26. Chapter 26
Shelter
The silence stretches for about three seconds.
Then I get up off the floor.
My knees are bruised, and my shoulder is going to be spectacular tomorrow, and there is plaster dust in my hair, and the coffee shop that I have spent the past several months building into something that feels like mine is a complete wreck around me.
I brush myself off. I look at the man standing in the middle of it with the amulet in his fist.
“What the fuck,” I say. “Are you the arch-nemesis of the Shadow Realm?”
He blinks. “No. I just got here.”
I stare at him.
Despite everything, the history, the past, the hurt, I can tell he isn’t bullshitting. Besides, if he was the grand architect of everything, the nameless somebody who wants Dis dead, he would be sure to boast about it.
No, Dad just happened to walk into my life with extraordinary timing. Which tracts.
“So,” I breathe raggedly. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
A pause. “Your coven contacted me. They were worried about you.”
He looks around the destroyed coffee shop.
The scarred ceiling. The missing windows.
The two enormous shadow beings pinned to the wall.
The splinters that used to be furniture.
His gaze moves across all of it with the calm assessment of someone who has encountered magical disaster before and knows how to read the aftermath.
Then it comes back to me, and there is a very brief, very controlled expression that might be relief at finding me upright, followed by something else entirely.
“Rightly so,” he says.
The old familiarity of it, the slight weight of judgement in those two words, lands exactly the way it always used to.
Like he can’t help it. Like he is still the person who looked at his thirteen-year-old son and found him lacking and said so.
Like fifteen years hasn’t quite worn that particular groove smooth.
I feel the old rage come up through me like something that has been waiting patiently in the basement for exactly this moment.
But I’m not going to vent, or rage. Because despite my dad’s opinion, I’m not too emotional. And I’m going to focus on the here and now. The situation at hand. The practical questions that need answers. Not the ones I’ve always longed to have addressed.
“How,” I say, very carefully, “are you controlling that thing.”
I point at Wraith, who is standing completely still in the middle of the coffee shop with his head down, twitching faintly, looking about as threatening as a wet kitten. Because my dad can do that to people.
My dad glances at Wraith with the brief, assessing look of someone checking on a problem they’ve already solved. “I saw it was bound to a cursed amulet,” he says. “So I called the amulet to me. It was a simple solution.”
A simple solution.
I think about the first attack, me running naked around my own living room while Dis sent crows through the window as a last resort.
The fear I’ve felt since, every time the wards twitched.
The unknown enemy that Fiend warned me about, with those purple eyes full of something I couldn’t quite read.
The second attack, twenty minutes ago, with Bunny’s hand in mine on the floor and my death walking toward me in a straight line.
A simple solution. He saw the shape of it and called the amulet to him, and it was a simple solution.
I’ve known powerful witches. I’ve spent my whole life in the company of witches.
But watching someone call a cursed amulet out of the air from across a room while maintaining a shield against something as powerful as Wraith, because it’s the obvious thing to do, as if it’s barely worth mentioning, is a different category of thing entirely. It’s intelligent as well as strong.
I came from this. Whatever I am, whatever small clever magic I’ve managed to build for myself out of insufficient raw material, I came from this.
Yet I didn’t see it. The simple solution did not occur to me. Would never have occurred to me. I am his son, but I will forever be so much less than he is. In all ways.
I hate that. I hate that so much it makes my back teeth ache.
“Well,” I say. “Mr Most Perfect And Clever Witch Who Ever Lived.” My voice comes out sharper than I intend, which is to say exactly as sharp as I intend. “You can piss off now.”
Something moves across his face. He opens his mouth.
“Felix…”
“No.”
He closes his mouth.
“Whatever you have to say,” I say, and my voice is very steady, steadier than I feel, steadier than I have any right to be right now.
“I don’t want to hear it. You had fifteen years to say it and you didn’t, so you can keep it.
Whatever it is. However long you’ve been carrying it around. ” I hold his gaze. “Keep it.”
The man who is my father looks at me. He looks at me for a long moment with those dark eyes that I have apparently inherited, because that’s the kind of joke the universe enjoys making.
He looks like someone who has rehearsed something, somewhere, in some quiet room, and has just understood that the rehearsal was for a conversation that isn’t going to happen today and possibly isn’t going to happen at all.
His shoulders drop, just slightly. The careful composure settles into something quieter. The face of someone accepting a consequence they know they deserve.
“Fair enough,” he says.
I look at Hex and Dark, still pinned to the wall.
Hex’s red eyes have been moving between me and my father with the focused attention of someone who is filing everything away for future reference.
Dark’s amber eyes are fixed on Bunny, who is sitting on the floor with his back against the counter, looking slightly battered and a little dazed, watching the whole scene with the wide, interested expression of someone watching something important happen.
“Get your new minion to release them,” I say, as I point to Hex and Dark. “They are my friends.”
My dad lifts one perfect, confident and manly eyebrow, at me having shadow beings for friends, but wisely, he says nothing. He simply turns to Wraith. A small gesture, nothing more, and the silver webs dissolve.
Dark is across the coffee shop in an instant.
Not toward Wraith. Not toward the exit. Straight to Bunny, crouching in front of him, those amber eyes scanning him with an intensity that is completely focused and completely personal and has nothing tactical in it whatsoever.
Bunny looks up at him and smiles, the real one, the enormous one, and says something too quiet for me to catch, and Dark’s expression does something I’ve never seen a shadow being’s expression do before.
I look away. That’s not mine to watch.
Hex peels himself off the wall with the careful dignity of someone who has just been stuck to a wall and is choosing not to make a fuss about it. He straightens. He looks at my dad with the measured assessment of someone meeting a significant force for the first time.
My dad looks back at him with the same quality of assessment.
“You can keep that one,” I say, pointing at Wraith, before anyone can have any kind of moment about anything. “Go. Take him with you. And never darken my door again.”
My dad opens his mouth. I watch him consider whatever he was going to say. I watch him decide, clearly, that he has no right to say it. Not here, not now, possibly not ever, and that he knows this, and that knowing it is its own kind of thing to carry.
He closes his mouth. He nods.
He looks at me once more, just for a second, with those familiar dark eyes. There’s something in them I don’t have the capacity to process right now. Something that looks like it has been there for a long time and has gotten very tired of being carried around.
Not my problem.
He shakes the amulet once, a small, precise movement.
Wraith shudders. Then he comes apart, those terrible pale eyes going last, dissolving into a coil of dark smoke that winds itself into the amulet like something returning home.
The amulet sits there in my dad’s fist, bright with it, humming quietly.
My dad puts it in his coat pocket.
He walks to the door. The one that no longer has a full complement of glass in it.
He steps through it without looking back, the long black coat settling around him, and then he’s on the street and he’s gone, and the door swings gently behind him, glass rattling faintly in what remains of the frame.
The coffee shop is very quiet.
Hex is looking at me. I look back at him.
There’s a conversation coming, I know there is, about all the things that just happened and what they mean and what happens next.
Adam is probably three minutes away on his bicycle, cycling with the focused panic of someone whose fiancé just communicated some kind of emergency and left without explaining it fully.
Because Hex wouldn’t have the sense to lock him in a cupboard.
I know all of this.
I also know that I have been on the floor of my destroyed coffee shop thinking I was going to die while the person upstairs couldn’t reach me and felt everything I felt through a connection that has been building since the first feeding, and that there is exactly one place I want to be right now and it is not explaining things to Hex or managing Adam’s feelings about the splinters that used to be furniture or thinking about insurance claims for catastrophic supernatural damage.
“Give me five minutes,” I say to Hex.
He looks at me. Those red eyes steady and knowing, and not asking anything I’m not ready to answer.
He nods.
I turn on my heel and go upstairs.
I don’t slow down in the hallway. I don’t stop to take a breath or compose myself or do any of the things I would normally do before walking into a situation that requires me to be okay.
I push the flat door open and I cross the living room in about four steps and I step across the boundary of the circle and Dis is there, right there, already facing me, waiting, and I walk straight into him without stopping and his arms come around me before I’ve finished the thought.
I burst into tears.
Not the controlled kind. Not the kind you can pass off as something else, tiredness or dust in your eyes or the cold air coming through the broken windows.
The kind that have been building since I was thirteen years old in a cold room while people who were supposed to love me decided I wasn’t worth keeping.
The kind that have been stored up through every cold night and every flat that wasn’t really home and every time I managed something difficult completely alone because there was no one to call.
The kind that fifteen years of keeping everything together with insufficient materials has been generating quietly in the background, waiting for somewhere safe enough to go.
Dis holds me. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t tell me it’s alright or that it’s over or any of the things people say when they don’t know what else to do with someone else’s pain.
He just holds me, those arms solid and real around me, and the shadows settle close and quiet like something drawing in to keep the cold out, and the circle hums its familiar frequency underneath my feet, and I cry until I’m completely empty.
It takes a while.
When I’m done, I just stand there. Face definitely destroyed.
Still in my coffee shop apron, which has plaster dust on it now and possibly some of Bunny’s blood from where he was hit, and I should check on Bunny, I should go back down, there are a hundred things that need doing and I’m standing in a summoning circle in my living room being held by the being I summoned for revenge and it’s the safest I’ve felt since I was too small to understand that the adults around me didn’t want me.
“You survived,” Dis says, very quietly, into my hair.
“I did,” I say into his shoulder.
We stand there a bit longer.
Downstairs, distantly, I hear the coffee shop door. Adam’s voice, high with worry. Hex’s quieter response. The sounds of people who love each other finding each other after something frightening, which is its own kind of thing, its own ordinary miracle.
I should go down. Or invite them up. I know I should.
“In a minute,” Dis says, as if he can hear me thinking it. Which, through the connection we have built between us, through feeding and Scrabble and terrible daytime television and hands through circles holding what needed to be held, he probably can.
“Yeah,” I say. “In a minute.”
I stay exactly where I am.