51. Tabitha
Tabitha
Six months later, and the strangest thing about peace is how quickly you get used to it.
Sanguisca is mine, properly mine, and it turns out being Queen of a realm that runs on desire and darkness is a lot less about smiting and a lot more about admin than the ancient prophecies let on.
Who knew. There are disputes to settle and territories to sort and a whole population of demons who spent three centuries in a book and are frankly delighted to have someone on the throne who’ll listen to them.
I hold court from a chair that finally fits me, with four consorts ranged around me who make governing bearable and the nights extremely unbearable in the best possible way, and the realm hums warm and red and safe, its border mended, its Queen claimed, its ghost at rest.
And it’s changing. That’s the part that undoes me, quietly, when I let myself notice it.
Valerian said it was a fixer-upper, a realm that had been starving and leaderless so long it forgot it was ever more than a hellscape, and he was right.
It’s remembering now. The wastes aren’t so waste anymore.
There are night-markets springing up in the old ruins, lit gold instead of that sullen red, demons trading and arguing and laughing where a year ago there was nothing but survival.
Krael’s building something out in the eastern reaches he won’t tell me about and grins about like a boy with a secret.
The fire-gardens Valerian described, the ones I thought were a story to make me feel better, they’re real, and they’re coming back, great blooms of tame flame that the little demon children, and it turns out there are little demon children, play in without getting burned.
My realm is learning how to thrive because a bookseller too stubborn to die gave it permission to.
I did that. Me. It’s the proudest I’ve ever been of anything, and I’ll never say it out loud, because Valerian would be unbearable about being right.
I did go back to Earth. Once. I owed it that.
I closed up the bookshop properly, told Mrs Thompson I was moving away for love, which is the truest lie I’ve ever told, and watched her eyes go soft and knowing in a way that made me wonder how much that clever old woman always suspected about the quiet girl who read too much and shifted into a cat.
She hugged me and told me to be happy and not to be a stranger, and I didn’t promise, because I try not to lie to people I love, but I left her the shop and a letter and I think she understood.
And I saw my parents. That was harder. I sat them down in their cold London flat and I told them a version of the truth, that I’d found where I belong, that it’s far away, that they won’t see me much, that I’m loved, properly loved, for exactly what I am, cat and fire and all.
My mother didn’t soften. She never will.
But my father, my gentle father who always called me Tabby-cat when Mum wasn’t listening, walked me to the door and held my face and said, “You look happy, love. Happier than I’ve ever seen you. Whoever they are, they’re good to you?”
“They’re good to me, Dad,” I said. “All four of them.”
He blinked. Then he laughed, a real one, the first I’d heard from him in years. “Well,” he said. “You always did do everything your own way. Go on. Go and be happy. I’ll tell your mother you’re fine.”
And that was that. My Earth life, closed gently, on my own terms, no vanishing, no loose ends, no lunch I never showed up to. Just a goodbye I got to choose. Then home, through a portal I opened myself with three words and a claimed throne’s power, back to the realm and the family that are mine.
They threw me a coronation. I say threw, like it was a party, and it was, in the way a hell dimension does parties, which is to say with rather more fire than a health and safety officer would sanction.
The whole realm came. Every demon that survived the war and a good many who’d hidden in the wastes for three centuries too frightened to come out, they all came, poured into the courtyard of my Palace under a sky finally more red than grey, and they knelt.
I hate a fuss. Everyone knows this. But I stood on the steps of my own throne room with my four men behind me and Krael, two-armed again and grinning fit to split his tusks, holding the crown, and I looked out at thousands of the things that had spent a year trying to kill me now kneeling because they wanted to. I cried, obviously, because I’m me.
“You’re leaking, my Queen,” Krael rumbled.
“Shut up and give me the crown, you enormous menace.”
He put it on my head, black iron and old fire, the crown of Sanguisca that no one had worn since Tabeitha fell, and the realm sang.
I felt it, the whole of it, that current running both ways, Queen to realm and realm to Queen, and this time there was no ghost in it, no borrowed coat, no asking permission.
Just me. Just mine. A bookseller from Westlake, crowned Queen of hell, with four consorts at her back and a war-leader at her side and a whole realm on its knees not in fear but in love.
“Long live the HellCat Queen,” Krael bellowed, and the realm bellowed it back until the spires shook. I stood there in my crown and let them, and thought, if only the Tabby who cried over Alex in a bookshop could see me now.
And behind me, my four men. Not kneeling.
I told them they never kneel, not to me, we’re past that, we were past it the first time they caught me falling.
Luka with his hand warm at the small of my back.
Azaan grinning like the whole thing’s a marvellous joke only we’re in on.
Gavriel, stone-faced and shining-eyed, guarding me even here, even in a courtyard full of people who love me, because he can’t help it and I’d never ask him to.
And Valerian, close at my shoulder, murmuring just for me, under the roar, “Three centuries I waited to serve a true Queen. Turns out she was worth every year, little kitty.” And I had to bite the inside of my cheek not to cry all over again.
She’d never believe it, that bookshop girl. I hardly do.
Tonight there’s a fire in the great hearth burning gold, and I’m curled up in the middle of my four men in the Queen’s chambers, warm and thoroughly loved and pleasantly wrecked, because a coronation in a realm that runs on desire and darkness ends exactly how you’d think, with the Queen taken apart by all four of her consorts until she forgets her own name and half the realm’s below her windows and glowing brighter for it.
Azaan’s tracing lazy patterns on my bare arm where three claw-marks used to be and aren’t anymore.
“You’re thinking,” he says. “I can feel it. You think loud.”
“I’m allowed to think. I’m the Queen.”
“Terrifying precedent,” Valerian murmurs, not opening his eyes.
“I was thinking,” I say, “about how a year ago I was a lonely bookseller crying over a man who turned out to be a demon, in a village where nobody knew what I really was, convinced the most exciting thing about me was that I turned into a cat the size of a shoe.” I look round at them, my ridiculous, gorgeous, murderous family, the panther and the elemental and the guardian and the warlock, the four best things that ever crawled out of a cursed book.
“And now I’m the claimed Queen of a hell dimension with four consorts and a realm that loves me and my own name on every door.
Nine lives. No ghost. No countdown. Just this. ”
“Regrets?” Luka rumbles, smug, because he knows the answer.
They each rule a piece of me, and a piece of the realm with it, in the end.
Valerian keeps the histories and the treaties, three centuries of a warlock’s memory finally put to something other than surviving.
Azaan handles the people, because he feels them, because he always knew who was hurting before they said a word.
Luka runs the borders and the hunts, then comes home smelling of smoke, grinning like a boy.
And Gavriel guards the door of every room I’m ever in, freed at last to do it as a man who gets to keep his own life.
Four consorts, four crowns of their own in all but name, and me at the centre holding the whole warm mad thing together.
“Only that it took me three deaths and a whole other dimension to get here.” I settle deeper into the four of them, into the warmth and the weight and the safety of them, my legion, my family, my home.
“Curiosity killed the cat, they say. Read the creepy book, Tabby; what’s the worst that could happen? ”
“And?” Gavriel asks, gruff, indulgent, hating that he’s asking.
I grin into the gold firelight of my own realm, whole and claimed and happier than a lonely girl in a bookshop ever dreamed she could be.
“Turns out,” I say, “there’s a cat in hell’s chance it kills me. I’ve got eight more lives, an army of demons, and four men who’d burn the world down twice over to keep me. Let the worst come. I’m the HellCat Queen.” I close my eyes, home at last. “And I’m unleashed.”