Chapter 16
Meeting the Bros
Iget home to find Hex has rearranged the living room.
Not dramatically. Just enough. The sofa is at a slightly different angle. The lamp has moved. My collection of mismatched candles, which I have spent considerable time arranging on the windowsill in an order that pleases me, have been grouped by height.
“I was bored,” says Hex, from the sofa, without looking up.
“You were bored,” I repeat.
“You were gone for eight hours.”
“I was at work.” I drop my bag by the door and look at the candles. They do, infuriatingly, look better grouped by height. “Normal people go to work. It’s a thing that happens.”
“I’m not normal people.”
“You can say that again.”
I make tea. Hex follows me to the kitchen in the way he has taken to doing, occupying the doorframe with his arms crossed and watching me move around the small space with that particular quality of attention that I have stopped finding unnerving and started finding something else entirely, which is its own problem.
I tell him about Peterson. About the solicitor line and the filming and the small round of applause. Hex looks extremely pleased in a way that is mostly pride and only slightly territorial, which is about as good as it gets with him.
I don’t tell him what Felix said. I’m not sure why.
I open my mouth to say it twice and both times something stops me.
Maybe because the flat is warm and the tea is good and Hex is leaning in my kitchen doorway looking at me like I’m something worth looking at, and I want five more minutes of that before the complicated part.
I never get the five minutes.
The temperature drops.
Not gradually. Instantly, the way it does when something significant is about to happen rather than something ordinary.
My breath mists in the air. The overhead light flickers.
And then the shadows in the corner of the kitchen thicken and move and two figures step out of them with the easy confidence of beings who have been doing this for a very long time.
I make a sound. Not a dignified sound. Somewhere between a yelp and a very undignified squeak.
The first figure is tall. Not Hex tall, but close, with a lean, watchful quality, like someone who has spent a long time being very still and observant. His edges are sharper than Hex’s, more defined, his features precise and almost severe. His eyes glow a deep, emerald green.
The second is broader. Built like the kind of man you’d be genuinely frightened to meet in a dark alley, even if he wasn’t made entirely of shadows, all contained power and restrained force.
His eyes burn a steady dark amber. He carries himself with the particular energy of someone who doesn’t need to make threats because he has never needed to.
They both look at Hex.
And then, in perfect unison, they bow.
Not a nod. Not an incline of the head. A proper, formal, deliberate bow, one fist pressed to the chest, eyes down.
“My liege,” says the green-eyed one, quietly.
“My liege,” echoes the amber-eyed one.
The silence that follows is enormous.
I look at Hex. Hex, who complained this morning that I’d put the mugs back in the wrong order.
Hex, who has strong opinions about candle arrangement.
Hex, who called me cute when I was annoyed and reorganised my bookshelves without asking, and made himself entirely at home in my uncle’s very ordinary flat in Bristol.
Hex has straightened in the kitchen doorway. Something shifts in him, some quality I haven’t seen before. The easy charm doesn’t disappear exactly, but it steps aside. What’s underneath it is older and quieter and considerably more dangerous.
He looks, for the first time since I’ve known him, like exactly what he is. A prince.
“Night. Dark.” His voice is different too. Still the same deep timbre, but the warmth has been replaced by something more measured. “You found me.”
“We’ve been looking for a while,” says the green-eyed one, who must be Night. His gaze moves to me with a curiosity that is not unfriendly. “This is Adam.”
It is not a question.
“I’ve heard a great deal about you,” says Dark, the amber-eyed one, and there is something in his voice that might be warmth.
He looks at me with the assessing expression of someone who has been told a lot about a person and is now putting it together with the reality.
Whatever conclusion he reaches seems to satisfy him. “You called him a baby duck.”
I open my mouth. Close it.
“He told you that,” I say.
“He told us quite a lot,” says Night, and he is smiling now, which makes him look considerably less severe and considerably more like someone I might actually like.
“In my defence,” I say, “he was being very intense and I panicked.”
Dark makes a sound that is almost certainly a laugh converted, with some effort, into something more appropriate for someone who just bowed to his prince. He glances at Hex. “I like him.”
“Glad you approve,” I mutter.
“Come through,” says Hex, and there is a quiet authority in it that nobody in the room is going to argue with, including me.
We all migrate to the living room. I perch on the edge of the sofa.
Night and Dark settle into the room the way shadow beings seem to settle into rooms, present but not entirely constrained by the furniture.
Hex remains standing.
“Tell me,” he says.
Night and Dark exchange a glance. Something passes between them, a shorthand that needs no words.
“Dis knows you’re alive,” says Night.
The room gets very quiet. Hex’s expression doesn’t change but something in the air does, a subtle shift in pressure, like the moment before a storm decides what it’s going to do.
“How long has he known?” Hex asks.
“We think a few days.” Dark’s jaw tightens. “He’s not happy about it.”
“No,” says Hex, and there is something in his voice that might be grim satisfaction. “I imagine he isn’t.”
I look between them. “Who is Dis?” I ask, because nobody seems to be going to tell me and I am sitting in my own living room and I think I’ve earned the right to know what is happening in it.
Three pairs of eyes turn to me. Night’s green. Dark’s amber. Hex’s red, still burning with that quality I haven’t seen before tonight, that quiet princely thing I am going to need considerably more time to process.
“Dis is the current Shadow King,” says Night carefully. “He sits on the throne that should be Hex’s.”
“He orchestrated the coup,” says Dark, and his voice has gone flat and hard. “Overthrew Hex’s father. Bound Hex’s powers. Sent him here to fade.”
I think about what Hex told me in the kitchen so many days ago, when I asked about the curse. My father was not a good king. But those who overthrew him are worse.
“So he’s the one who did this to you,” I say to Hex.
Hex doesn’t answer directly. He looks at the window instead, at the dark Bristol street beyond the glass, and his expression is unreadable. “Dis is powerful,” he says. “More powerful than most people know. More than he lets on.”
“He has been sitting on your throne,” says Dark, “and ruling your realm, and now he knows you survived exile and are recovering, and he will not simply wait for you to come to him.”
“Wraith is already moving,” says Night quietly. “We don’t know where yet. But he’s been given a task. We’re fairly certain we know what it is.”
The silence stretches. I am acutely aware that I am the only person in this room without shadow powers and the only person whose flat this technically is and probably the only person who doesn’t fully understand what’s being said but understands enough to know it’s bad.
“What’s the task?” I ask.
Night looks at Hex. Hex looks at me, and for just a moment that measured princeliness softens back into something more familiar. Something that looks almost apologetic.
“You,” says Dark simply.
Oh.
Right then.
“Me,” I say, in what I think is quite a calm voice, all things considered.
“You’re the source,” says Night. “You’re what’s keeping Hex alive and what’s been making him stronger. If Dis wants to stop Hex, the most efficient way is to remove the source.”
I think about that for a moment. Remove the source. Cheerful phrasing.
“Right,” I say.
“We’re not going to let that happen,” says Dark, with a certainty that is absolutely genuine and also somewhat terrifying in its implications, because the kind of certainty that sounds like that, usually means the alternative is genuinely being considered by someone.
I look at Hex. He is looking at me with an expression I cannot entirely read, something layered and complicated and too much for this living room on a Tuesday evening.
“You knew,” I say. Not accusing. Just saying it.
“I suspected,” he says. “I didn’t know.”
“There’s a difference.”
“Yes.”
“We can discuss that later,” I say, which is probably the most mature thing I have ever said in my life, and also a very effective way of making clear that we absolutely will be discussing it later.
Hex holds my gaze for a moment. Then he nods, once.
Night and Dark stay for another hour. I learn that they are brothers.
The conversation shifts, becomes more tactical, moves into territory I don’t entirely follow but try to keep up with.
There is talk of allegiances and timing and the state of the Shadow Realm, and Night and Dark speak about it with the weariness of people who have been watching something they love be mismanaged for a long time and are very ready for it to stop.
Dark makes a joke at some point. I don’t catch all of it but Hex almost smiles, and Night shakes his head with the expression of someone who has been making excuses for his brother for centuries and has made peace with it.
They are, despite everything, good company.
When they leave, stepping back into the shadows the same way they came, Night pauses at the threshold and looks back at me.
“He talked about you,” he says quietly. “Before all of this. Before the exile. He talked about the human boy he used to feed on.” A pause. “We’re glad he has you.”
And then he’s gone.