Tabitha
I have fought a lot of battles since I fell through that book, and I’ve been useless in most of them, or juice for someone else’s magic, or a thing to be protected in the middle of the pack. Not this one. This one, I’m at the front, and it feels less like a fight than a homecoming.
Mordecai’s dark comes at us in a wave, wraiths and shades pouring across the black granite, and my four men meet it the way they were made to.
Luka’s a streak of panther and hellfire, tearing shades apart faster than they can form.
Azaan rides his own hurricane above the courtyard, raining down blades of air and ice, funnelling the dark away from me.
Gavriel plants himself at my left shoulder, shield blazing gold, ax carving arcs that leave nothing standing.
And Valerian, spent as he is, still throws violet death with both hands, snarling incantations, buying me every step.
And me. I don’t hang back. For the first time, I don’t hang back.
I let the HellCat come, and she comes gladly.
I don’t fully shift, I don’t need to, I just let the fire run up my arms and out of my hands and I burn a path through the dark towards my own front door.
Gold fire, not Tabeitha’s cold blue, mine, the warm kind, the kind that answers to a bookseller from Westlake, and it eats through Mordecai’s shades like they’re paper.
“That’s it, kitty cat!” Luka roars, savage and delighted, at my side. “Burn them!”
“I’m burning, I’m burning, keep the big ones off me!”
We push across the courtyard step by step, a wedge of fire and fury, five of us against a realm’s worth of one demon’s grief.
Mordecai himself hangs back, marshalling the dark, and I can feel him trying to reach past all of it to me, tendrils of shadow snaking along the ground towards my ankles the way they did in the ravine, trying to snatch me, to pull me apart from the others, to get me alone where he can do what he did before.
Not this time. Every tendril that reaches me meets fire, and dies.
The dark comes at us in waves, and each one is worse than the last. Shades with too many arms. Wraiths that scream in Alex’s voice, his real voice, the one from Earth, saying my name over and over to gut me, and I burn them for the cheap trick it is even as it lands.
Things with no shape at all, just cold and teeth.
Mordecai has spent three centuries alone with the dark and he’s very, very good at making more of it.
But we’ve spent a year learning to fight as one thing, and that’s something he’s never had. He fights alone. He’s always fought alone. That’s his whole tragedy, right there in the way he wages a war.
Azaan drops out of his storm to shield my left when a wraith gets under Gavriel’s guard, and Luka’s there on my right before I’ve felt the shade at my back.
Valerian calls the shots from three moves ahead, “Left, kitten, now duck, Gavriel the big one on the steps,” and we move like one animal with five bodies, and the dark can’t find a seam in us because there isn’t one.
A shade the size of a horse rears up right in front of me and I don’t flinch. I catch it with both flaming hands and I tear it apart down the middle, and it’s the first time in this whole nightmare I’ve done that without a scrap of fear. I feel the realm notice. I feel it lean in. Closer now.
“He’s trying to split us,” Gavriel grinds out, shield up, covering my flank. “Wants you cut off. Stay close, my Queen. We do not let him get you alone.”
“Wasn’t planning on it. Get me to the doors.”
The throne room doors are twenty feet away. Then fifteen. Then a great knot of shades boils up between us and them, thicker than anything yet, and I feel Mordecai pour himself into it, a wall of solid dark, because he knows, he can feel what I’m about to do. It’s the one thing he can’t survive.
“Together!” Valerian shouts. “Everything, now, all of it, into her! Juice her and let her through!”
And they do. All four of them at once. Luka’s smoke, Azaan’s wind, Gavriel’s golden shield-light, Valerian’s violet blood-magic, all of it slamming into me through the bond and through my hands, more power than I’ve ever held.
It should burn my palms to the bone and it doesn’t, because I’m not the vessel anymore, I’m the Queen, and this is my realm’s power coming home to its Queen.
I throw it all at the wall of dark. And the wall of dark comes apart in a roar of gold, and Mordecai’s scream tears across the courtyard, and the throne room doors blow open in front of me.
“Go!” Luka bellows. “We’ll hold him! GO, TABBY!”
And I go. I run through the doors into my own throne room, alone, the way it has to be done, the way the Oracle said, whole and unafraid, while my family holds the grief-mad demon and his whole dark army at my back.
The throne room is exactly as it always is. Vast. Shadowed. The enormous fireplace. The stone walls. And the throne itself, black and cold and waiting, the chair I have never once been able to sit on without the realm rejecting me, because I’ve always climbed towards it as a woman borrowing a coat.
Not now.
Behind me, the battle roars. Ahead of me, the throne waits.
I stop asking permission.
I walk up the steps to my throne, and I turn, and I sit down on it like it was carved for me, because it was, and I say, out loud, to the realm, to the ghost in my blood, to three hundred years of everyone telling me whose this all really is:
“Mine.”
And the realm answers.