5. Tabitha
Tabitha
We set off for the Palace with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the mess in my head, and for the first few miles I’m no use to anyone, because I keep running the same six years on a loop and finding new places where I should have known.
The time Alex went quiet whenever I talked about my family, my shifter nature, the things that made me different.
I thought he was being tactful. He was gathering intelligence.
The way he never wanted to meet my parents, never pushed to know where I came from.
I thought he was shy. He already knew where I came from.
He’d been waiting at the end of my bloodline for three hundred years.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Azaan says, dropping back to walk with me. “That’s not like you. It’s unsettling. Say something rude so I know you’re alive.”
“Your face is rude.”
“There she is.” But his green eyes are watching me carefully. “You’re doing the thing. Combing back through it all for the clues. Torturing yourself with what you should have spotted.”
“How did you...”
“Because I’d do the same.” He bumps my shoulder gently.
“Stop, though. You didn’t miss anything, little one.
There was nothing to miss. He’s three hundred years old and made of lies.
You were a kind woman who trusted her boyfriend.
That’s not a flaw. That’s not something to comb yourself raw over. The flaw is entirely his.”
I want to believe him. I mostly don’t. But it helps, a little, to have it said.
The realm, meanwhile, does the thing it’s started doing lately, which is notice me.
As we walk, the ground under my feet seems steadier than it should be.
A fire geyser we pass roars up gold instead of red as I go by, like it’s tipping its hat.
I’d think I was imagining it, except Valerian’s watching it happen with an expression I can only call hungry, like a man seeing the first green shoot after a long winter.
“It knows you,” he says quietly, when he catches me noticing. “Even now. Even before you’ve claimed it. The realm feels its Queen, little kitty, and it’s been starving for one for three hundred years. Every time you stop being afraid of it, it reaches for you a little more.”
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a girl who’s having a bad week.”
“It’s not pressure. It’s the opposite.” He almost smiles. “It’s the one thing in this dimension that wants nothing from you but to let it love you.”
And deep down, sour and patient, Tabeitha stirs at that, and whispers, it loved me first, little bitch, and it’ll love me again when I’m wearing your skin. I grit my teeth and shove her down and keep walking, because that’s the one thing I know how to do. Keep walking. Keep getting up.
On foot. Toward a Palace, a ghost, a war, and a version of myself I haven’t met yet.
But not alone. Never that. I’ve got four of them, and apparently a whole realm that wants to love me, and one ancient cow in my head who’s about to find out exactly how stubborn a cornered cat can be.