4. Tabitha
Tabitha
We don’t stop until the lair is a smear of rubble behind us and there’s open hellscape between me and that voice.
I sit down on a scorched rock, put my head between my knees, and breathe. The men form up around me, a loose ring of muscle and magic, all of them watching the horizon, none of them saying the thing they’re all thinking, which is: what the hell just happened in there.
So I say it.
“Mordecai’s called Alex.” My voice comes out flat and strange. “He’s my ex. The one from Earth. Six years. The one who dumped me and buggered off to New York.” I lift my head. “Except there was no New York, was there. There was this. He was this, the whole time.”
The silence that follows is its own kind of loud.
“Say something,” I tell them.
“I’m going to kill him,” Luka says simply.
“Bit basic, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
Azaan crouches in front of me, green eyes searching my face. He’s the one who feels things, who felt my heartbreak the first day I landed here and asked me who hurt me. He knows exactly who hurt me. He’s looking at me now like he’s trying to work out how deep it goes.
“How much of it was real?” he asks quietly.
And there it is. The question I’ve been shoving in the box since I sat down at that table.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “That’s the worst part.
I don’t know if any of it was, or if all of it was fake, or if some of it was real and that’s meant to make it hurt less, except it makes it hurt more, because how am I supposed to know which bits?
” I scrub my hands over my face. “Six years, and I don’t know if he ever meant a single word. ”
The awful thing is the specifics. It’s not the big stuff, the holidays, the anniversaries, the I-love-yous.
It’s the small stuff that ambushes me now, crouched on a rock in hell.
The way he learned to make my tea exactly right, milk in first, brewed till it was nearly orange.
The way he’d put his cold feet on me in bed and laugh when I yelped.
Six years of small kindnesses, and I don’t know if a single one of them was a man loving me or a demon running a very long con, and I never will, because the only person who could tell me just tried to hollow me out for the soul I’m carrying.
“He knew how I take my tea,” I say, and it comes out cracked and stupid and I can’t stop it. “Three hundred years old, an Upper-Class Demon, older than Valerian, and he learned how I take my tea. Why would he bother, if none of it was real? Why would a thing like that learn a thing like that?”
“Because it’s how you make a lie perfect,” Gavriel says, gruff and gentle at once.
“The best lies are ninety-nine parts true. It doesn’t mean the tea was love, my Queen.
It means he was patient. Don’t let him make you doubt your own heart.
Yours was real. That’s the only one in that flat that ever was. ”
“It doesn’t matter,” Luka says.
“It matters to me.”
“I know.” He kneels too, takes my hands, careful of the tender palms. His amber eyes hold mine, steady, no smoke now, just Luka.
“I mean it doesn’t change anything. Whatever he was on Earth, whatever he made you feel, it’s over.
You’re not that woman anymore, kitty cat.
You’re ours, and he’s a dead man who hasn’t noticed yet. ”
The tight thing behind my ribs eases a fraction.
Not the sadness. That’s still there, tangled up with the fury, a horrible knot I’ll be picking at for a while.
But the panic eases, because he’s right.
I’m not the Tabby who read that book in her jimjams and cried over a man.
That Tabby didn’t have four hell creatures who’d tear a realm apart to get her back.
“He said I’m carrying something,” I say. “He said he doesn’t want me. He wants her. Tabeitha.”
Valerian makes a low sound. He’s been quiet, which for Valerian is deafening.
“Val,” I say. “Arse-face. Talk to me.”
“Don’t call me that.” Automatic. Then, softer: “I knew him. Long ago, before the sealing. Mordecai was Tabeitha’s consort.
Her general. Her lover.” His blue eyes have gone that tinged-purple they do when he’s turning something over that he doesn’t like.
“If he’s alive, and if he wants her back, then everything we thought this was just changed.
This isn’t about your power, little kitty. Not really.”
“Then what’s it about?”
He looks at me, and for once there’s no cleverness in it, no strategy, just a very old, very tired man who’s realised the door he shut three centuries ago never actually closed.
“It’s about grief,” he says. “His. And he’s had three hundred years to let it rot.”
I get to my feet. My legs hold, which is a nice surprise. Deep down, Tabeitha shifts and settles, smug, well-fed on my misery, and I grit my teeth and shove her down where she belongs.
Not today, you ancient cow.
“Right,” I say. “Then we go to the Palace, we work out what he wants, we get my book back, and we make sure he never gets his hands on her, or me, ever again.” I look round at the four of them, my ridiculous, gorgeous, murderous family. “And then we kill him. Slowly. Any objections?”
“None,” says Gavriel, and the others echo it, and even the sulfur wind seems to agree.
On foot, obviously. Because in this dimension it’s always on foot.
But together.