27. Luka
Luka
The last day’s march to the stronghold nearly costs us before we ever reach it, and it’s my fault, because I’m so busy watching Tabby I don’t watch the sky.
I feel her strain, that’s my excuse. The closer we get to the fortress, the more the old Queen pushes at her, feeding on Tabby’s dread of the plan, and I can feel every inch of it through the mate bond, and it’s tearing me up.
So I’m walking with half my attention on the inside of my mate’s head, which is exactly when the sky opens and the wraith-drake comes down.
It’s not a fire drake. I wish it were a fire drake. It’s a thing Mordecai made, or bound, a drake wound through with his shadow, black smoke where there should be fire, and it drops out of the murk silent as guilt and it’s got its talons out for Tabby before I’ve even shifted.
“TABBY!”
I’m not going to reach her. I know it in the half-second it takes, the cold maths of it, I’m too far and too slow because I was watching her soul instead of the sky, and the shadow-drake is going to take my mate and it’s my fault.
And then Tabby saves herself.
She doesn’t freeze. The girl who froze in her first week in this realm is gone, burned away by everything since.
She turns into it, my mouthy, brilliant, brave mate, and she throws up both hands wreathed in gold fire and catches the drake’s talons on a wall of flame.
It shrieks and pulls up short. By the time it’s wheeling for a second pass I’m there, four hundred pounds of panther and hellfire, and I take it out of the air and we go down together in a tangle of smoke and claws.
It’s a hard fight. The shadow in it eats my hellfire the way Mordecai’s magic always does, and it’s fast. It very nearly opens my belly before Gavriel’s ax comes down and pins its wing to the ground and Valerian’s violet burns the shadow out of it so my fire can finally bite.
We kill it together, the way we kill everything, but it costs us, and I limp out of it bleeding from a dozen places, panther-shape shredded.
Tabby’s on me before I’ve finished shifting back, hands in my fur, then on my skin, frantic.
“You idiot,” she’s saying, half-crying, half-furious. “You great reckless idiot, you weren’t watching, I felt you, you were in my head instead of on the sky, you nearly died because you were worrying about me, don’t you DARE, Luka...”
“You saved yourself,” I say, dazed, proud, bleeding. “Kitty cat. You caught a drake on your bare hands. Did you see that? You didn’t need me at all.”
“I always need you.” She presses her forehead to mine, shaking. “That’s not the point. The point is you can’t die watching me, do you understand? I can’t do any of this if I lose one of you. I can’t. So stop it. Stop nearly dying to save a woman who’s learning to save herself.”
“Can’t,” I mumble, as Azaan’s cool magic starts knitting my wounds shut. “Made for it. Mate.”
“You’re all impossible. Every one of you. A matched set of impossible men.”
“You picked us.”
“I did. God knows why.” But she stays curled over me while Azaan heals me, her hand in my hair, and I feel her strain quiet for a moment, feel her fear for me shove even Tabeitha to the back of her head.
I think, dazed and bleeding and stupidly happy, that if getting hurt is what it takes to make her forget the ghost for a minute, I’ll get hurt every day for the rest of my nine lives.
That night, camped in sight of the fortress, none of us says the obvious thing, which is that tomorrow could take one of us for real.
We just make sure to say everything else instead.