3. Tabitha
Tabitha
The wall comes apart in a scream of shadow and gold light, and then my whole world is here, in this stupid cave, snarling.
Luka hits the ground first as a panther and is a man by the time he’s upright, naked and furious and beautiful, hellfire still smoking off his skin.
Gavriel’s next, shield up, red eyes finding me across the room and going soft for half a second before they go hard again.
Azaan rides in on his own hurricane. And Valerian walks in last, the way he always does, unbothered, coat swishing, violet crackling at his fingertips, like he’s arrived at a party running fashionably late.
“Sorry we’re tardy, little kitty,” he says to me, eyes on Alex. “The doorman was difficult.”
“I’d almost given up on you,” I say, and my voice cracks on it, just slightly, and I hate that too.
Alex hasn’t moved. That’s the thing that keeps the fear cold in my belly. Four of the most dangerous things in this dimension have just demolished his front door, and he’s still sitting there with his glass, looking mildly inconvenienced.
“Well,” he says. “The full set. Valerian. It’s been an age.”
Valerian goes very still. “I know that voice.”
“You should. You served the woman I loved.”
The room changes. I watch it happen on Valerian’s face, the calculation, the recognition, the dawning of something that in anyone else I’d call horror.
“Mordecai,” he breathes.
“There it is.”
“You’re dead. You were sealed. You were left outside the...”
“I was left outside everything.” For the first time the calm slips, just a hair, and underneath it there’s a hole so old and so deep it makes my HellCat go quiet.
“You sealed the realm and saved yourselves inside your little book, and I was on the wrong side of the door when it shut. Do you know what that’s like, Valerian?
Three centuries on the margins of nothing. Alone.”
“You brought that on yourself,” Valerian says.
“Enough,” Gavriel growls, moving between me and Alex, shield raised. “Tabby. Come here. Now.”
I move. Of course I move. But Alex lifts one finger, lazy, and the shadows come off the walls like a tide, wrapping the men where they stand, holding them, and I understand in one sick lurch exactly how outmatched we are. He isn’t even trying. He’s toying.
“I could kill them,” he says to me, conversational. “All four. Right now, in front of you. I want you to understand that I’m choosing not to, and I’m choosing not to because of you. So when you decide to hate me, sweetheart, remember that I let your pets live.”
“They’re not pets,” I hiss.
“No. They’re yours. I know exactly what they are to you.
” He stands, and for the first time I feel the age of him, the weight, like standing at the bottom of the sea.
“I’m going to make you an offer, Tabby. Not today.
Today you’re frightened and you’re grieving and you’ll say no just to spite me.
But soon. When you understand what you’re carrying and what it’s worth, you’ll come and find me, and I’ll be waiting, the way I’ve always been waiting. ”
I look at him, really look, at the face I woke up to for six years, at the man who held me while I cried about my cold family and never once let on that he was colder than any of them, and I feel the ground of everything I thought I knew shift under me.
And in the middle of the fear and the grief and the fury, one thing burns clear and steadying, and I hold onto it.
“You keep saying that,” I say. “Waiting. Like it makes you romantic instead of a stalker with a three-hundred-year memory.” I lift my chin.
“Here’s what I understand, Alex. You had me.
For six years, you actually had me, the real thing, a woman who’d have followed you anywhere and did.
And you looked at that, at a person loving you with her whole stupid heart, and you decided the thing you wanted wasn’t her.
It was the dead woman she’s carrying. That’s not love.
That’s grave-robbing. And you can wait another three centuries, sweetheart, because I would rather burn. ”
Something flickers in his face, quick and raw, and then it’s gone.
“Don’t hold your breath. Actually, do.”
He smiles again, that same crooked smile, and the shadows around my men tighten until Luka roars and Azaan’s face goes grey.
“Alex,” I warn.
“There she is.” He looks almost fond. “Come home safe, sweetheart. All of you. It would be a shame to lose any of you before the good part.”
And then he’s gone, and the book with him, that pull in the shadows I noticed earlier winking out like a snuffed candle, and the darkness releases my men all at once so they stagger.
I’m across the room before I’ve decided to be. Luka catches me. Gavriel’s arm comes round us both, Azaan presses his forehead to my hair, Valerian’s hand finds the back of my neck, grounding, and for one second I let myself shake in the middle of all four of them.
Then the cave starts to come down, because of course it does, and we run.