Caught with my Pants Down
The shower helps. Not enormously, not in the way that showers help when you’re well and it’s a normal morning, but in the specific way that being clean and warm helps when you feel like something that’s been left out in the rain for too long.
My head is still stuffed with cotton wool and my throat is still complaining, but I feel marginally more like a person and marginally less like death warmed up.
Getting here was a whole thing.
Dis had objections. Significant, vehement, extensively articulated objections to me leaving the futon, getting out of the circle, and going to the bathroom unsupervised.
He couldn’t stop me, obviously. The binding doesn’t allow him any authority over my movements.
But he made his feelings known with a thoroughness that was exhausting, and I’d had to promise, in specific terms, that I would be back within fifteen minutes and that I would shout if anything happened.
I hadn’t pointed out that I couldn’t actually shout loudly enough to be heard over a running shower. That felt like information that would only cause more problems.
I’m standing under the hot water now, eyes closed, letting it work on the tension in my shoulders and wash away the gross, sweaty feeling of being sick.
I’m also thinking about Dis’s face when he told me to be careful.
The particular quality of it. The way it’s different from the face he makes when he’s being imperious, or amused, or carefully composed.
It’s the face he makes when something matters and he can’t do anything about it.
I don’t know what to do with that face. I’ve been not knowing what to do with it for a few days now and I’m not getting any better at it.
I’m also not doing a great job of not thinking about any of the other things that have quietly rearranged the shape of my life without asking permission.
I should release him. I know I should release him.
The revenge stopped making sense a while ago, and became absurd around the time he tucked a blanket around my feet and quoted This Morning at me about the importance of rest.
Something shifts in the air.
It’s subtle. A change in pressure, like a door opening somewhere in the flat. Except the bathroom door is closed. And this isn’t that kind of shift.
It’s magical. The particular sensation of something pressing against a ward. Something with considerable force. And the ward is mine, and it’s holding, but it’s complaining about it, sending little pulses of alarm up through the channels of magic I’ve had passively running since I moved in.
Something is attacking my flat.
I’m out of the shower before I’ve consciously decided to move. I grab the towel from the rail. Wrap it around my waist without breaking stride. I don’t stop for anything else because there isn’t time.
I run.
The living room is chaos.
Wraith is there. I recognise the feel of him from before and also because he’s unmistakable, tall and wrong and the kind of presence that makes every survival instinct I have stand up and start screaming.
He’s at the boundary of the circle, pressing against it, and the wards are blazing, flaring visible in the air, gold-white and straining against the force being applied to them.
Dis is standing in the middle of the circle.
He looks furious and controlled and dangerous in equal measure, his shadows massed around him, and he’s holding the binding from the inside, feeding power into the wards I set that are currently the only thing standing between him and whatever Wraith is doing.
“Felix.” Dis’s voice is absolutely level, which means he’s more alarmed than he’s letting on. “Flee.”
“Absolutely not,” I say.
Wraith turns.
He doesn’t speak. And the silence of him is worse than anything he could say. He just turns, and pale eyes find me, white and dimmed. Lanterns through fog. And for a moment, everything narrows to that point of focus.
Then he diverts his attack.
I throw myself sideways as something dark and cold tears through the air where I was standing. It hits the wall behind me and the plaster cracks, a spiderweb of damage spreading outward from the impact point.
Right. Okay. Running time.
I run.
The living room is not a large space in which to be running, but I am motivated, and motivation counts for a lot.
I duck behind the sofa as another attack comes and feel it pass overhead.
I come up on the other side and fling a protection charm at Wraith, which does not do much but at least makes him redirect his attention for half a second, which is half a second I use to get behind the armchair.
“Release me,” Dis says, very calmly, from the circle. “I can fight him.”
“I’m a bit busy!” I throw myself flat as something crashes into the bookshelf to my left and my books cascade to the floor.
“Release me, and I can end this.”
“I can’t just…” I scramble back to my feet and run for the other side of the room. I can’t just click my fingers and undo a spell weaving that took me months to construct. I’m not that kind of witch.
“He’s your minion! You deal with him from in there!” I yell, instead of trying to explain my failings.
“He is not my minion.” Something in Dis’s voice has sharpened. “Not anymore.”
I process this while running around the back of the sofa for the second time. “What do you mean, not anymore? He set my flat on fire on your orders!”
“He carried out my orders when I held the amulet. I no longer hold the amulet.”
Another attack. I throw myself to the floor and feel it go over my head, close enough to ruffle my wet hair. “What amulet?”
“The Amulet of Dominion. “ Dis’s shadows are pressing against the boundary of the circle from the inside, straining. “I lost it when I lost the throne.”
I process this in the half-second gap between attacks. “So who has it now?”
“I don’t know,” Dis says, and the honesty of that, the thin edge of something underneath it, lands like a stone.
An unknown enemy. Someone who took the amulet. Someone who sent Wraith here. I have absolutely no idea who or why or what they want, and this is not the moment to work it out because Wraith is between me and the door, and I’m running out of room.
“Come into the circle,” Dis orders imperiously.
I trip over something and my ungraceful scramble saves my ass as another blast of magic hisses right where my head should have been.
“Can’t,” I pant as I start another lap of the living room. “The wards absorbed the power from the attack. They won’t let anything in now.”
I had been, up until approximately one minute and thirty seconds ago, very proud of that particular bit of spell-weaving. A feedback loop. Any attack backfires and strengthens the barrier.
It had never occurred to me that I would ever want to join Dis in the circle. I don’t think it was a terrible oversight. Nobody could have foreseen this situation. That he… and I… and…
Suddenly, the window implodes inward.
Not a projectile. A flock of crows, black and enormous and deafening, pouring through the broken window in a rush of feathers and cold air.
They fill the room instantly. They’re everywhere, swooping and circling and diving, and one of them catches me across the side of the head with a wing, and I stagger.
“Ouch! Motherfucker!”
“My apologies,” says Dis, from the circle, with great dignity.
I glance at him. The crows are still filling the room, swirling around Wraith, diving at him, buying me precious seconds while making everything utterly chaotic.
“These crows are YOU?” I yell.
“It is the best I can do from within the circle.” He sounds slightly defensive. “I have very limited reach.”
“You sent crows!”
“Yes, and they are working.”
They are, actually. Wraith is dealing with them, swatting them away, distracted, and it’s buying me time but not enough time, because I’ve backed myself into the corner by the window and Wraith is between me and every exit and the crows are thinning and I’ve run out of space and options in roughly equal measure.
I realise my towel has fallen off.
Of course it has.
I am stark naked in my living room being cornered by an ancient supernatural assassin, and this is apparently how I die, and if there’s an afterlife, I’m going to have serious words with whoever is responsible for the circumstances of my death, because this is undignified in ways that feel personal.
Wraith advances. He doesn’t hurry. He doesn’t need to. I’m cornered and out of room, and my magic is scraped thin from the protection charms I’ve been throwing, and he knows it. Those luminous mist-like eyes are fixed on me with the blank, purposeful focus of something carrying out a task.
I throw the last protection charm I have left in me. It holds for about two seconds and then dissolves, and that’s it, that’s everything I’ve got.
Dis is at the boundary of his circle, pressing against the wards, and I can see what it’s costing him, the effort of it, and he still can’t get through.
“Felix,” he says, and his voice has lost every bit of its composure. Just my name. Just that.
Wraith raises his hand.
The front door comes off its hinges.
Hex fills the doorway. Not metaphorically.
Hex is not a small person and the doorway is not a large doorway and the combination of them, plus the red eyes blazing and the shadows rising and the sheer concentrated weight of his presence when he stops moderating himself for human company, is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen in my life.
Wraith turns.
The fight, if you can call it that, lasts about forty-five seconds.
Hex is not playing. He’s not warming up or testing or feeling out his opponent.
He hits like someone who has been fighting things like Wraith since before my grandparents were born, with the grim efficiency of someone who has deeply seated beliefs about finishing things quickly. It’s almost clinical.
Wraith screeches once, a sound that goes directly through my back teeth, and then he comes apart at the edges and disperses, shadows dissolving into nothing.
He’s gone.
The remaining crows flap to the broken window. They file out through it with a ragged dignity, the last one pausing on the sill for a moment, almost seeming to look back, before following the others into the grey Bristol sky.
The silence is absolute.
I am standing in the corner of my living room. Naked. Covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat, my hair plastered to my head from the shower I didn’t finish. My books are all over the floor. There’s a crack in the wall. The window is broken and admitting cold air. The door is off its hinges.
Hex is standing where the door used to be, red eyes moving slowly around the room.
They land on the circle.
On Dis, standing in the centre of it, still coiled and ready, his shadows not quite settled.
On the runes that are no longer visible but are absolutely, undeniably present, humming with the particular frequency of a binding that has been active for weeks.
On me.
The silence stretches. I am aware of my own nakedness with a completeness that is almost meditative.
There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to say.
The evidence is comprehensive and Hex is one of the most perceptive beings I’ve ever met and he’s looked at the room for approximately thirty seconds and that would have been long enough for him to understand everything, but I can see from his face that he’s not at all surprised and now my stomach is sinking with the certainty that he already knew.
Dis has not moved. He’s watching Hex with the careful stillness of someone who has just been unexpectedly rescued and hasn’t yet determined what it costs.
I look at the floor. At the books. At the crack in the wall.
At the towel, which is very far away.
“We need to talk,” Hex says.