Chapter 26
Cat
Hope died in my chest, its decay spreading a lethargy to my limbs so I barely managed to close my fingers around the scales hidden in a deep pocket of magic in time.
My fingers brushed cool metal—cold even after hours of resting against my body heat—and I tore the scales free, thrusting them between us before Virgil could rip my face off.
I didn’t want to kill Virgil. I didn’t even want him hurt, but there was no way to know what the scales would do when faced with a threat to my life.
They’d tried to crush the life from the last threat to me, and their failure to kill Violence still rankled, but I needed Virgil alive.
He was my family, my brother. He knew who I was, like my husbands knew who I was.
I craved that connection to my former life with a hunger that made my chest hurt.
“Virgil,” I panted, looking into his eyes as a blast of light from the scales and nudged him back three feet.
His heart still beat, furry chest moved with the bellows of great lungs, but he shook his head over and over.
Panic sank its claws into my heart as I scrambled to my feet, holding the glowing scales between us.
“Do you know me? It’s Cat. Your sister…”
My voice fell flat, no confidence in it, and the scales seemed to respond to my doubt. But instead of dimming, the pink-tinged illumination grew, casting itself across the gorge until light beamed into the sky and I had to squint to even make out the shadow of my brother.
The thread that had tugged me towards the scales sang now with a deep vibration, and goosebumps swept down my arms. There’d been a severe injustice here, enforced on every one of the gorge’s inhabitants, and it wasn’t just the scales that reacted.
My rage flickered, a match sputtering to life, and then the fire caught, latched on, and blazed.
A crime had been committed, with each of these creatures a victim.
A coal burned red hot in my chest. The scientist was dead—my husbands had told me as much.
The woman whose orders she followed was dead, along with Cruelty who pulled her strings.
But Violence. The coal flared hotter as the magic within me judged him and found him guilty.
Not only of my death and torture, but the suffering of these innocent people, too. A low growl built in my chest and Virgil took a step back, lowering his head in deference to a predator far higher on the food chain.
“Cat,” Misery called, but Death interrupted him.
“No, don’t interrupt. She’s judging them.”
It sent a thrill through me that he understood my magic, sensed its importance, and showed me the respect both that ancient title—Judgement—and the scales demanded.
It made a more human, feminine part of me purr, too.
My husband knew I was dangerous, knew this was my job, and trusted me to handle it.
The scales’ light slowly, gradually swept back from the grey sky above, past the ragged stone of the chasm, and into the rose gold metal, winking from the faceted morganite before it went dull. Dormant once more.
When I lifted my head, it was to see every wild animal in the gorge focused on me, no doubt why Miz had tried to warn me, but the creatures didn’t attack.
They didn’t move at all. A frown tugged at my brow until I realised this was instinct—fight, flight, or fawn, and every animal, every predator in the gorge, had chosen fawn.
They stood so perfectly still and prayed the apex predator in their midst didn’t notice them.
But I did. I scanned every animal, searching their eyes for intelligence, watching it sharpen in so many stares, until a smile pulled at my lips.
“I think,” I said, walking slowly through the gorge toward my husbands, “you should be able to shift now.”
The scales had judged their innocence, had sifted through the injustice wreaked upon them, and had undone it.
The power made me a little dizzy. Not the magic itself, but the ability to affect things on this scale. The power to blast a bestial curse into threads and cobwebs.
The second I was close enough, Tor dragged me into his arms and held me so tightly my bones ached.
“You’re gonna give me a fucking heart attack, beautiful,” he groaned into my hair, tucking my head under his chin, a kiss feathering over my crown. “Please stop running headfirst into danger. For the sake of my health.”
I wrapped the scales in their shadow and sent them back into the pocket where they sat, calm, against my skin.
My arms found their way around Tor’s waist, my desire to have him closer overriding any awkwardness I might have felt.
His scent drowned out everything else, the feel of his heart beating profound for reasons I couldn’t articulate.
It was as if I’d been scared to lose him, scared something bad would tear him away from me, and the relief of having him back was overpowering.
“Tor, were you…” I began, unsure. “Were you in danger? Recently?”
His chest brushed mine when he loosed a great sigh. “You could say that. Those prick siblings had me trapped in a mirror, separated from all of you.”
My body knew that, my soul knew and remembered the panic. It was just taking my mind a little longer to catch up.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” I said, forcing myself to unwind my arms and step back or I’d never let him go.
My face burned when I realised we had an audience.
Not my other husbands, who I’d swiftly become used to watching me in intimate moments—the creatures who’d been lupine, feline, or stag-like but now stood, stark-naked, in the gorge, or knelt on the floor in equal states of undress.
All watching us. No, watching me with a stunned awe like they’d just watched an angel descend from the heavens to issue a holy decree.
“Um, hi,” I said, pulling my back straight, lifting my head.
“You’re free to go wherever you desire, but if you’d like to stay together and be somewhere safe, with a roof over your head and running water…
” I checked with Pain, who nodded, the shadow that had never unwound itself from my body telling him of my attention. “We have a lodge where you can live.”
“It also comes with grounds,” he added, addressing the strangers—and my brother. “For anyone who’d rather be in animal form. Assuming you can shift back…?”
“They can,” I confirmed. “The magic sensed they had no choice in their nature, so it righted the wrong. You can now be whatever form you choose,” I told the impromptu nudist colony, trying to keep my eyes above shoulder level, especially when I met the pained amber eyes of my brother.
The people murmured, trusting each other more than us, which was fair.
“Madde,” I whispered. “Could you—”
“Give my best pants to your brother so you don’t have to see his dingaling? On it!”
A laugh snorted out of me, another catching me in the throat when I saw his best pants were pink velour with Sexy sequinned across the ass. Either way, Virgil gratefully pulled them on.1
“We,” a woman began, maybe a year older than me with a rat’s nest of dirty blonde hair and a pretty face made stark by horrors and gods knew how long being trapped as an animal.
Halting and slow, she spoke, as if remembering how to speak again.
“We will see the lodge before we decide whether to stay.”
I gave her a sympathetic smile, and wondered if I knew how it felt to be trapped as an animal against my will. “Lead the way,” I told Pain, and followed him out of the gorge.