Chapter 15
Secrets and Scrabble
Icome home from my shift to find Dis watching a documentary about meerkats with the focused intensity of an addict.
I stand in the doorway and observe him watching it for a moment.
He’s leaning forward on the futon, elbows on his knees, those burning blue eyes fixed on the screen like the meerkats might do something astonishing at any moment.
On screen, a meerkat stands sentinel on a rock, scanning the horizon.
Dis nods slightly, like he approves of its vigilance.
Right. Okay.
Summoning someone for revenge is perfectly acceptable. Rotting their mind beyond repair with far too much screen time, is not. It’s not even remotely ethical.
I should have known better. I let Hex play with my phone, and the shadow man became worryingly obsessed with social media. It’s time I started learning from my past mistakes.
I walk to the television and turn it off.
The silence is immediate and absolute.
Dis turns to look at me with an expression that could strip paint.
“That was informative,” he says, with the careful enunciation of someone exercising enormous self-control.
“You’ve been watching television non-stop for four and a half days,” I say. “You need a break.”
“I am learning about your realm.”
“You were watching meerkats.”
“Meerkats are part of your realm.”
I cross my arms. He crosses his. We stare at each other across the living room. The television sits dark and silent beside me like an unwilling hostage.
“It’s not good for you,” I say. “Staring at a screen for over one hundred and eight hours straight.”
“I don’t experience fatigue the way you do. And I was not watching TV when I feasted on your pleasure. Your one hundred and eight hours assertion is incorrect.”
I grind my teeth and fight the blush that’s threatening to rise at his casual reference to the intimacy we shared. “That’s not the point. It’s become an obsession. You were practically inside the screen when I came home yesterday.”
A pause. “I was simply engaged with the content.”
“Disney. You were watching Loose Women.”
“The discourse was complex.”
“It really wasn’t.” I pick up the remote and put it on the windowsill, far out of reach of the circle, which feels deeply parental and slightly absurd but also entirely necessary. “No more TV today. We’re doing something else.”
Dis stares at the blank television screen.
Then he leans back on the futon with the slow, deliberate dignity of someone making it very clear that while they are complying, they are not happy about it.
He arranges himself with his arms folded and his gaze fixed on the middle distance, radiating displeasure like a very beautiful, very ancient radiator.
He’s sulking. An immortal shadow king is sitting on my second-hand futon, sulking.
The responsibility of this hits me somewhere in the chest. This is what I’ve created. This is my life. I’m like a parent who’s just confiscated the iPad from a very powerful toddler.
I sigh heavily and go to my bedroom and rummage through the wardrobe. I swear I saw something in here when I moved in. Something that might help.
My fingers hit cardboard at the back, behind a stack of old spell notebooks. I pull it out.
Scrabble. A battered old box, the kind that’s been through several homes, the lid slightly buckled and the corners worn soft. Someone’s name is written on the side in faded biro. Not mine. The previous tenant, probably, or the one before that. Forgotten here like a lot of things get forgotten.
I carry it into the living room and set it on the floor.
Dis looks at it. Then at me. His sulk shifts slightly into something more like curiosity, which he’s clearly trying to suppress.
“What is that?”
“Scrabble. It’s a game.”
“Another competition?”
“Yes. You make words out of letter tiles and score points. Longer words on better squares score more. It’s about vocabulary and strategy.”
I open the box and start setting up the board, unfolding it on the floor between us, sorting through the tiles.
Some are slightly sticky from years of other people’s hands, and one of the triple word score squares is obscured by a faint ring from a mug somebody rested on the board once.
These things have had a whole life before me. I find that oddly comforting.
Dis watches me set up with the focused attention he gives to everything, that quality of observation he has that makes you feel like you’re being catalogued.
I pause. Something has just occurred to me.
“Can you read English?”
Dis blinks. “Clearly I speak it, Little Witch.”
“Right, but speaking and reading are different. You might be speaking it because of magic. Telepathy. I might just be hearing your words as English because of some translation effect you can emanate.” I frown at the tiles. “I honestly don’t know how I understand you.”
There is a pause in which Dis appears to consider this possibility with more intellectual seriousness than it might strictly deserve.
“I suppose an uneducated being could use magic so. If they needed to. I, however, can speak your language perfectly.”
I sigh heavily. “Great. Good to know. But can you read and write?”
Blue eyes blaze at me. A silent glare of insult and outrage.
I have a feeling that this is going to be a long night.
“I can read and write,” he says finally, drawing himself up with an air of someone about to deliver important information, “every human language that has ever existed.”
I look at him. “Every one?” That is genuinely impressive. No wonder he was insulted that I thought he might be illiterate.
“Every one.”
“That has ever existed?”
“Yes.”
“Including the dead ones?”
“Particularly the dead ones.” He says this with a faint note of superiority, like being fluent in extinct languages is just obviously the baseline standard.
I stare at him for a moment. Then I go to the kitchen and get a bottle of wine.
Red, the cheap kind, the sort that comes in bottles with very simple labels.
I get two glasses because it seems rude not to offer, even if I have no idea whether shadow beings can actually drink wine or if Hex just fakes it, or whether Dis would consider it beneath him.
I push one glass through the circle, placing it on the floor in front of him. He looks at it. Looks at me. Picks it up with the careful interest of someone encountering a new specimen, and takes a sip.
He doesn’t comment. But he doesn’t put it down either.
Then I slide the Scrabble board into the circle, because I can reach into it, but he can’t reach out.
I pour my own glass of wine, settle cross-legged on the floor in front of the Scrabble board, and distribute the tiles.
We play.
Dis takes to Scrabble the way he takes to everything, with an unsettling combination of intensity and pride.
His first word is DOMINION, landing across a double word score with the satisfaction of someone planting a flag.
I put down SPITE and feel that this is appropriate.
He responds with FRACTURE, and I start to suspect he might be very good at this.
The wine helps. It usually does. The first glass smooths off the sharp edges of the evening, and somewhere in the middle of the second, I stop feeling like I’m managing a situation and start feeling like I’m just sitting with someone.
Playing a game. Drinking cheap wine in my cramped living room while rain gently patters against the window.
Dis plays SCORN and I look at it for a moment longer than I need to.
“Was it always scorn?” I ask. “In the Shadow Realm. If you failed.” He kind of hinted at that, while watching Bake Off, and now I find myself needing to know for sure.
He rearranges his tiles carefully in his rack before answering.
“Not always scorn. But always consequences. I was trained from the moment I was formed to be useful. Effective. To serve a purpose greater than myself.” He picks up his wine and studies it rather than me.
“Sentiment was a weakness. Hesitation was a weakness. Attachment was a weakness. These things were... removed, when they appeared.”
“Removed how?”
“Punished out of me.” He says it simply, without drama. That almost makes it worse. “I learned quickly that it was easier not to develop them in the first place.”
I put down HOLLOW and score fourteen points and don’t say anything for a moment.
“I know something about that,” I say finally.
Dis looks at me. Not the cataloguing look this time. Something quieter.
“I was born into a coven,” I say. “A kick-ass, feared and respected coven. Very traditional. Serious. Dark leaning.” I pause.
“Both my parents are powerful, high-ranking witches. It should have been great, right? Nepo baby, magic family, built-in community, people who understand what you are.” I pick up my wine.
“Except magic isn’t just hereditary. The strength of it varies.
And mine was...” I pause again, looking for the right word and not finding it. “Mine was disappointing. To them.”
“You have power,” Dis says. It’s not a compliment exactly, more like a correction to an error.
“I do. I’m clever about it. I can find ways to do things that should be beyond me.
But the raw strength just isn’t there, not the way it was supposed to be.
Not the way they wanted.” I turn a tile over in my fingers.
The letter E, worn smooth. “I wasn’t what they needed.
What they’d planned for. And a coven isn’t...
” I stop. “A coven isn’t really a family.
Not when it comes down to it. It’s a power structure.
And I wasn’t capable of pulling my weight in the power structure. ”
“What happened?” Dis asks.
“They kicked me out.” I say it easily, because I’ve had years to practise saying it easily.
“I was thirteen and had nowhere to go. They said I could come back when I’d developed my abilities to an acceptable standard.
” The laugh that comes out of me is small and not particularly funny. “I’m still waiting for the invitation.”
Dis is quiet. I refill my glass. The Scrabble board sits between us with its words, DOMINION and FRACTURE and SCORN and HOLLOW, all radiating out from the centre like a map of a very specific kind of damage.
“I have a coven now. Sort of. But it’s not the same, you know.” I gulp down more wine, unsettled by the fact that Dis does know.
“I understand,” he says. Not in the way people say it when they want you to feel heard but don’t really know what you mean. He means it in the way that comes from the same place.
“You were never a person to them either,” I say. “Were you.”
“I was a weapon,” Dis says. “Weapons are not loved. They are maintained. Sharpened. Kept useful. And when they are no longer useful...” He makes a small gesture that encompasses everything. “Well. Here we are.”
I should fight this. I know I should. This is the part where I remind myself who he is and what he did and why I summoned him here. This is the part where I put the emotional distance back in place and stop doing this.
But god, it’s nice. It’s so unexpectedly, desperately nice to sit here with someone who understands the specific flavour of growing up unwanted. Not abandoned through necessity or tragedy. Deliberately discarded. Looked at and found lacking and set aside.
Most people, when I try to explain it, get that careful, sympathetic look. The one that means they feel sorry for you but can’t quite reach where you actually are.
Dis doesn’t look at me like that.
“You should have been loved,” I tell him, and I’m not sure why I say it out loud. Maybe the wine. Maybe just the dark and the rain and the strange intimacy of words on a board between two people who both know what it means to be only a tool to the people who should have loved you.
Dis looks at me for a long moment. Something moves in those blue eyes that I don’t have a name for.
“As should you,” he says quietly.
I put down my next word. SHELTER, across a triple letter score.
We keep playing.