Chapter 15
I’ll Be Home Soon
Tuesday morning and I am back behind the counter, which is where I belong, except that nothing feels quite like it belongs anymore.
It has been eight days since Hex materialised in my bedroom. Eight days since my entire understanding of reality quietly packed its bags and moved out without leaving a forwarding address. Eight days of shadow princes and family dinners and my books being reorganised without my consent.
The morning rush is the same as it always is.
Flat whites and oat milk lattes and one man who orders a decaf americano with such listless energy that I want to ask him what the point is.
Felix is on the register. I am on the machine.
The indie playlist is doing its thing. The vegan bakery next door is doing something with cardamom.
Everything is normal. Completely normal. I am a completely normal person making completely normal coffee.
I’m definitely not regretting telling Hex he had to stay in the flat so I could work in peace. What kind of overly-clingy person would regret that?
“Your aura is doing something really weird,” says Felix, without looking up from the till.
“You look great too.”
“I mean it.” He glances over his shoulder at me. “It keeps flickering. Like a dodgy light bulb.”
“Maybe I’m tired.”
“You’re not tired. You’re unsettled.” He turns back to the next customer with a brilliant smile that gives absolutely no indication that he was just discussing my supernatural energy field. “Hi! What can I get you?”
I make the coffee. I steam the milk. I do not think about flickering auras or what they might mean.
The rush dies down around nine. Felix appears at my elbow with the focused energy of someone who has been waiting for exactly this moment.
“Talk,” he says.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Something is off.” He leans against the counter and crosses his arms, which makes his pentagram rings catch the light in a way that would be quite theatrical if Felix weren’t entirely sincere about all of it.
“Not with you specifically. With the energy around you. It started yesterday but it’s stronger today. ”
I think about the shape in the doorway across the street. There and then gone. Hex’s easy smile sliding back onto his face. Nothing to worry about today.
“Hex said everything was fine,” I say.
Felix gives me a look. “And you believed him.”
It isn’t a question. It doesn’t need to be. I busy myself wiping down the steam wand.
“He said there was nothing to worry about,” I say, which is not the same thing, and Felix’s expression tells me he has noticed.
“Something in the Shadow Realm is paying attention to Bristol,” Felix says, keeping his voice low and even, the tone he uses when he wants to deliver alarming information without alarming me, which never actually works but I appreciate the effort.
“I felt it last night when I was doing my evening practice. It’s like a frequency.
Something tuning in.” He pauses. “Something that wasn’t there a week ago. ”
The steam wand is very clean now. I keep wiping it anyway.
“Are you sensing Hex?” I ask. “He’s getting stronger, maybe he’s putting out some kind of signal?”
“Maybe.” Felix doesn’t look convinced. “If you’re right, that’s not necessarily a good thing.”
I stare at him.
“If I can sense Hex, then his enemies, or other entities, can too.”
I set down the cloth. The coffee shop hums pleasantly around us. A woman in the corner is typing on a laptop. Two students are sharing a pastry and arguing softly about something. The fairy lights are doing their fairy light thing.
“Right,” I say.
“Right,” Felix agrees. He gives my shoulder a brief, businesslike pat that is his version of a hug. “Just thought you should know. Keep your eyes open.”
He goes back to the register. I go back to the machine. I make a flat white with slightly more concentration than it requires.
Keep your eyes open.
I have been keeping my eyes open. I have been keeping them very open. Haven’t I? Fantastic sex and witty banter hasn’t made me forget that Hex is a dangerous, otherworldly being with all the complications that must entail, has it?
The bell above the door chimes.
I look up automatically, ready to smile, and my stomach drops straight through the floor.
Mr Peterson is standing in the doorway of Coffeelicious. Not a thug this time. Mr Peterson himself, with the expression of a man who has never once in his life not got what he wants.
He spots me immediately. Of course he does.
He walks to the counter with the slow, deliberate pace of someone who owns every room he walks into and knows it. He stops in front of me. He doesn’t queue. There are two people in the queue and he simply walks past them as if they are furniture.
“Hey!” says the woman he cuts in front of.
Peterson ignores her. His eyes are on me.
“I want a word with you,” he says.
My heart is doing something dramatic in my chest. Last time this happened there were two very large men and a locked door involved. Peterson on his own, in daylight, in a coffee shop full of witnesses, is considerably less frightening. I tell myself this firmly.
“I’m working,” I say. “If you’d like to join the queue, I’ll be with you shortly.”
Something shifts in Peterson’s expression. He wasn’t expecting that. People like Peterson are never expecting that.
“I don’t think you understand the situation,” he says, and his voice has dropped to something quieter and more dangerous. “I have contacts in this city. Serious contacts. The kind that can make problems disappear. And right now, you are a problem.”
Felix has materialised beside me. I don’t know when he got there. He is holding a coffee tamper with the calm energy of someone who is not going to use it as a weapon but wants Peterson to know that it is available as an option.
The woman Peterson cut in front of is filming on her phone. Bless her.
I look at Peterson. I think about Hex. I think about shadow creatures and dinner parties and family dinners and my mother’s voice on the phone telling me I’m a disappointment.
I think about the man who sent thugs to my workplace because I wouldn’t fawn over him.
And something very calm settles over me like a coat.
I’m sure Hex will come if I need him, but I don’t think I do. I think I’ve got this.
“Mr Peterson,” I say pleasantly. “You’re being filmed.
By at least three people in this coffee shop, I’d estimate.
” I watch him glance around and clock the phones.
“You sent threatening men to my workplace last week. That’s on camera too, the whole thing, and so is this.
” I lean forward slightly on the counter.
“If you have contacts, I suggest you use them to find yourself a good solicitor. Because you’re going to need one if you keep this up. ”
Silence.
Peterson stares at me. His jaw is doing something complicated.
“I want an apology,” he says, but the certainty has gone out of it.
“I’m sure you do.” I straighten up. “Would you like a coffee while you wait for that to happen?”
Felix makes a sound beside me that he converts, very professionally, into a cough.
Peterson looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at the phones. Then he turns and walks out of Coffeelicious without another word. The door swings shut behind him.
The woman who was filming gives me a small round of applause. Her friend joins in. The two students look up from their pastry.
Felix turns to me with an expression of absolute delight. “A solicitor,” he says reverently. “You threatened him with a solicitor.”
“It seemed appropriate. I couldn’t exactly threaten to sic my shadow prince on him while everyone was filming.”
“It was magnificent.” He shakes his head. “A week ago you apologised to a man for a latte having milk in it.”
“I’ve grown.”
“You have.” He sounds genuinely pleased. Then his expression shifts, the delight fading into something more thoughtful. He glances at the window, at the street outside, and that small frown appears between his brows. The one that I think means his witch senses are doing something.
“Felix,” I say.
“It’s nothing.” But he keeps looking at the window. “Just that frequency again. Stronger than before.”
I follow his gaze. The Bristol street. Ordinary Tuesday morning. Pedestrians and pigeons and a courier struggling with an enormous parcel.
Nothing in the shadows.
Nothing I can see, anyway.
“How worried should I be?” I ask quietly.
Felix is quiet for a moment. He picks up a cloth and starts wiping the counter with unnecessary thoroughness, which is his version of having thoughts he isn’t sure how to say.
“I think,” he says carefully, “that Hex being here has been like lighting a bonfire in a dark field. Brilliant if you’re trying to warm yourself up. Less brilliant if there are things out there in the dark that you don’t want to attract.”
I stare at the cloth moving in circles on the counter.
“And the things in the dark,” I say. “Are they attracted?”
Felix stops wiping. He looks up at me. His dark eyes are very serious, all the goth theatrics stripped away, just Felix being honest with me in the way he always is eventually.
“Yes,” he says simply. “I think they are.”
The fairy lights flicker above us. Just once. Brief enough that nobody else in the coffee shop notices.
But I notice.
And Felix notices me noticing.
We look at each other. Neither of us says anything else. There isn’t really anything else to say.
I pick up my cloth and go back to work. I make lattes and cappuccinos and one complicated seasonal thing with three modifications that takes considerably longer than it should. I smile at customers. I draw a leaf in the foam.
I do not think about bonfires in dark fields. I do not think about dark things being attracted to the light. Because, despite being a literal shadow, Hex is the light. I’m sure of it.
Instead of all of that, I think about going home.
Hex will be there. He always is now. I’ll walk in and the flat will be warmer than I left it and something will have been moved or reorganised without my permission and he’ll look at me with those red eyes and say something that manages to be both infuriating and reassuring in the same breath.
It should feel like an intrusion. Honestly, it should. It is an intrusion. He is a shadow prince who has taken up residence in my uncle’s flat without asking and rearranges my possessions for fun.
But when the end of my shift comes and I untie my apron and say goodbye to Felix, who gives me a long look that means be careful in his particular language, I walk home faster than usual.
Not because I’m frightened.
Because something is paying attention to Bristol. Something is tuning in, looking for the bonfire in the dark field.
And the bonfire is currently alphabetising my books and criticising my mug collection, and I want to get home to him before the dark finds the light.