Chapter 18
No Regrets
Iam asleep when my phone rings.
Not deeply asleep. The kind of thin, restless sleep that comes from knowing too much and being able to do nothing about it.
My phone screen lights up the room. I grab it before it disturbs Hex.
Felix.
I answer immediately because Felix does not call at two in the morning for fun.
“Hey,” I say quietly, already sitting up. “What’s wrong?”
There is a pause. Background noise. Something crackling and distant and wrong.
“So,” says Felix. “Don’t panic.”
“Felix.”
“I’m fine.” Another pause. The crackling gets louder. “Mostly fine. There’s a situation.”
I am already out of bed, moving to the hallway, closing the bedroom door behind me. “What situation?”
“My building is on fire.”
I stop moving. “What?”
“My building.” His voice is very calm. Terrifyingly calm. “It’s on fire. Has been for about twenty minutes. I’m on the fourteenth floor and the stairwell is gone and the window is obviously not an option and I’ve tried everything I can do magically and I’m fairly out of ideas at this point.”
The crackling sound is not a bad connection. It’s fire.
“Felix.” My voice comes out strange. Very level. Very careful. The way voices go when the person using them is trying very hard not to lose it. “Have you called the fire brigade?”
“First thing. They’re outside. They can’t get high enough.” A pause. Then, very quietly. “Adam, I don’t think I’m going to get out of this one.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m just being realistic.” Something shifts in his voice. The calmness cracks, just slightly, just enough for me to hear what’s underneath it. “I didn’t want to be on my own. That’s all. I just didn’t want to be on my own.”
My throat closes up completely.
“You’re not on your own,” I say. “You’re not. Felix, listen to me, you’re not on your own.”
He starts coughing. Not a small cough. The kind that takes over, that won’t stop, that sounds like his lungs are trying to leave his body. I stand in my hallway in the dark and listen to it and feel completely, utterly useless.
The bedroom door opens. Hex stands in the doorway, red eyes fully illuminated, taking in my face and the phone pressed to my ear and whatever expression I’m wearing right now.
“Felix,” I say, when the coughing finally subsides. “Are you still there?”
“Still here.” His voice is rougher now. Scraped raw. “Sorry. The smoke is getting bad.”
I look at Hex. Hex looks at me.
“Can you help him?” I ask. Not loudly. Just directly, just straight at Hex, just the most important question I have ever asked another being.
Something moves across Hex’s face. A calculation. A hesitation. “Adam,” he says carefully. “Interfering with fate in the human realm is not something I should...”
“Can you help him.”
Not a question this time.
Hex is quiet for a moment. He looks at me with those red eyes, and I look back and I don’t say anything else because I don’t need to. It’s all there in my face, and he can read me better than I can read myself, and he knows it.
“Hex is going to come to you,” I tell Felix. “Just stay on the line. Just keep talking to me.”
“Adam,” says Felix, and his voice is smaller than I have ever heard it. “Tell him not to do anything dramatic.”
“He’s going to be dramatic,” I say. “That’s just who he is. You’re going to have to live with it.”
A sound from Felix that might be a laugh and might be a cough and is probably both.
Hex crosses the hallway to me. He puts one hand briefly on the side of my face, just for a second, and looks at me with an expression that I don’t have words for, and then he dissolves. Not gradually. All at once, like a candle going out, the shadows swallowing him whole.
He’s gone.
I press the phone back to my ear. “Felix. Talk to me.”
“I’m here.” More coughing. Shorter this time, more controlled, like he’s trying to conserve himself. “Your shadow prince is dramatically swooping in to save me, then.”
“Apparently.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Felix, your building is on fire.”
“I know. I’m just making conversation.” A pause. “Are you scared?”
“Yes,” I say honestly.
“Me too.” Another pause. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Your secret is safe.”
The crackling gets very loud for a moment and I grip the phone so hard my knuckles hurt and then Felix makes a sharp sound and says “oh” in a voice that sounds surprised and then the line goes muffled and chaotic and I stand in my hallway and wait.
The hairs on the back of my neck rise. Goosebumps dance down my skin.
I spin around.
The thing at the end of my hallway is not Hex.
It has Hex’s shape, roughly. The same tall outline, the same suggestion of broad shoulders. But the edges are wrong, ragged rather than fluid, and the eyes that glow in the darkness are not red. They are a pale, colourless white. Like light through fog. Like nothing I have seen before.
And it smiles at me. Too big. Far too wide.
I do not scream. I want to. Every instinct I have is screaming at every other instinct I have. But I think of Felix on the fourteenth floor with smoke in his lungs, and I plant my feet on the hallway floor of my uncle’s flat, and I look at this thing and I do not scream.
“You must be Wraith,” I say.
The thing tilts its head. All the way to the side, far further than a human neck could ever go. That wrong smile doesn’t move.
“Hex is going to come back,” I say. My voice is shaking. I let it shake. “And when he does, you are going to wish you’d picked a different Wednesday.”
Wraith moves. Fast, the way shadows move when they want to, no transition between there and here.
One moment it is at the end of the hallway.
The next moment it is directly in front of me and the cold coming off it is nothing like Hex’s cold, nothing like that particular winter chill I have come to find reassuring.
This is empty cold. Wrong cold. The cold of something that doesn’t have warmth and never did.
One long shadowy hand reaches towards my face.
The flat explodes with darkness.
Not Wraith’s darkness. Something else. Something that comes in from every corner and every crack and every shadow in the room all at once, flooding the hallway with a force that hits me like a physical thing and sends me stumbling back against the wall.
The temperature drops so sharply I gasp.
The lights blow out. Every single one, simultaneously, the pop of each bulb like punctuation.
And then Hex is there.
Not the Hex who reorganises my bookshelves.
Not the Hex who calls me cute when I’m annoyed and reads the rota on my fridge and argues about candle arrangement.
Not even the Hex who stood in my kitchen last night and received a bow from two shadow beings with quiet authority.
This is most definitely not the Hex who kisses me so sweetly.
This Hex is something else entirely.
He is enormous. Not physically taller, not exactly, but the space he takes up has expanded far beyond his body, the shadows around him alive and moving and dense with something that makes the air feel thick and hard to breathe.
His eyes are not glowing. They are burning.
Furious, incandescent, the red so bright it burns into my retinas.
Wraith goes flying backwards. Propelled by a force I can’t name. One moment he is right next to me, touching my face and stealing the warmth out of my blood, and then suddenly he has been catapulted back to the far end of the hallway.
The thing that is not quite Hex stands between me and Wraith, and the sound that comes out of him is not a voice.
It is not a language. It is something older than both of those things, something that vibrates in my chest and behind my eyes and in the base of my spine, and it means one thing with complete, unmistakable clarity.
LEAVE. NOW. WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
Wraith is still. That pale smile has gone.
For a long moment, nothing moves. The darkness breathes. The silence rings.
Then Wraith dissolves. Not dramatically. Just gone, as if he was never there, leaving nothing behind but cold air and the smell of something that feels like death.
The darkness contracts. Hex shrinks back into himself, the terrible enormity of him folding away until he is just a man-shaped shadow in my hallway again, red eyes dimming from furnace to ember. He turns to look at me.
I am pressed against the wall with my phone still in my hand and my heart trying to beat its way out of my body.
We look at each other.
“Felix,” I manage, and look down at my phone.
The call is still connected. Distantly, very distantly, I can hear Felix’s voice saying something. I press the phone to my ear.
“...are you still there? Adam? He dropped me on top of a fire engine, which is objectively hilarious, and I need you to know I am completely fine but I am going to need a very large drink and also possibly a new flat, so…”
“Felix.” My voice comes out wrong. Too high. Too thin.
A pause. “Adam. Are you okay?”
I look at Hex. Hex looks at me. He is back to himself, or mostly back to himself, but there is something in his expression that is new. Something that looks, underneath all the careful composure, a very long way from fine.
“I am,” I say. “I will be. Are you safe?”
“I’m on top of a fire engine in my pyjamas in the middle of Bristol, and there are a lot of very attractive firemen who have questions,” says Felix. “So yes. Relatively speaking.” Another pause. “He picked me up. Just appeared and picked me up and flew out of the window.”
“That does sound like him.”
“I have feelings about this,” says Felix. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He hangs up.
I lower the phone. The hallway is very quiet. The blown bulbs have left us in the dark, and the only light is Hex’s eyes, steady and red and fixed entirely on me.
I don’t know how long we stand there.
Eventually I say, “Thank you.”
“Don’t,” says Hex, and his voice is rough in a way I haven’t heard before. “Don’t thank me.”
“Hex…”
“The fire was not an accident.” He says it quietly. Controlled. But underneath the control, something is running very hot. “He used Felix to get me away from you. It was planned. All of it.”
I think about that. I think about Felix on the fourteenth floor saying I don’t think I’m getting out of this one. I think about Wraith’s pale eyes and that wrong cold and the hand reaching towards my face.
“He didn’t get what he came for,” I say.
“No.” Hex’s jaw tightens. “Because I came back in time.”
“You did.”
“I nearly didn’t.” The words come out like they cost him something. Like saying them out loud is worse than not saying them. “I was nearly too late, Adam.”
I cross the hallway. I don’t think about it. I just do it, close the distance between us and put my arms around him, which is something I haven’t done before, not like this, not just because I need to and not for any other reason.
He goes very still for a moment.
Then his arms come around me, and he holds on with a ferocity that says everything neither of us is saying out loud.
Outside, Bristol carries on. Somewhere across the city, Felix is sitting on a fire engine in his pyjamas. Somewhere in the Shadow Realm, Wraith is reporting back.
But right here, in the dark hallway of my uncle’s flat, with all the lightbulbs blown and the cold slowly fading and Hex’s arms around me, I think that whatever is coming, whatever Dis sends next, whatever the cost of all of this turns out to be…
I am not sorry.
Not even a little bit.