Madde could carry us back to the castle.

“We’ll be fine,” Tor promised quietly, pressing a hard kiss to my temple.

“I know,” I replied automatically, but there was too much going through my head, and even though we were going to find the scientist working for Nightmare, we still didn’t have any antidotes right now and—

“Did you see that?” I asked urgently, raising my hand to point at a flash of red I’d seen slipping between the trees ahead of us. I’d never seen anyone else out here except us—and Phil. “There’s someone out here.”

“Could be anyone, beautiful,” Tor tried to soothe me. “The woods aren’t private property; any student can access them. And the gates don’t even lock to Ford.”

I knew that. But paranoia surged, along with a wild cocktail of suspicion, alarm, threat, and hope. If someone was out here, maybe they’d seen the scientist and— “Isn’t that the direction of the cottage?”

“It is,” Miz confirmed grimly, following me the second I set off running. Tor and Madde quickly caught up to us, a frazzled air of nerves and excitement around us. It was only a glint of hope, barely anything in the dark, but I’d take anything. So I ran, faster and faster, my shoes flying over the uneven ground, leaping the roots of tall trees.

“I see them,” Miz called to me as we ran, his white hair flying behind him like a banner. “There. It’s a woman!”

My hope swelled so much it knocked against my breastbone. Could it be her, Nightmare’s mad scientist, the monster who made the serum? Violence muddied the light of my hope, but there was a flash of excitement in the violence, too. She would pay for everything she’d done. And I’d enjoy meting out that justice.

Miz grunted, loudly enough that it reached me even over my rough breaths, and I slowed when he grabbed his ribs, his breaths wheezing. I stared in horror as he doubled over, gaspingin clear pain, light glinting off my crown ring on his middle finger.

“Miz?” I demanded, my voice stripped of any determination, replaced with horror. He was hurt, weakened by a scratch to his arm, and we had no idea what that was doing to any of my husbands. Let alone the dangerous way he’d bound his magic—

“Fine, my universe,” he wheezed, straightening when Tor reached us, the latter instantly grabbing Miz’s shoulders, scanning his face, his body. “Just a little too much exertion,” he laughed, strained.

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