For the moment, there was only shock. I did that. I really just did that. There were shouts of protest all around, largely over the sudden noise. She realized she was still standing, breathing hysterical hard. Captain Spectre was the one who did more than shout. He gently, carefully, walked to where Hawk stood.

  “Can I have my gun back now?” He said, as if he were disarming an intense bomb.

  Wordless, Hawk handed the evil black thing over to him. Her hands were shaking. Why were they shaking? Her eyes were fixed on Shadow. Maybe that was the reason. He was staring from her to the destroyed bottle and back. He looked almost…lost. Unmoored.

  “I’m sorry,” She said, her voice quavering. “I’m sorry, but I had to.”

  He fixed on her face, his alien hands clenched at his side. “Just…why? I wanted it. More than anything, I wanted it.”

  Firmer footing now, as her reasons broadened like flowers. “Three reasons. One: We’ve all been through hell because of Kaiser. We watched him kill Henry and shove something like that shit into Mattias. We know the man thinks in machinations and plots. And you want to put something he made, that he gave you—specifically to drive a wedge between us—into your body? Into your head? On nothing but his word that it is what he said it is?” Her voice was rising on each word. By the end she felt confident, her speech firm and forceful.

  Shadow heard this all. He absorbed every word as if they were bullets. “Fine. That is one reason. What are the others?”

  “Second: You wanted to use it because you want to be Alex West. But you are Alex.”

  “I remember nothing of him,” Shadow said.

  “Not true. Not true at all. You started to remember on our journey through Henry’s mind. Little things, but you remembered running cons with Baylor—your father—at baseball stadiums.”

  “That was a dream,” He said.

  “You run cons the way he did.” She pushed. “With compassion for the people you’re working, with brilliance for the manipulation. And when we were working together to get concessions from Illyris, you and I could work together flawlessly. That’s not the sort of thing you do with someone you’ve only known for…what? Two, three weeks of Holian time?” She dug a little deeper. “You trusted me, too. Me, and Em, and Henry. You knew better than to trust Kaiser. You reacted to us as if you knew us, because you did. You do. You do remember. It’s just taking some time to get it all together again.”

  Stricken, he said, “But don’t you see how unfair it is to you? You love a man, whole and complete and unblemished. I can give you at least some of that back—or at least, I could, before you destroyed it. It was hope in that bottle.”

  “It was poison. And you know it as well as I do. Kaiser was running a con on you. He realized what you wanted the most in all the world—to be whole—and he offered it to you in a bottle. Or else he baited me with it, figuring that if he gave it to you, and you hated me for it, that would confirm to me that it is what he says he is.” Pause. “Which I’m not convinced it is.” Another pause. “Or was.” Yeah. The longer she talked, the more confident she was that shooting the poison was the best choice she’d ever made.

  Finally, he said, “What’s your third reason?”

  “I’m in love with you,” she said.

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Well, yes. That is why I would give you Alex. I would give you back your love. I would—”

  “You’re not hearing me, Jackass. I said I’m in love with you.”

  Silence. And it went on, and on, broken only by the sound of MPs arriving to investigate the gunshot. Cursing, Captain Spectre turned towards them and began covering Hawk’s ass quite thoroughly. She spared him little thought. It was the Shadow she was fixated on. Having said it aloud, her soul now wanted to follow him, a heliotrope after his light.”

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  “I’m broken.” He said, at last.

  “You were broken. And you are scarred, I can see that cleanly. You’re so lost in grieving for what you were, you can’t see the brilliance of what you are now. But you survived it. Your scars are your glory. Not because of what was done to you—that was wrong. It will always be wrong—but because it means you did survive.”

  “I am gods-eaten. I am devoured with little more than rind and core left to feast upon.”

  “And you made it through,” She said. “Being broken doesn’t make you unclean. It shatters you for a little while, but our souls and bodies value whole-ness. You began healing almost immediately…save for the wounds to your psyche, which I get. I’d be upset too. But those can be healed, same as the rest of you. I think you’re already more than halfway there.”

  He stared at her. “But I am so far from what your husband was! How can you—”

  “Because we are the sum of our experiences. What we live through, what we do, what we fight for. Every win and every loss and everything in between. Those add up to make us into us. And you’ve survived a lot. If I took any of that away from you, it’d be like amputating a limb. And that’s not the love you build a life on. The Shadowmaster is as much a part of Alex’s life as Alex ever was. If I erase even one fraction of the Shadow…it’s not love. It’s selfishness. And fear of what I don’t understand. The loving act is to step out into the unknown and learn to love…well, all of you. And trust me, I’m already most of the way there.” She began to cry. “I don’t want to lose you. Any part of you. I want everything. The scary big cats. The incomprehensible powers.”

  “These hands? Touching you?” He held up the limbs in question, with the violet skin and clawed fingers. “You could stand it?”

  “I’ve dreamed about it,” she said, honestly. And yes, there were other people in the room who could hear her, and she was now wandering off into territory that should have stayed private. She didn’t care. This was more important. “Part of what made that whole journey to Illyris so difficult was…it made me realize how I felt about you. That I didn’t want to rescue just Alex anymore. You made me see you as your own distinct and perfect thing—”

  “I am far from perfect—”

  “You’re perfection to me. I wouldn’t change anything about you. I’d fight whoever did try. And that includes you. You are the sum of your glorious parts, and you’re adding new things to yourself every day, every hour, and every minute, and I love each new thing. I want to discover your unmapped country. I want to be with you as long as I can. My own personal forever.”

  He approached her now, slow, as if he were trying to capture a bird freshly flown from the nest. “I’m not sure I can meet your expectations.”

  “That you exist as you are?” She said.

  “I am violent. I am a warlord who has bloodied themselves well. You deserve someone who is clean of blood and done with war.”

  “I deserve,” She said, softly, “to get what I want. And what I want is the broken, gods eaten, blood-soaked mess of you. I wouldn’t be happy with something bloodless and perfect; not when you’ve shown me the magnificence of your mess.”

  They were near enough to touch, now. Near enough for her to see that he was shaking, too. “Woman,” he said, at last. “Hawk-of-the-West. Godslayer. You are a Queen amongst your people; they are just too blind to see it.”

  “I can say the same about yours,” She said, deliberately interrupting another speech of self-abnegation. “I should have been fighting your lovers off with a stick.”

  “I’m trying to say you should not settle. You should demand what you want of me, bid me by every vow and debt to become the embodiment of your desire.”

  “And I’m trying to say that you already are. You are Alex, at the core. You’re the same person with the same desires and the same morals and, god help us all, the same urge to self-destruct out of guilt for shit you can’t help. So stop it. Stop trying to be some idealized version of yourself that only you care about, and just be yourself. Because I’m in love with that self. I don’t want to see it ruined because you can’t appreciate it.”

  He nodded. His voice was soft as silk when he said, “And all of that is moot; you destroyed the bottle.”

  “Yes.” She said, firmly. “I did.” A pause. “But if it hadn’t been from Kaiser, I probably would have settled for just…talking you out of it, if I could. I would have accepted the risk of failure because at least we could work our way up from there. But this was something that Kaiser Willheim gave you. He’s the one who started this mess, and you really thought putting something he gave you into your head was a good idea?” She paused, as a horrifying thought occurred to her. “For all we know, it could have been himself in that bottle.”

  A bad thought, indeed. Shadow turned pale. He was about to respond when a soldier pushed his way into their little group with a chant of “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” He stood at attention before Captain Spectre and said, “Apologies, sir. I’m on orders from General Mulligan. We need you and the Shadow down in Holia ASAP.

  “It’s looking like Argon has begun to invade.”