Page 38 of All Hallows Trick

“Probably,” Death echoed, grit in his voice. “Forgive me if I don’t want to risk—”

“Madde!”Cat shouted, ripping all our focus to her, every one of us lunging across the sunset-warm stone of the courtyard in answer to the panic in her voice. It tugged at my chest until it was hard to breathe, until my gut cramped with every millisecond it took to find her in the plume of dark magic.Where is she, where is she?All I could see were the creatures who’d encircled Madness as he fought with streams of darkness, but where was my fucking wife—

I exhaled so hard it hurt my throat. “No fucking heroics,” I growled at Miz, Death, and Virgil. “No one dies today. Yeah?”

They agreed, but we were already running towards the dozen creatures who’d been designed to kill us, and there was no guarantee we’d all make it out. What if Death took another injury? What if he was so weak he couldn’t defend himself? What if Miz stumbled and couldn’t recover?

“I need a weapon,” Virgil said urgently.

“No, you don’t,” Death replied in a voice that always chilled my soul. I shot him a warning look the stubborn bastard ignored. The temperature dropped, the dead of this realm suddenly restless. I felt it; their icy rage crept down my spine like a spider. The dead were usually placid but could be called to violence given the right inclination and power.

Power Death didn’t fuckinghave.

“You’re not strong enough, you fucking idiot,” I snarled. He ignored that, too, pulling on the magic that saturated the air of this domain, exerting himself too much. Sweat beaded on his dark forehead, his hands curling into fists, but he didn’t stop moving towards Cat, towards the creatures that could kill him far too fucking easily.

I snapped my arm out at my side, ignoring how difficult it was to summon my power. A curl of darkness wrapped around Death, tugging him back, and I ran faster, determined to meet the creatures before the weak idiot could.

The dead arrived just as I threw out my hand and knocked aside the moose-antlered creature inching towards Cat. She had no weapons, no magic, and on reflection I shouldn’t have sent her into the fray, but something strange began to happen—the subjects kept their distance, eyeing her warily. And when I skidded beside her, I realised she didn’t need weapons when claws tipped her fingers. She slashed them through the air inwarning, driving back a winged jaguar who’d slunk closer. The others kept their distance.

Were these other students from Ford? Innocent civilians? A tangle of guilt formed behind my ribs, but I ignored it. They were threats, and that’s all I could allow them to be.

“Madness!” Cat yelled, trying to get through the ring of subjects to reach him. Some backed up at the sight of her—at the sight of her black eyes, I realised—but others turned to her with teeth bared on snarls, claws flexing from paws. I lashed them away from her with shadows, trying to be as stringent as possible. It would help no one if I burned out too quickly.

“Oh hey, cavalry’s arrived!” Madde said cheerfully from within the circle of creatures, only darkness and shadow keeping them from mauling him to death.

I pulled up a swath of magic right as I realised the subjects weren’t actuallyattacking.They had Madde surrounded, and they were creeping closer to Cat, wary and focused, but no wounds had been dealt, no blood drawn. And I realised far too fucking late we’d been baited into a trap and walked ourselves quite agreeably into it. Fucker!

“Death,” I yelled, spinning, scanning the courtyard until my eyes fell on him. He stood tall as he strode closer, outwardly strong, but I knew he was running on empty. “Call them off. The spirits—call them off!”

I could command them myself on a good day, but we were so far from a good day I couldn’t even see a mirage of it, and my mastery over the dead was a mere drop compared to Death’s ocean. He could rally a whole community of spirits in minutes, could command them to kneel, could create an army of them in seconds. Hewasdeath, was linked so intrinsically to the spirits upon their deaths that it was instinct for them to respond to him. And more than that, the ones who lived in the towns and villages around our homeknewhim. Anyone could spend mereminutes with him and be willing to walk into war to defend him; his goodness was palpable. It was partly why I’d become a semi-decent guy in this second life.

But none of that stopped me from throwing out my arm, casting a weak net of power over the spirits as they swarmed through the walls, the gates, and the castle into the courtyard to answer Death’s call.Go,I snarled at them through that dark net,get the hell out of here.

But Death’s sway was more potent than mine. Only one of them flitted away, at least forty ghosts remaining.This is going to get ugly.

“This was never about us,” I yelled to Death, giving Miz a hard look at his side.Protect him. Keep the stupid bastard alive.Miz nodded, his eyes livid and harsh. So fucking beautiful, both of them. If anything happened to them, I’d resurrect the bastards just to kill them all over again for breaking my heart.

“The spirits,” Cat gasped, figuring it out. “Oh god, there’s so many of them. Tor—”

I faced her, a growl revving up my chest, protectiveness like a red haze over my vision as I reached for my wife. I caught her, pulling her into my arms just as the jaguar that had been stalking her leapt into motion… and racedpastus.

“Hey, quick question,” Madde asked when the circle of subjects broke up around him. “What the fuck?”

“You must think the world revolves around you.”

The words were rough from days of torture and screaming. They dropped the temperature of my blood and had Cat bristling against my side. I felt Death and Miz reach us, my senses on high alert. My hands flexed around Cat, pulling her tighter against me.

“This was never about you, Madness,” Poppy said, shaking her head with an amused smile. She was a fucking psycho, moredeserving of the name Madness than Madde and that was really saying something.

“Stop it,” Cat snapped, testing my arms around her; they didn’t budge. She flinched back into me when a lion joined the jaguar racing across the courtyard, followed by a winged leopard, a bear, and a deer with vicious fangs. “This is crazy.Stop.”

Poppy’s eyes softened, and for a sick second I genuinely believed her affection was true. Hell, maybe it was; people could just as easily cause harm with love as with hatred. “There are bigger things in play right now, Cat. None of this will hurt you, though.” She gasped, catching sight of something behind me, past Death and Miz, her eyes filling with awe. “Another of my children.”

Virgil’s laugh was a dark, unsettling thing; it sent a shiver down my back, instinct demanding I put him in my line of sight. “You’re the crazy bitch who did this to me.”

“Don’t use those words,” Poppy chided, as if the courtyard wasn’t rapidly filling with snarls and growls from animal bodies primed to attack. I pulled Cat out of the path of a huge, black-furred wolf trailing wings it didn’t seem to know how to work. “Women have been called crazy and bitches for centuries, especially women like me, innovators who want to change the world.”

“Change the world?” Death asked calmly, ignoring the warning look I shot him when he strode past me and Cat. Fuck. I couldn’t protect them all at once and it was fuckingkillingme. I flicked my stare between the ghosts and the mad scientist, weighing our options. “And how does conducting experiments on innocent children achieve that? How does locking them in cells and torturing them achieve that?”

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