Tabitha
Mordecai’s waiting for me at my own front door, because of course he is, because he’d have felt me coming to claim the throne the way you feel a storm before it breaks, and it’s the one thing in all the realms he can’t allow.
He’s alone, standing in the black granite courtyard, wearing Alex’s face still, though it’s cracked now, grief showing through it like water through plaster.
Behind him, boiling up out of the shadows of the Palace walls, his forces gather, wraiths and shades and things made of the dark he’s spent three centuries alone with.
Between us and my throne room, a wall of him.
“Don’t,” he says, and it’s not a threat, it’s almost a plea. “Tabby. Sweetheart. Don’t do this.”
“Don’t sweetheart me.” I stop at the edge of the courtyard, my men fanning out beside me, and I feel the bond hum, five points of light, ready. “You lost the right to sweetheart me somewhere around the part where you spent six years lying to me to get close to a soul I didn’t know I was carrying.”
“Not all of it was a lie.” His voice breaks on it, and the awful thing, the thing I have to look straight at now instead of shoving in a box, is that I believe him.
“That’s what you never understood. I came to Earth for her.
For Tabeitha. To be near the vessel, to wait for the power to ripen.
That was the plan. Three hundred years of plan.
” He takes a step towards me, and Gavriel’s shield flares, and he stops.
“And then I actually met you. And you were funny. And curious. And kind in a way she never was. And I told myself it didn’t matter, that you were only the box, that when I finally brought her back you’d simply stop, and I’d have my Queen and it wouldn’t cost me anything I couldn’t bear to lose. ”
“But?” I say quietly, because I have to hear it.
“But I fell in love with the box.” His eyes are wet.
Alex’s eyes. The ones I woke up to for six years.
“With you. The wrong woman. The scrap. And I hated myself for it, so I did the cruellest thing I could think of, I broke it off, I left, I went cold, because I thought if I made you hate me it would be easier to hollow you out when the time came.” He laughs, and it’s the loneliest sound I’ve ever heard.
“It didn’t make it easier. It made it worse.
Because then you fell through the book grieving me, and you found them, and you got everything I couldn’t give you. I had to watch.”
The courtyard is silent. My men have gone still. And I stand there with three centuries of a demon’s grief laid bare in front of me, wearing the face of the man I loved, and I understand that this is the cruellest card he’s got and he’s playing it because it’s true.
Some of it was real. That’s the answer to the question I couldn’t stop asking. Some of it was real.
And it changes nothing.
“You know what, Alex?” I say, and my voice is steadier than I thought it would be.
“I believe you. I think some of it was real. I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and I mean that.
Three centuries alone, and the one time you feel something, you’re so broken you try to kill it.
” I feel my HellCat rise, warm, certain, mine.
“But here’s the thing you still don’t get, after all this time.
You had six years of me and you spent them planning to erase me for a ghost. They’ve had one year of me and they’ve died for me.
Burned realms for me. Hauled me back from death with their bare hands.
They love the woman I actually am. You love the box you were sorry to have to break.
” I lift my chin. “You want Tabeitha. Fine. But she’s a squatter in my body and I’m about to evict her, and when she’s gone, sweetheart, there’s nothing left here for you.
There never was. There was only ever me. And I’m not yours.”
His face crumples, and then it hardens, grief curdling into the thing it’s been curdling into for three hundred years. The shadows behind him surge up, and I feel the whole courtyard tip towards violence.
“Then I’ll take her out of you myself,” Mordecai says, cold now, final.
“Before you claim that throne. I’ll kill you, and I’ll catch her soul before it can slingshot to Earth, and I’ll pour her into a vessel that won’t fight me.
If I can’t have you both, I’ll have her.
I’ve waited too long to lose her to a bookseller’s stubbornness. ”
“Yeah,” I say, and my hands catch fire, gold and hot and mine. “I thought you might say something like that.”
“Tabby,” Luka growls, panther bleeding out of him.
“I know.” I don’t take my eyes off Mordecai.
“He’s between me and my throne. So we go through him.
” I feel the four of them settle into place around me, my family, my legion of four against a courtyard full of dark.
“Get me to that throne room. Whatever it takes. I claim the throne, I evict the ghost, and then, Alex.” I bare my teeth.
“Then you and I finish it. Properly. No more lies. No more boxes.”
He raises his hands, and the dark rises with them.
“Now,” I say.
And the courtyard erupts.