25. Chapter 25
Daddy Issues
The radiator is making that clicking sound it always makes, and Bunny has just said good morning to the coffee shop as a whole, for the fourth time today, which it apparently deserves.
And Dark is in his corner with a cup of tea that Bunny brought him without being asked, and everything smells like espresso, and it’s all perfectly fine.
Dark is holding the tea in both hands and looking at it with the careful attention he brings to everything Bunny does.
It’s a new thing, the tea. Bunny started it yesterday, just walked over to the corner table and set it down and said, there you go, and went back to work, and Dark has accepted it every morning since with the solemnity of someone receiving something important.
Shadow beings don’t need to eat or drink.
I know this. I’ve known it for as long as I’ve known Hex, and it’s been confirmed thoroughly by weeks of living with one.
Dis doesn’t eat. He feeds on emotional energy.
He doesn’t need tea or biscuits or pasta, though he watches me eat all of those things with a focused interest that I’ve chosen not to examine too closely.
Dark doesn’t need Bunny’s tea either.
I don’t have the heart to tell Bunny that. And honestly, watching Dark hold the mug in both hands and look at it like it’s something worth holding, I’m not sure it would matter if I did.
Bunny has gone back to the counter and is singing something quietly to himself, adjusting his bunny ears, completely unbothered by the enormous shadow being in the corner who cannot take his eyes off him.
I am making someone’s flat white and pretending I’m not watching any of this because it’s grating in a way I’m not examining.
It’s fine. Everything is fine, and I’m fine, and I’m moving on.
The morning rush comes and goes. A difficult customer. Bunny handles it. I make coffee. Dark watches Bunny from his corner with those amber eyes. I watch the clock. Ordinary.
At eleven forty-three, the wards start screaming.
I feel it through the entire building, through the magic channels I’ve kept running since I moved in.
The prickling alarm is different this time, bigger, and whatever has come into my flat upstairs is not the same Wraith we faced before.
He has been building toward this, preparing and gathering force.
Dark doesn’t hesitate. He goes straight up through the ceiling.
Not through a door. Through the ceiling.
One moment he’s in the corner booth and then he’s simply gone upward, shadows dissolving through plaster and wood with the ease of something that has never had much respect for physical barriers.
I hear it above me immediately, the impact, the sound of something enormous meeting something else enormous, the particular resonance of a fight between beings who don’t operate by human physics.
“Everyone out,” I say. Clearly. Firmly. “Gas leak, everybody needs to leave right now please.”
There are nine customers sitting at tables, and they do deserve to be saved, despite being customers.
They move, because most people aren’t dumb when it comes to gas leaks, even customers.
Bunny holds the door, warm and efficient, shepherding them out with that particular quality he has of making people feel looked after without knowing why.
I make a shooing gesture at him when he looks at me. He immediately understands what I mean.
He doesn’t leave.
Of course he doesn’t. Bunny would never take the sensible option. It’s one of his most infuriating qualities, but I don’t have time to be infuriated by it right now.
I grab Bunny’s arm and pull him next to me.
The fight above us is moving. I can track it through the ceiling, through the vibrations and the surges of magic that pulse down through the floor under my feet.
Dark is formidable. I knew that. I could sense it.
Watching him in the corner booth drinking tea, I’d almost forgotten it, almost let the domesticity of it obscure what he actually is.
I remember now.
But Wraith is stronger than before. Much stronger. Something has been done to him since the last attack, something that has made him larger and denser and more deliberate, and even Dark is being pushed back.
The ceiling undulates. A blur of shadows falls through it. Too busy fighting to care about the laws of this realm.
Dark and Wraith fall into the coffee shop together, and the shift in air pressure shakes the whole building. Then cups fly off shelves and the windows implode inward from the sheer weight of the magic being flung in every direction.
Bunny and I are crouched near the counter.
Ideally, we should get behind it, I just need to time it right.
Find a gap in the flying debris and deadly stray blasts of magic.
For now, I’ve got my arm around him, pulling him down, and I can feel the magic like pressure against my skin, like standing too close to something very large that is very angry.
Dark and Wraith, two enormous forces of shadow and cold and ancient power, are colliding like two opposing galaxies.
The furniture is now splinters, and the walls are cracking, and I can feel every impact through my knees. Dark is formidable. He holds his ground with something terrible and focused. But Wraith is relentless in a way that Dark is struggling to match.
Then Wraith stops fighting him.
Just stops. Mid-struggle. And turns his head, those pale eyes finding Bunny over Dark’s shoulder with a deliberateness that makes my stomach drop.
Dark turns to look. He moves swifter than thought, withdrawing from wrestling with Wraith, to making a shield of himself. Standing between Wraith and Bunny, and by happy coincidence, me.
A silver-dark web hits Dark square in the chest and expands on contact, threads of shadow-steel throwing him backwards and pinning him against the wall with a finality that makes it immediately clear this was designed for exactly this.
Dark strains against it, every muscle moving, but it holds and it tightens when he pulls, and I can see from his face that he knows it.
Wraith turning his attention to Bunny was a feint, a ploy, a distraction.
And Dark fell for it.
Now Wraith is stepping towards Bunny. Grinning monstrously wide with far too many teeth. This isn’t a distraction anymore. This is a predator toying with its prey. This is vengeance and wrath against Dark for daring to fight him. Pure malevolence.
I stand up. I’m stupid and I’m going to pay for this, but I’m already drawing my power before the thought finishes, and I put myself between Wraith and Bunny with every ward charm I can pull together in three seconds.
It slows him. Not stops him. He advances through it the way something vast and cold advances through everything, steady and patient.
Bunny grabs my leg from behind. I can feel him there, warm and real, and I hate this, hate that my choices have put him in this.
A blast comes from the side. I didn’t see it coming.
There’s a sound, Bunny makes a sound, and then we’re both on the floor and the world has gone sideways and there’s ringing in my ears.
My shoulder is against the counter leg. Bunny is beside me and he’s breathing, he’s breathing, but his face has gone grey and he’s not moving much.
Dark is making a sound that doesn’t go through the ears, something older than sound. He’s pulling at the web with everything he has, but the web is winning.
Something cold streams through the shattered windows. Hex, red eyes blazing, already attacking, already driving Wraith back. He’s fast and devastating, and for one second I think it’s going to be okay.
Then a web hits Hex too. He goes into the wall beside Dark, and the web catches and holds, and the sound he makes when it tightens is quiet and awful.
The coffee shop goes very still.
Wraith turns to look at us.
Me on the floor, back against the counter. Bunny beside me, breathing in shallow, careful sips, bunny ears askew. Dark on the wall, still straining. Hex on the wall, red eyes blazing, working but not getting free.
Wraith starts walking toward us.
He’s not hurrying. There’s nowhere to go and we all know it.
Above me, I can feel Dis, a blazing point of fury and desperation, pressing against the boundary of the circle with everything he has.
The circle is holding him. The circle that was supposed to protect me is the thing keeping him from reaching me, and there is a particular cruelty in that which lands somewhere deep and awful.
He’s there. He knows what’s happening. He can feel it and he can’t get to me, and I can feel that too, the edges of his panic bleeding through our connection.
I pull Bunny closer. He makes a small sound, his face still grey and wrong.
“It’s okay,” I tell him.
“It’s really not,” he says quietly.
“No,” I agree. “It’s really not. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Brian.”
“Don’t be.” His hand finds mine on the floor. Warm and steady, because even now Bunny is steadier than he has any right to be. “I’m glad I’m here.”
I don’t have words for that. I just hold his hand and watch Wraith walk toward us, and I think about all the things I never said.
About a Scrabble board with words on it that were doing more work than Scrabble words should have to do.
About SHELTER across a triple-letter score.
About blue eyes watching me from a summoning circle, about being made to rest on a futon, about it is worth more than you know said quietly in the dark.
I know what I should have done with that. I know exactly, now, standing on the other side of a decision I can’t take back.
I should have said something.
Wraith raises his hand. White witch-light crackles between his too-long fingers.
The coffee shop door opens.
The man who comes through it is in his mid-forties. Dark eyes, dark beard streaked with silver, a long black leather coat that has seen better decades and doesn’t seem to know it.
But it is the sheer raw power radiating from him that is remarkable. This is a witch who qualifies as a force of nature in his own right.
He takes in the whole scene with one sweeping glance, those dark eyes moving across Wraith, across Hex and Dark pinned to the wall, across the wreckage of the coffee shop, across me and Bunny on the floor.
There is no visible surprise on his face. Just assessment. Just the rapid, practiced assessment of someone who encounters situations like this and has learned to work with what’s in front of them.
“Ah,” he says, with the calm of someone who has walked into chaos before and found it manageable. “I see.”
Wraith spins. The attack is fast and vicious and full, everything he has, the kind of attack that ended this in seconds last time.
The man raises his right hand. A shield blooms outward from it, gold-white and dense and clearly the work of considerable skill, and the attack hits it and doesn’t go through.
Wraith claws at it, wild and rageful, and the shield holds, but it’s flexing under the pressure and I can see from the set of the man’s jaw that it’s costing him.
He doesn’t look alarmed. He looks like someone completing a calculation with a deadline.
He tilts his head. Studies Wraith through the shield with the focused attention of someone reading something written in a language they know intimately.
“Ah,” he says again, and it’s a different sound entirely. Something that means he’s understood something, found the shape of it, knows what to do.
He holds out his left hand. Palm up. Open. Empty.
Nothing happens for a moment. Wraith claws frantically and furiously at the shield. The gold-white of it flickers.
Then a gold amulet drops out of the air into the witch’s palm.
Not from a pocket or a bag. Not falling from a shelf.
Out of the air itself, as if it were always there and simply needed to be asked for correctly, by someone who knew the right way to ask.
It’s small and worn, and it hums with the kind of power that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up from across the room.
The witch wraps his fingers around it.
Wraith goes rigid.
“Stop,” the man says. Quietly. One word, landing with the absolute unquestionable weight of someone who has never had cause to doubt they would be obeyed.
Wraith shudders. The shadows around him convulse once, twice, three times. His head lowers, hung like a dog in trouble. Then he goes completely still, apart from a faint twitching at the edges. A discarded puppet waiting for his next command.
The sudden stillness is startling.
The coffee shop is destroyed. Cups are everywhere.
Chairs are overturned. The windows are gone, and cold air is coming through the gaps.
Dark is still pinned to the wall, amber eyes fixed on Bunny with an expression that has nothing professional in it anymore.
Hex is still pinned, red eyes blazing. Bunny’s hand is still in mine on the floor.
Adam, no doubt, is cycling as fast as he can towards us. Unless Hex has locked him in a cupboard.
And this man standing in the middle of it all, fist closed around the amulet, looking across the wreckage directly at me.
Face to face. Eye to eye. No side profile. And like this, the beard hides nothing.
I know this face. I haven’t seen it in fifteen years, but I know it the way you know things that got into you early enough to become part of your structure. Before you had any say in what got in.
The world has gone very quiet.
“Dad?” I gasp.