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My ears perk forward to listen for her movements. I expect to hear pots clanging in that damnable kitchen, where she seems to spend half the time these days.
But instead, I hear something that sets a growl in my chest and my teeth on edge.
She is singing. I have only heard the noise from her once before. When she was singing for Thing. And the noise echoes up from the dark stairs below.
She went back down after I left.
She has opened the door to the dungeon.
And she is singing to Thing again.
Fury almost splits my head in two, straight down the center.
But I don’t roar. The seething, writhing thing that has taken root inside me keeps me silent as I stalk down the stairs, all my fur standing straight up.
I cannot believe she is testing me thus. I did not think I had to command her to stay out of the dungeon, but I thought I had made myself quite clear on the issue all the same.
She must know she has disobeyed me.
I have been too soft on her.
Creator-Father was wrong about so much, but when he disciplined me harshly, I listened.
Perhaps I must be harsh with her, too. Mortals are foolish creatures, and if her going back down to play with monsters does not prove it, I do not know what else does.
She is a spoiled child in need of correction.
My head pulses with my anger as I pull my wings tightly to my sides. Still, they scrape the walls as I take the stairs three at a time.
And then I am there, stalking through the dungeon doorway.
And there she is, all but sitting in Thing’s lap, wearing another of Creator-Father’s kitchen-coverings as clothing. She sits within the circle of his many arms, his many sharp claws, his fangs.
First is fear for her. Then more fury than I have felt yet as other thoughts stab. Jealous thoughts.
“Here we go,” Remus observes dryly from the back wall, alerting everyone to my presence.
My consort looks up at me with a bright smile. “Abaddon! Look, Thing and I—”
She is cut off by my hand closing around her throat. Easily, I lift her off the floor and out of Thing’s grasp, turning and holding her high in the air. She looks shocked, her face going white, her feet kicking uselessly in the air.
“You will never come down here again,” I warn her, fury in every word.
Too late I realize my mistake.
Remus’s tail whips around my throat and jerks me backward before I register what has happened. That I have not moved far enough beyond his chain’s length. I’m yanked off kilter and my consort drops to the floor.
They are in mutiny against me. How long? How many times has she come down here and worked her wiles on him the same way she has on me? Is she his consort, too?
Immediately, she scurries back to the wall opposite me, her hands going to her throat, eyes wide with shock and betrayal.
I am confused by the regret stabbing me. But perhaps that is just Thing’s claws, which indeed have all come out at once and are stabbing every part of vulnerable skin he can reach.
“No!” my consort yells, and Remus’s tail tightens at my throat.
“Why no?” Thing’s voice seethes at my ear.
Hannah-consort skitters across the dungeon and hides behind Thing’s back. She places a hand on his shoulder.
What the fuck is happening? Fury and confusion war. Everything within me wants to lash out at Thing. At her. At all of them. She looks at me as if I have betrayed her, yet obviously she is the betrayer.
I have been a fool to ever believe a word out of her lying mouth, to ever believe she feels anything for me—
My fury lends me strength. If I bear my wings backward, I can overpower—
“Don’t hurt him,” she says, her voice quiet.
Then Thing’s rough voice. “He hurt you. You bear kit. He deserves death.”
Kit? KIT?
All strength gives out of my legs, and I fall to my knees.
“Kit?” asks Hannah-consort.
But as Remus’s tail releases from my neck, I turn, and I see.
Shackles fall from my eyes, and oh gods of the Great Hall, do I see. Or rather smell.
Thing is clean.
His hair is no longer a matted, filthy mess, but clean and combed. His skin is cleaned of filth and even his claws have been cleansed and trimmed. He not only allowed her to touch him, but to bathe, groom, and cover his nakedness. He, who attacks if I ever come within feet of him.
Though I am on my knees now, he has reared up on his legs, all six arms and thirty claws bared and ready should I attack.
He, who has always had a more wickedly acute sense of smell than I, protects my consort from me.
For he has scented what I only now catch the barest whiff of—that she is already with child.
