“I wanted to save you,” I said softly. “All of you. From all of it.”
Thomas bowed his head over his infant son and shook.
“My son,” he breathed in a whisper, gasping between sobs. “I will always love you. And when you need me most, I will be there. I swear it.”
A shiver went through me.
Words have power.
Words are magic.
And I felt a tiny shudder of Doom go running over my skin.
“Let it be done swiftly,” Mab murmured, holding out her arms. “I have much work to do if I am to save Justine, and it must begin soon.”
Thomas curled around the baby for one more moment.
Then, slowly, as if every movement was pain, he held out his arms.
And the Queen of Air and Darkness stole my brother’s child.
Chapter
Fifty-One
It had been two weeks since I saved Thomas, Justine, and their son, and I still felt fairly crappy about the whole thing.
I’d taken to doing my meditating out on the roof at sunrise as the spring mornings got warmer. Fitz joined me every morning, as did Mouse on weekends. For Mouse, meditation looked like him curling up in a sunbeam and taking a nap next to me, but he gave off such an aura of peace and contentment when he did it that I figured he had to be helping.
Bear hung around while I did, always wary, never obvious about it. The massive Valkyrie had tried to convince me, at first, that sitting completely still with my eyes closed on a roof when there were a lot of places that I could be shot from was a bad idea, and on a technical level she was absolutely right. But you can’t go through life hiding in a cave. You’ve gotta get out in the sun, or you aren’t living. Just surviving.
Anyway. I was just wrapping up and doing a few stretches, not yoga, and Thomas, in a denim jacket, tank top, and workout pants, came out of the doorway to the roof and stepped into the sun, squinting. It was early yet. The protesters and counterprotesters wouldn’t start showing up for another half an hour or so. Mouse lifted his head at once and started thumping his tail on the stone floor.
I lurched up from what an ignorant person would have thought was a pigeon pose.
“Hey, guys,” I said to Fitz and Bear. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen for breakfast.”
I’d given Fitz the very brief rundown on Thomas. “That’s him, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.” He pushed himself up with the lightness and ease of youth and said, to Bear, “You ready to do coffee yet?”
“My God,” Bear said. “Why would anyone drink that bitter nonsense when there’s already hot chocolate?”
Fitz shook his head grimly as they headed for the stairs. “Damn. Even with the biker boots, sometimes you only rise to cool adjacent, Bear.”
“Guess I’ll just have to lose a couple seconds’ worth of sleep over the lack of your approval, then,” Bear said easily.
Thomas frowned after the pair of them and then glanced at me. “Valkyrie?”
“And new apprentice,” I said. “So far, Council doesn’t know about him.”
He shook his head. “Damn. I missed a lot.”
“I know how you feel. Exactly.”
He considered that for a moment and then grunted. “When you were dead for a while.”
