21. Tabitha
Tabitha
By the time we drag ourselves back to the Palace, I’ve decided that the worst thing about being Queen of a hell dimension isn’t the dying, or the ghost, or the ex, or the doom cloud. It’s that my own house keeps trying to kill me.
“Incoming,” Gavriel says flatly, and sure enough, a knot of demons boils up out of the shadows near the gate, low-level, ugly, snarling, and comes straight for me.
“You have GOT to be joking.” I duck behind Gavriel’s shield as the first one lunges. “I pay for this place with my soul. Literally. My actual soul is the deposit. And I still can’t walk through my own front gate.”
“They don’t know you,” Valerian says, incinerating two with a bored flick of violet.
“Same as before. Until you claim the throne properly, the Palace and everything in it treats you as an intruder. You’re the Queen in name, in blood, in right.
But the realm hasn’t felt you take it. So the low ones default to attack. ”
“That’s so rude.” Luka bats a demon out of the air. “It’s like a house alarm that goes off at the owner.”
“It’s exactly like that,” Azaan agrees, whipping the last two into a wall with a gust. “And it’ll keep doing it until she stops treating the throne like it belongs to someone else.”
I don’t answer that, because I don’t have an answer, because he’s right and I hate it. Instead I follow them into the Palace, into my cold, echoing, beautiful, hostile house, and I try not to feel like a burglar in my own kingdom.
Inside, it’s quieter, and the fear I’ve been holding at bay all the way home creeps back in.
Because we’ve retrieved nothing. We know who Mordecai is now, we know what he wants, we know he’s more powerful than anything we’ve faced, and beyond him there’s a whole other world coming to switch us off.
And in here, in me, there’s Tabeitha, quiet since the road but not gone, never gone, waiting for the next crack.
I feel her stir as I think of her, smug and patient, and I grit my teeth.
Not yet, you ancient cow. Not ever, if I can help it.
“Tabby.” Azaan’s at my shoulder, green eyes soft, having felt the dip in me the way he always does. “You’ve gone somewhere dark. Come back.”
“I’m here.” I make myself smile. “Just doing the maths again.”
“Stop doing the maths.”
“Can’t. It’s who I am. Bookish. Give me a problem and I’ll count it to death.
” I look round at the four of them, filthy and battle-worn and mine, in the warm gold light of the one hearth Valerian keeps lit for me.
“We’ve got a lot of problems, boys. Mordecai.
The book. Her.” I tap my temple. “The cold thing coming. And a throne I still can’t sit on because I can’t work out how to believe it’s mine.
” I blow out a breath. “But we’re all still standing, and we’ve got each other, and I’ve decided that’s going to have to be enough to be going on with.
So. Food, because no one wants a hangry Queen, and then we plan how to take my book back off my murderous ex. In that order.”
“A woman with priorities,” Valerian says, and snaps his fingers, and a feast appears on the long table by the fire.
I dive for it like the starving bookseller I am, and the men settle round me. For a little while, in the warm and the quiet, with the four of them ribbing each other and stealing food off my plate, it’s almost possible to forget everything that’s hunting us.
Almost.
Tabeitha doesn’t forget. She never does. But for tonight, I eat, and I laugh at Azaan’s terrible impression of a hostile door-demon, and I let myself have this, because I’ve learned the hard way that you take the good hours where you find them in this place.
There aren’t many. So you take them.