Chapter 13 #2
Hex looks mildly embarrassed, which is a remarkable thing to witness on a stranger’s face animated by a shadow prince. “I own several now. One does accumulate them. You’ll find that happens, in time.”
James opens his mouth. Closes it.
My father, who has been quiet most of the evening in the way my father is always quiet when there are strong personalities in the room, asks Hex what his family background is. My mother shoots my father a look that means she wanted to ask this but didn’t want to be seen asking it.
Hex considers the question with great seriousness. “Old money,” he says finally. “Very old. The family goes back further than most records do, really. We stopped counting generations some time ago.” He smiles. “It gets confusing.”
“Where are they based?” my mother asks.
“Oh, all over,” says Hex vaguely. “We have a primary residence, but it’s not somewhere most people visit. Rather difficult to get to.” He glances at me sideways. “Isn’t it, Adam.”
“Incredibly difficult,” I agree faintly.
“You must come from good stock though,” says my aunt, looking Hex over with approval. “You’re very handsome.”
“Thank you.” Hex looks genuinely delighted. “I’ve worked hard on it.”
There is a brief silence around the table as everyone tries to work out if that was a joke.
I take a very large bite of roast potato.
It goes on like this. Course after course.
My mother tops up Hex’s wine, and he accepts it with grace and drinks approximately none of it, which I only notice because I’m watching him extremely carefully.
He compliments the food with an enthusiasm that is almost too much and somehow lands just on the right side of charming.
He asks my aunt about her garden with genuine curiosity, and she talks about it for ten minutes while he listens as if she is saying something fascinating.
And then, gently, precisely, he turns back to my mother.
“You must be very proud of Adam,” he says.
My mother pauses. “Of course,” she says, in the tone of someone who has been slightly caught off guard.
“He’s extraordinary,” Hex says simply. “I’m sure you know that.”
My face is on fire. I stare at my plate.
“He’s always been very...” my mother starts.
“He stood up to a very difficult man this week,” Hex continues conversationally, as if they’re discussing the weather.
“Refused to be intimidated. Held his ground completely.” He picks up his wineglass, doesn’t drink from it, sets it back down.
“Most people wouldn’t have. He didn’t even think twice. ”
The table is quiet.
“Well,” says my mother, after a moment. “I didn’t know about that.”
“He doesn’t talk about himself enough,” says Hex. He looks at me then, directly, and his eyes are soft and warm and completely, unmistakably Hex. “That’s his only fault.”
I clear my throat. “Does anyone want more gravy?”
It’s around the cheese course that things start to go wrong.
It starts small. Hex’s right hand spasms again, harder this time, knocking his cheese knife sideways.
He rights it. His smile doesn’t flicker.
But his head tilts suddenly, sharply, to an angle that is slightly too far, and he pauses mid-sentence with a blankness crossing his face that lasts just a fraction too long.
I watch him. My stomach tightens.
He comes back. Smooth as anything. Finishes the sentence. My aunt laughs. My cousin reaches for the port.
But then his left hand jerks. His chair scrapes back an inch. His eyes go briefly, horribly blank, and for just a second I can see someone else in his face. Someone confused. Someone frightened. Someone who absolutely did not agree to be at a dinner party in Exeter tonight.
I put my hand over my mouth and fake a cough.
“Are you alright?” Priya asks me.
“Fine,” I say. “Just went down the wrong way.”
Hex’s stolen body gives a full, violent shudder that he converts at the last second into what appears to be a sneeze. Several people say bless you. He nods graciously. His jaw is working slightly, like he’s concentrating enormously hard.
I need to get us out of here.
“Sebastian,” I say, as naturally as I can manage. “Didn’t you say you had that thing?”
Hex turns to look at me. His eyes are flickering. Red, dark, red, dark, like a dying light.
“The thing,” I say pointedly.
“The thing,” Hex repeats, and his voice has gone slightly strange. Layered. Like two people talking at once. “Yes. The thing.”
“We really should make a move.” I push back from the table and stand up. “I’m so sorry, it completely slipped my mind. We have to be somewhere.”
“Oh but we haven’t had coffee!” my mother protests.
“I know, I’m so sorry.” I am moving along the table, grabbing Hex’s chair. Hex stands, which involves a slight wobble and a hand slapped down on the table for balance that rattles the glasses. “Wonderful dinner, Mum, honestly, the roast was brilliant.”
“Is Sebastian alright?” my father asks, watching Hex with a slight frown.
“Long week,” I say firmly. “Very demanding job. You know how it is.”
Hex straightens up. He pulls together what is clearly a heroic effort of concentration.
The flickering stops. He smiles at the table, and it is a good smile, it is a devastating smile, and he says, “Forgive me. I have an early flight to Geneva. Adam very kindly agreed to see me off.” He looks around the table.
“This has been one of the most entertaining evenings I’ve had in a very long time. ”
The way he says entertaining clearly means something slightly different to what the table thinks it means.
He shakes my father’s hand. He kisses my aunt’s cheek, and she goes pink.
He tells James it was wonderful to meet him and says, with complete warmth and sincerity, “I’m sure we’ll all be hearing great things from you one day.
” James thanks him, and it’s only afterwards, I suspect, that he’ll realise he’s not entirely sure that was a compliment.
My mother gets a second kiss on the cheek and a promise that next time he’ll bring the good champagne. She sees us to the door with an expression on her face that I have genuinely never seen before and don’t entirely know how to categorise.
The door closes behind us.
We make it down the garden path at a walk. Then around the corner at a jog, and into the pub car park at something approaching a run.
The car park is dark and mostly empty. A few cars. A lamppost at the far end shedding orange light. The sounds of the pub muffled behind us.
Hex stops. The body he’s wearing goes very still.
Then it opens its mouth, and black smoke pours out.
It is not a small amount of smoke. It billows out in great rolling clouds, thick and absolute and darker than the night around us, curling upwards and then condensing, pulling together into a shape beside the now very unoccupied looking man who is standing with his arms loose at his sides and his eyes closed.
The smoke settles. Solidifies. Becomes Hex, standing in the shadow of a parked car, red eyes glowing faintly, a grin spreading across his face.
The man opens his eyes.
He looks at his hands. He looks at the pub. He looks at me.
“Wha…” he says.
I feel genuinely terrible. I also feel genuinely unable to explain any of this. I gesture towards the pub with what I hope is a reassuring expression. “You’ve had a night, mate. I’d get back in there if I were you.”
The man looks at the pub. He looks back at me. His expression is that of someone whose internal processing system has encountered something it fundamentally cannot parse.
He pats his pocket. Finds his phone. Stares at it.
“I’m going to get an Uber,” he says, to no one in particular.
“Good call,” I say.
He walks away. Not towards the pub. Not towards the road. Just slightly away, in the manner of a man who needs to put some distance between himself and everything. I watch him go with a feeling of profound guilt.
Hex materialises more solidly at my shoulder. “He’ll be fine.”
“You don’t know that.”
“He’ll have a strange gap in his memory and a feeling that something interesting happened.” Hex sounds unconcerned. “That’s basically every good night out.”
I turn to look at him. He’s fully himself now, all shadows and red eyes and the particular quality of presence that fills whatever space he’s in. He’s watching me with an expression that is trying to be smug and not quite managing it because something else keeps breaking through underneath.
“You absolute menace,” I say.
“I thought it went rather well.”
“You told my mother you own several buildings.”
“I do own several buildings. In the Shadow Realm, admittedly, but the statement was technically accurate.”
“You told my uncle you’ve played golf on a private island in Iceland.”
“I’ve been to Iceland.” He pauses. “There are shadows everywhere. I’ve technically been most places.”
“My cousin is going to spend the next three weeks trying to find the Reykjavik island golf course.”
“Then he’ll have a project. People like James need projects.”
I press my hand over my mouth. The laugh comes out anyway, bursting through my fingers, and once it starts I can’t stop it.
I’m laughing properly now, slightly hysterically, the kind of laugh that comes from somewhere deep and relieved and overwhelmed all at once.
Hex watches me with that soft expression, the one he thinks I don’t notice, the one that makes my chest do complicated things.
We end up in the park around the corner. Because neither of us wants to go home yet, apparently, and the park is there, and the night is cool and clear, and there’s a bench by a big old oak tree that seems as good a place as any.
We sit. Not quite touching. The sky above the tree is full of stars, or as full as a city sky ever gets.
“My mother giggled,” I say.
“She did.”
“She has never giggled in my entire twenty-six years of knowing her.”
“I have that effect on people.”
My laughter bubbles back up. Strong enough to make my shoulders shake.
I look at him. He’s looking up at the sky. His profile in the dark is all sharp angles, the red of his eyes dimmed to almost nothing, just a faint warmth.
“You told her I was extraordinary,” I say as I wipe a tear from my eye.
“You are.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
Hex turns to look at me. “Yes, I did.”
I hold his gaze for a moment. My heart is doing that thing it does. That complicated, inconvenient, increasingly difficult to ignore thing.
This is temporary. A few months. He’ll get his strength back, and he’ll go, and I’ll be here on this bench or one very like it, alone, with an extraordinary story and no one to tell it to.
I know that. I know it completely.
But the stars are out and Hex just told my mother I was extraordinary, and made my cousin feel small, and somewhere out there a confused man is getting an Uber with no memory of his evening, and I am laughing in a park at ten o’clock on a Saturday night in a way I haven’t laughed in longer than I can remember.
It might only last a few months.
But it is going to be the best few months of my life.