Tabitha
I’m in the back seat of my own body and I can’t reach the front.
This is what she’s wanted all along, and now she’s got it, and it’s worse than drowning, because when you drown at least it ends.
This doesn’t end. I’m still here, that’s the horror, I’m awake and aware and shoved down into the dark of my own skull while Tabeitha drives my body around and I can only watch through my own eyes like they’re a window in someone else’s house.
She stands us up out of Luka’s arms. I feel his grief through the bond, his refusal to let go even now, and I scream at him from the back seat, I’m here, I’m still here, don’t give up, but nothing reaches the front. My mouth is hers.
“Look at you all,” she says, and turns us in a slow circle, taking in my family.
My family. “Three centuries I ruled this realm, and she got four of you to love her in less than a year. It’s almost impressive.
Sentimental. But impressive.” She stops on Valerian, who’s on his knees, spent to the bone from hauling my soul back.
“Valerian. My most trusted. You told me to split myself. You made this possible. I should thank you.”
“I made a mistake,” Valerian says hoarsely. “I’ve been paying for it since. Give her back, Tabeitha. She’s stronger than you. She always has been. You’re only a fragment.”
“A fragment that’s driving,” she says sweetly.
And here’s the thing she doesn’t know, the thing that gives me the first thread of hope in all this dark.
She’s driving, yes. But she’s a fragment, like Valerian said, a piece of a soul, three centuries old and full of herself and grief and pride.
And I’m not a fragment. I’m whole. This is my body, grown from my blood, and every cell of it knows me the way it will never know her.
She’s a driver in a stolen car. But it’s still my car. And I know where the handbrake is.
I stop screaming to be let out. That’s not how I get back in. I go quiet, quiet as a cat, and I watch her from the back seat, and I wait.
“Kill Mordecai,” Azaan says suddenly, sharp, and I feel him doing the thing he does, thinking three moves ahead behind the charm.
“You hate him. He’s been trying to drag you out of the dark and reshape you into what he wanted for three hundred years.
You’re not his lost love, Tabeitha, you’re his obsession.
He doesn’t want you. He wants a ghost he can own.
So prove you’re the Queen and not his doll. Kill him.”
It’s clever. It’s so clever. He’s trying to point her fury away from us, buy time, and it half works, because I feel her hesitate, feel her turn our head towards Mordecai, who’s dragging himself upright across the ruined circle, his beautiful stolen face streaked with tears.
“Tabeitha,” Mordecai breathes. “It worked. You’re here. You’re...”
“I’m here,” she agrees coldly. “No thanks to your circle. You put me in a cage and called it love, Mordecai. You always did.” She lifts our hand, and cold fire, her fire, wrong fire, gathers in our palm. “I ruled realms before you were anything. I don’t need saving. And I certainly don’t need you.”
And that’s my moment. While she’s fixed on him, while all three centuries of her pride are pointed at the man who spent them trying to remake her, while she’s not watching the back seat because she thinks I’ve stopped fighting.
I reach for the handbrake.
Not the front. Not the wheel. I can’t take the wheel yet, she’s too strong on it.
But I can reach the one thing that’s mine at the root, the fire, my fire, the HellCat that’s answered to me and only me since the first day it woke.
And I don’t turn it inward this time. I’ve done enough dying.
I just close my hand round it, deep in the dark, and I hold, so she can’t use it, so the cold wrong fire in our palm gutters and dies because I won’t let her have the fuel.
She snarls. Rounds on herself, on me, in our own head. You. You’re supposed to be drowned.
I’m a cat, I tell her, from the back seat, and I bare my teeth in the dark. We don’t drown easy. And it’s my fire, you ancient cow. Not yours. Never yours.
It’s not enough to take the wheel back. Not yet. But it’s enough to stall her, enough to make her fight me for every inch instead of swanning about murdering people in my skin, and I feel the men feel it, feel the bond flare as they realise I’m still in here, still clawing.
“She’s fighting,” Luka says, fierce, wet. “She’s still in there. Tabby, hold on, we’ve got you, don’t let go...”
“Get her out of here,” Valerian orders, hauling himself up by sheer will.
“The book, grab the book, and get us all out through the seam before Mordecai recovers or she gets her feet back under her. We can’t win this here.
We regroup, we free Tabby somewhere safe, we do it right. Go. Now. Carry her if you have to.”
And Gavriel, my Guardian, who raised his shield not knowing whether to protect me or from me, makes the call.
He crosses the room in three strides, and he doesn’t strike the thing wearing my face.
He wraps me up in his huge arms, gentle, reverent, the way he always has, and he says, low, right against my ear, for me, only for me, in the back seat where he somehow knows I’m listening:
“Hold on, my Queen. We’ve got the wheel. You just hold the fire. We’ll get you home.”
And Luka grabs the book off the plinth, Azaan blows the seam wide, and we run, all of us, out of the fortress and into the red night, Mordecai’s howl of grief and rage chasing us into the dark.
We got the book.
But he’s still got me. Half of me. The worst half’s got the wheel.
And I don’t know yet how to take it back.
But I’ve got my fire. And I’m still here.
I’m still here.