32. Tabitha
Tabitha
The circle catches fire and I feel Tabeitha win.
It happens all at once, the cold blue flame roaring up around the ring, the book blazing on its plinth, Mordecai’s power crashing down like a tide, and Tabeitha surging up through me with three centuries of hunger, and the wheel, my one hand on the wheel, tears out of my grip.
I go under.
It’s not like the road, where I clawed back an inch at a time.
This is a wave the size of a world, and I’m nothing under it, a swimmer in a storm.
I feel her flood into every corner of me, feel her take my hands, my spine, my voice, feel her reach for the last little rooms of me where I still live, and there’s nothing to hold.
The bond, I reach for the bond, but the circle’s cold fire is between me and them, and I can feel Gavriel throwing himself at the ring and being thrown back, feel Luka’s fire guttering against Mordecai’s shadow, feel all four of them fighting to reach me and failing.
Whole again, my love, Mordecai is saying, somewhere far away, above the water. Come back to me properly. Let go of the scrap. Let her drown.
And Tabeitha laughs with my mouth, and reaches for the last of me, and I understand that in about three seconds I stop existing.
She keeps the body. She keeps the men, my men, and they’ll have to kill this body to stop her, and she knows they can’t, she’s counting on it.
Mordecai gets his Queen, the realm falls, the Sorcerers come, and it all ends here because I was clever enough to walk into my ex’s trap wearing a dead woman.
No.
Not like this.
There’s one thing she can’t take. One thing that’s mine and only mine, the thing Azaan named on that burning ridge. I always get up. I always fight. And there’s one way left to fight when there’s nothing left to fight with.
If I die, the circle breaks. A resurrection needs a living vessel. You can’t pour a soul into a corpse.
And I’ve got seven lives.
Six now, in a second.
I’m so sorry, I think at the four of them, wherever they are, past the cold fire. I’m so sorry. I love you. Pull me back. Please. One more time.
And I reach down into the deep of me, past Tabeitha’s flood, to the small hot core of my own fire, my HellCat, mine, and I do the one thing she never expects, because she’s fighting to live and I’m the only one in this body willing to die.
I turn the fire inward.
And I burn us both down.
The last thing I feel is Tabeitha’s shriek of fury and disbelief as the circle shatters, as the cold blue fire blows out, as Mordecai screams my name, her name, both names, and the world goes white and then red and then, at last, mercifully, black.
Three claw-marks now.
But the circle’s broken.
And I’m gone.