Some Explaining to Do
“We need to talk.” The words echo in my soul.
Nobody moves for a moment. Then Hex steps further into the wrecked living room, his red eyes sweeping over the circle, over Dis, over me standing there with my towel very much not on me.
“Felix,” he says, with the particular gentleness of someone trying not to add to an already catastrophic morning, “you may want clothes.”
Right. Yes. Clothes.
I’m aware of Hex giving me the privacy of looking elsewhere while I walk out of the room, which I appreciate more than I have words for right now.
I find clothes. It takes longer than it should, my hands not quite steady yet, and When I come back into the living room in jeans and a jumper that I’ve put on slightly wrong, Hex is surveying the broken window with the focused attention of someone assessing the most easily fixed problem they’ve been confronted with. Can’t say I blame him.
“There is a roll of bin bags under your sink,” he says. “And tape, in the kitchen drawer. It will hold until something better can be arranged.”
We patch the window together, wordlessly, black plastic and too much tape, while Dis watches from the circle with an expression I don’t have the energy to interpret yet.
Hex and I start sweeping up the glass. The prince is surprisingly diligent, muttering something about how easily humans leak.
We’ve barely finished when the door bursts open.
Adam is breathless, his bike helmet still on, his face the particular shade of panic that comes from cycling somewhere as fast as humanly possible while not knowing what you’re cycling toward.
His eyes do a frantic sweep of the room, taking in the broken window, the wrecked furniture, the crack in the wall, me standing there looking like I’ve been through something.
Then he sees Dis.
“Ahhh!” he squeaks and steps back. “Hex vanished, mid sentence, we were talking about runner beans and then he just whispered your name and disappeared…” He stops, shakes his head, and starts again. “Hex why aren’t you fighting Dis! Quick! Before he does something terrible!”
“Adam.” Hex’s voice is steady. “The attack was from Wraith. Dis is not attacking. He is bound.”
Adam’s eyes are huge and unblinking. “Wraith was here… Dis is bound?”
Adam stares at the circle properly now, really looking at it, and I watch him notice the faint shimmer of the wards, still fizzing from the fight. And the careful way Dis is standing within an exact boundary, despite the absence of any chains or visible restraint.
It’s pretty clear, even to the untrained eye, that Dis isn’t going anywhere.
“Bound,” Adam repeats. “Bound how. Bound since when.”
“Since the dark moon,” answers Hex. “By Felix’s weaving.”
Adam turns to look at Hex very slowly. “You knew about this.”
It’s not a question, but Hex answers it like one anyway.
“Yes,” he says.
Adam goes very pale.
Hex’s voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t defend itself, just states the thing plainly, the way he states most things. “I sensed a disturbance in the magical landscape of Bristol. It carried Felix’s signature. I understood, fairly quickly, what he was attempting.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
Adam takes his helmet off. He sets it down on the arm of the sofa with the particular care of someone who doesn’t entirely trust his own hands right now. “Why not?”
“Because I judged it as not mine to share,” Hex says.
“Felix had been deeply wronged. Vengeance is not a crime in the Shadow Realm, and I made a decision to give him room to pursue it without interference. That decision was mine to make. Keeping it from you was also my decision, and I see now that it was the wrong one.”
“That’s not.” Adam stops. Starts again, his voice catching slightly. “Hex, we don’t keep things from each other. That’s meant to be the whole point.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
“Because I judged this as separate from that promise. I was wrong to judge it that way.” Something shifts in Hex’s expression, the careful composure cracking just slightly, just enough to show something underneath it that looks almost like fear.
“I am sorry. Not for the choice to let Felix do what he needed to do. For the choice to keep it from you.”
Adam doesn’t say anything. He sits down on the sofa, slowly, like his legs have decided independently that this is necessary.
He’s not looking at Hex anymore. He’s looking at the middle distance, processing, and I recognise the particular expression of someone trying to work out how something they trusted completely just became slightly less simple.
I cannot watch this anymore.
“Tea,” I announce, to nobody, and flee to the kitchen.
I fill the kettle. I find mugs. My hands are doing the motions while my brain replays the conversation I just witnessed, the thing I caused without ever meaning to.
The kettle boils far too quickly. The quickest any kettle has ever boiled in the history of kettles. Stupid thing clearly hates me and is refusing to offer me any sort of refuge. As soon as I have a moment, I’m throwing the traitorous thing out.
With great trepidation, I carry the mugs back through, and find that Hex has joined Adam on the sofa, and Adam has gone very still.
Not angry-still, not the stillness that precedes an explosion.
Just still in the way that people go still when something has hurt them and they’re deciding how to hold it.
He’s sitting beside Hex on my second-hand sofa, and the rift between them is subtle but completely visible if you know what you are looking at.
Two people who are so thoroughly in love it’s occasionally nauseating, sitting six inches apart with something unspoken lodged between them.
Something I put there.
I am the world’s worst person.
And now I’m faced with the dilemma of where to put myself.
The sofa has Adam and Hex on it, sitting that careful six inches apart, both of them present and neither of them quite resolved.
Joining them feels like picking a side. The futon is in the circle, with Dis, and sitting down next to my captive shadow being, feels like an even worse declaration of allegiance.
I hand the mugs out and put mine on the floor. I go to the kitchen and drag back the rickety wooden dining chair, the one with the wobble, and I plant it in the middle of the room at a diplomatic distance from everyone, and I sit on it.
It is not a comfortable chair. It is, at least, a neutral one.
Adam’s mug of tea is shaking slightly as he lifts it to his lips.
I pick up my mug. I think about how secrets are awful. Poisonous, wriggly little things that don’t seem important, until you are riddled with them and they are devouring you, and the contagion spreading to the people you love.
Fuck anymore secrets. I am done with them. Forever.
The plastic on the window flaps again. Nobody says anything.
I realise my cold feels remarkably better, which seems unjustified. But I guess being attacked by a freaky-ass assassin from another realm while running around butt-naked flinging magic willy-nilly, is just as an effective cold remedy as tea-tree and ghost peppers.
The adrenaline blasted the virus out of my system. Quite effective if you don’t mind the nearly dying naked part.
“Your fiancé saw me naked,” I blurt out into the silence, because apparently I’ve decided that no more secrets, really does start now, this second, even the embarrassing ones. “Just thought I’d say. So it doesn’t become a thing.”
Adam splutters on his tea. “What?”
“I was in the shower when Wraith attacked. The towel fell off in the fight. Well.” I pause, for accuracy. “Technically, while I was running away from Wraith and he was trying to kill me. But the point is, Hex saw everything, and I wanted it on the record so it doesn’t fester.”
Adam’s eyes pingpong between me and Hex. Hex has gone very still in a different way from before, the way a person goes still when they are hoping very hard that something will simply pass without incident.
Then Adam sighs heavily, shakes his head as if physically freeing himself from the mental image, and all the tight tension drains from Hex’s posture in a single visible wave of relief.
Something small and warm passes between them in the silence, something that closes the six-inch gap slightly, and I feel the rift ease just a fraction and am pathetically grateful for it.
Right. Okay. Onwards.
“You need to free Dis,” says Adam.
“Absolutely not,” I say, the response coming immediately and without thought, like a reflex, like something my mouth has decided before my brain has weighed in.
I sit with that for a moment.
I’m right, obviously. Absolutely not. For several reasons.
One, I haven’t got my revenge yet, not really, not in any way I can point to and call justice.
Two, I hate being told what to do. Three, I had a plan, a careful, months-in-the-making plan, and I’m not abandoning it just because things have gotten complicated.
And reason four, if I let Dis go, he will be gone.
Which should be fine. Which should be the goal. Which should feel like victory or at minimum like resolution, and instead feels like something I don’t want to look at directly because of what looking at it directly would mean.
Obviously, I cannot possibly say any of that out loud. Ever. So I need to say something that makes sense. Something that will ease the shocked look of dismay Adam has been wearing since I blurted out my absolutely-not declaration.
I clear my throat. “I summoned him. Bound him in a circle. Forced him to watch daytime TV.” I look at Adam steadily. “If I release him, he’ll kill me.”
Adam’s eyes go very wide. He turns to Dis with the expression of someone hoping very much to be reassured.
“Is that true?” he whispers.
Dis glances at me. Just briefly. Something moves in those blue eyes that I can’t quite name. Then he looks at Adam.
“I have witnessed,” Dis says, with immense solemnity, “every episode of The Great British Bake Off.”
The silence that follows is profound.