Chapter 16
The Past Always Bites You in the Ass
The morning shift is quiet enough that I’ve actually managed to get ahead of the prep work, which never happens.
Bunny is restocking the pastry display with the focused contentment of someone who finds restocking pastry displays genuinely fulfilling, which I’ve stopped trying to understand and just accepted as one of his many mysteries.
I’m wiping down the espresso machine when the door chimes and Dave walks in.
I know immediately from the way he’s walking that this isn’t a social call.
Dave has two walking speeds, ambling, which is his default, and purposeful, which means something has happened that requires a response.
This is purposeful. He’s wearing his work jeans and his pentagram tee shirt, and his expression is the one he gets when he’s been elected to deliver news nobody wants to deliver.
Dave is the kind of person who gets elected to these things a lot. He’s blunt and he’s kind and he doesn’t mess around with softening, which makes him the most tolerable option when the coven needs to send a messenger.
That doesn’t mean I’m pleased to see him.
“Felix,” he says, settling onto one of the counter stools.
“Dave.” I set down the cloth. “You want a coffee?”
“Please.”
I make it without being asked how he takes it, because I’ve known Dave for four years and he always takes it the same way, black and strong and without ceremony.
Bunny glances over from the pastry display, clocks the atmosphere, and finds somewhere very important to be in the back room. Good instincts, that boy.
I set the coffee in front of Dave. He wraps both hands around it and looks at it for a moment like he’s composing himself.
“You’ve missed the last three Esbats,” he says.
“I know.”
“Morgana’s worried. The whole coven’s been asking questions. You’re usually the one who shows up early and has already reorganised the ritual space before anyone else gets there.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
I meet his eyes across the counter and say nothing, which is its own kind of answer. Dave’s eyes narrow slightly. He reads it correctly, because Dave reads most things correctly.
“Felix.” His voice has dropped a level. “What have you done?”
“Nothing that concerns the coven.”
“That’s not…” He stops. Picks up his coffee.
Drinks. Sets it down with the controlled patience of someone trying very hard not to have an argument in a coffee shop.
“The thing is, it does concern the coven. Because the coven has been sensing something. For the past few weeks there’s been a disturbance, a kind of magical pressure that nobody can quite pin down, and it’s coming from roughly this direction, and you’re the only coven member who lives in this direction, and you’ve stopped coming to Esbats and you’re not answering messages and Felix, I’m standing here asking you as your friend, not just your coven member, what is going on? ”
It’s a long speech for Dave. He looks slightly tired from it.
I look at him for a long moment. The coffee shop hums around us, ordinary and warm. Somewhere in the back room, Bunny is very quietly not listening, which means he’s absolutely listening.
“I’m handling something,” I say. “I’ll be at the next Esbat.”
“You’d better be.” Dave’s voice is flat but not unkind. “Because if you’re not, Morgana’s going to call a full coven vote on your continued membership.”
The words land like a stone dropped into still water. I feel them ripple outward through my chest, cold and heavy.
“She wouldn’t.”
Bunny sneezes and it sounds suspiciously close. I ignore it.
“She’s worried, Felix. We’re all worried. And when Morgana worries, she gets formal about it.” He looks at me steadily. “I’m telling you as a friend. Sort out whatever you’ve got going on and come back. Nobody wants it to go further than this.”
He finishes his coffee. Leaves a fiver on the counter, which covers nearly twice what the coffee costs, and it was free anyway because he’s a friend. At least, I thought he was.
He leaves without saying another word, the door chiming behind him with the same cheerful note it always has, completely indifferent to the fact that my chest feels like something has sat down heavily on it.
I stand behind the counter and stare at the door for a long moment.
A coven vote. A formal coven vote on whether I get to stay.
I’ve been here before. Not with this coven, not with these people, but the feeling is identical.
The specific flavour of being assessed, being weighed up, being found potentially lacking.
Thirteen years old in a cold room while people who were supposed to love me decided whether I was worth keeping.
The vote hadn’t even been close, as it turned out.
I become aware that I’m gripping the edge of the counter hard enough that my knuckles have gone white.
I let go. Breathe. Pick up Dave’s fiver and put it in the tip jar.
“I’m taking my break,” I say to the back room, where Bunny is still pretending very hard to be busy.
“Sure!” he calls back, with studied casualness. “Take as long as you need!”
I take the stairs two at a time.
I shove the flat door open and slam it closed behind me.
I stand in my own hallway for a moment, breathing, and then I walk to the wall and punch it.
Not hard enough to go through it, just hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to give the thing in my chest somewhere to go.
My knuckles sting. The plaster is slightly scuffed. Good.
I’m aware that Dis is watching me from the living room. The TV remote is in his hand because I’m entirely too soft and I gave it to him before I left. But the TV screen is dark. Apparently I’m more entertaining than Midsomer Murders.
I lean my forehead against the wall. The plaster is cold against my skin.
“Something vexes you?” Dis says, with a slight uncertainty in his voice, as though he has observed the evidence and reached the conclusion but isn’t quite confident in his interpretation.
I turn around.
An ancient shadow king, sitting on a second-hand futon in a summoning circle, asking me with mild academic interest if something vexes me, after watching me slam the door and punch my own wall. I look at him. He looks back at me with those burning blue eyes, careful and attentive.
The laugh that comes out of me is not entirely sane.
It bubbles up from somewhere near the bottom of my lungs and comes out with the slightly hysterical quality of something that has been under pressure for too long.
I end up sitting on the hallway floor with my back against the wall, laughing in a way that isn’t entirely distinguishable from crying, while Dis watches with the expression of someone who has correctly identified that there is nothing useful they can do but is paying close attention anyway.
When it settles, I feel emptied out. Raw and strange and lighter, somehow, than I did before.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t apologise,” Dis says. “Tell me what happened.”
So I do. I sit on my hallway floor and I tell him about Dave and the Esbats and the coven vote and Morgana’s formal processes and the particular way that threat sits inside me because I’ve been here before, in a different room with different people, and last time nobody fought for me to stay.
I tell him about being thirteen and cold and homeless, which I’ve already told him over the Scrabble board, but somehow it’s different saying it now, in the immediate aftermath of the thing that is pulling up those same roots.
My voice comes out flatter than I intend. More matter-of-fact than I feel.
Dis listens the way he always listens, with his whole attention, not filling in the gaps or trying to redirect. When I stop talking, the flat is quiet except for the distant sounds of Bristol going about its day below the window.
“If I were free,” Dis says finally, “I would offer to help you wreak considerable and creative revenge on both your birth coven and your current one.”
Despite everything, I feel the corner of my mouth move. “Thanks for the offer, Disney.”
“I mean it. The people who discarded you deserve to understand the consequences of that decision at considerable length.”
“Very cathartic, I’m sure.” I look at the ceiling.
“But revenge isn’t always the answer. I don’t actually want to burn them down.
I just want…” I stop, because finishing that sentence requires more honesty than I’m ready for.
I want them to have wanted me. I want to not care whether they want me or not.
Both of those things at once, which is one of the more inconvenient things about being a person.
Dis is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is different. Considered, as though he’s choosing each word deliberately.
“There is a mistake,” he says, “that I have seen made many times, by many people who were capable of better. They return to the battlefield where they first lost. They believe that winning there, finally, will give them the thing they didn’t get the first time.
” He pauses. “It never does. The battlefield doesn’t hold what you’re looking for.
It hasn’t held it for a very long time. Whatever you needed that they didn’t give you, it isn’t there waiting. It was never going to be there.”
I sit with that for a moment. The hallway is quiet. The plaster is still cold against the back of my skull.
“So what do I do?” I ask.
“You stop fighting on ground that can’t give you victory,” Dis says. “And you find the thing you actually need somewhere else.” Something in his voice shifts, almost imperceptibly. “Somewhere it might actually exist.”
I look at him. He looks back at me. The blue of his eyes in the low light of the flat is something I’ve stopped being able to look at neutrally, which is a problem I’m filing under things I’ll deal with later.
“That’s very wise,” I say finally. “From my captive shadow being.”
“I have had a great deal of time to observe the mistakes of others.”
“And have you? Stopped fighting on the old ground?”
He’s quiet for a beat longer than usual. “I am working on it,” he says.
I nod slowly. I pull myself up off the hallway floor, which is less dignified than I’d like, and I roll my shoulders back and I think about Morgana’s formal processes and coven votes and the particular thing that Dave’s face looked like when he was delivering the news, which was not unkind.
He came because he wanted me to stay. That’s actually worth something.
“I’ll go to the Esbat,” I say, mostly to myself.
“Good,” says Dis.
I look at him. He’s watching me with that steady, attentive look that I have completely failed to get used to, the one that makes me feel seen in a way I don’t entirely know how to handle.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t,” he says, and his voice has a slight edge to it that means he’s uncomfortable with gratitude, which I understand more than I probably should. “Go and make yourself some tea. You look terrible.”
“You really know how to make a person feel better.”
“You look terrible, and you should drink something warm and then go back to work,” he says, with the deliberate precision of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and is pretending they don’t. “That is all I said.”
I go and make myself some tea.
I stand in my kitchen while the kettle boils and I think about old battlefields and things that aren’t waiting there anymore, and I think about the fact that somehow, without my consent or my planning or any part of my careful revenge-motivated agenda, I have ended up with someone in my life who tells me hard true things and then tells me to drink something warm.
I hadn’t known I was missing that.
I think the problem is that I’m starting to know it now.