Azaan
I feel everything. That’s my gift and my curse, always has been, and it has never once been worse than the flight from Mordecai’s fortress with the wrong woman wearing my Queen’s face.
I carry the book. Valerian shoved it into my hands as we ran and I’ve got it clamped to my chest like it’s worth what we paid for it, which it isn’t, nothing is, because what we paid for it is riding along beside us with Tabby’s body and Tabeitha’s cold eyes and I can feel, I can FEEL, my little one screaming somewhere down underneath and I can’t reach her.
That’s the thing that’s breaking me. I feel her.
Not gone. Trapped. Shoved into the back of her own head while that ancient thing drives, and every empath instinct I have is clawing at the walls trying to get to her and there’s no way in.
Mordecai’s howl chases us across the wastes, grief and rage, robbed of his ghost at the last second by a bookseller who’d rather burn than lose, and I want to feel triumphant about that and I can’t, because the price of it is walking next to me wearing her skin.
“Keep moving,” Valerian rasps. He’s grey, nearly dead, spent to the bone from hauling her soul back into the realm, and he’s still upright by pure spite.
“We can’t free her here. Mordecai could recover any moment.
We get distance, we get walls, we get her somewhere Tabeitha can’t reach for him. Then we fight for our girl.”
“She’s in there,” I say, and my voice cracks, which it never does, I’m the one who keeps things light, and I can’t, not now. “Valerian, I can feel her. She’s fighting. She’s holding the fire so the old cow can’t use it. She’s still ours, she’s just, she’s buried.”
“I know.” His jaw is set. “Which is why we do not give up on her. Not for a second. Do you understand me, Azaan? She held on through three deaths. We hold on through this.”
The thing wearing Tabby glances at us as we run, and it smiles, cold and amused. It says in that accent that isn’t hers, “You’re all so sentimental. She’s fading. Every step, a little more. By the time you reach your precious walls there may be nothing left of her to fight for.”
“Liar,” I say, because I feel my little one flare when Tabeitha says it, feel her spit and claw at the back of the skull, still there, still furious. “She’s not fading. She’s winding up. You’ve never fought a cornered cat, have you, your majesty. You’re about to.”
Tabeitha’s smile flickers, just slightly, and I hold onto that, because it means I’m right, because it means she’s frightened, because a fragment that was truly winning wouldn’t bother lying about it.
We run through the red night, four demons and a stolen Queen and a book we bled for, and I keep my eyes on the body that holds my little one.
I send everything I have down the bond even though I can’t get through, love and hope and come on, kitten, we’ve got you, hold on, over and over, in case any scrap of it reaches the back seat where she’s fighting.
I don’t know if it does. But I don’t stop. None of us do. You don’t stop for Tabby. She never once stopped for us.