Chapter 20
The Not-Ex
Felix is on his third cup of tea and has reached the stage of processing where he stops being fine and starts being furious.
“Intentional,” he says, for approximately the fourth time, turning the word over like he’s deciding what to do with it.
He is sitting cross-legged on my sofa in a borrowed jumper with his dark eyeliner very slightly smudged, which is the most dishevelled I have ever seen him and probably the most dishevelled he has been in his entire adult life.
“Someone burned my flat down on purpose. To distract Hex. And I was just. Collateral.”
“You weren’t collateral,” I say.
“I was absolutely collateral. I was bait.” He picks up his mug. “I have never been bait before. I find I deeply resent it.”
“To be fair,” says Hex, from the armchair, where he has been sitting with his arms crossed and the carefully neutral expression he uses when he’s decided not to involve himself in something and is finding this decision difficult, “you were extremely effective bait.”
Felix points at him. “That is not the reassurance you think it is.”
“I’m not trying to reassure you.”
“No, I can see that.” Felix looks at him for a long moment with those sharp dark eyes. Then, apparently deciding something, he nods once. “Right. When this is over, I’m going to do something about it.”
“Felix,” I say.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid. I’m going to do something very considered and extremely deliberate.” He takes a sip of tea with an air of absolute serenity. “I have some reading to do first.”
I open my mouth to ask what reading, exactly, but before I can say anything, the temperature in the room does something.
Not drops. Not the way it did with Night and Dark, that sudden plunge into cold. More like a shift in pressure. A change in the quality of the air, the way it changes just before something unexpected happens, before lightning strikes from a clear sky.
Someone is sitting on my sofa.
Not appearing. Not stepping out of shadows. Just suddenly, between one breath and the next, sitting right next to Felix as if they have always been there and we simply failed to notice.
Felix looks to his left. Then very deliberately back at his tea.
Hex grimaces and seems to brace himself, but he doesn’t hulk out, so I guess this visitor is nothing to worry about.
I stare.
The shadow person on my sofa is not large. Not physically imposing. Not built like contained violence the way Dark is, or radiating quiet authority the way Night does. He’s not a seven foot tall baby duckling like Hex. And he’s definitely not a creepy, eldritch horror like Wraith.
No, this shadow being is slight and fine-boned and small enough that my sofa, which is not a large sofa, fits him very comfortably.
He is wearing something dark and impractical that has no business looking as good as it does.
His hair is extraordinary. Waist-length, a black so deep it seems to absorb light rather than obscure it, falling loose way past his shoulders and pooling slightly on the cushion beside him.
His face is unreasonable. That is the only word for it.
The kind of face that makes you feel that the universe was showing off when it made it, cheekbones and jaw and mouth all arranged in a configuration that has no practical justification.
His eyes are purple. Like the brightest amethyst in existence.
All bright and strange and lit from within with something that might be amusement and might be something considerably older and harder to name.
He is looking directly at me.
He smiles.
Something about the smile makes the back of my neck prickle. Not because it’s threatening. Because it’s too knowing. The smile of someone who has seen a very great deal and finds most of it privately hilarious.
“Oh,” he says, and his voice is light and musical and somehow manages to convey the impression that this single syllable contains an entire sentence. “I see.”
Hex has gone very still in the armchair.
The extraordinary person on my sofa turns to look at Hex, and his smile does something complicated. “My betrothed,” he says warmly. “You look well. Considerably better than the last time I saw you.”
The silence that follows is enormous.
I look at Hex. Hex is not looking at me. He is looking at the person on my sofa with an expression I have never seen on his face before. It takes me a moment to identify it because it is so completely foreign on him.
He looks caught.
“Fiend,” he says, and his voice is very carefully controlled.
“You remember.” Fiend presses a hand to his chest with an expression of delighted relief. “I was worried you might have forgotten me in your exile. All those long lonely years. Did you think of me?”
“It hasn’t been years, it’s been weeks, and no,” says Hex.
“Liar.” Fiend says it without any heat, cheerfully, as if being called a liar is a perfectly pleasant thing. He turns back to me. The amethyst eyes are very bright. “And you’re Adam.”
“I am,” I say, because what else is there to say.
“He’s always talked about you,” says Fiend. Not like Night said it, warm and careful. Fiend says it the way someone says the punchline of a joke. “Constantly. It was quite tedious before I understood the context, and now it makes considerably more sense.”
“You’re not supposed to leave the palace,” says Hex.
“So I’ve been told,” says Fiend pleasantly.
“But I go where I like. You know that.” He looks around the living room with great interest, taking in his surroundings with the expression of someone reading a very interesting text.
“Lovely flat. Very organised. I particularly like the spice rack.” He glances at Hex. “Your doing, I assume?”
Felix, who has been watching all of this with the focused attention of someone filing everything away for later use, raises his hand. “Sorry. Who are you?”
Fiend looks at Felix with an expression of sudden, delighted interest, like a cat who has just noticed something moving in a corner. “Felix,” he says, as if the name itself is interesting. “The witch.”
“The witch,” Felix confirms, entirely unbothered. “And you are?”
“Fiend. Future ruler of the Shadow Realm.” He says it lightly, as if it’s fact and not a boast.
“Right.” Felix nods. “Tea?”
Fiend stares at him for a moment. Something moves in those purple eyes. “You know,” he says, “I think I like you.”
“Everyone does eventually,” says Felix, and gets up to put the kettle on.
I watch him go and then look back at Fiend, who is now examining my coffee table with seemingly great interest. He picks up the gold ring sitting by the candle where I left it this morning, turns it over once, and sets it back down with a precision that feels deliberate. His expression doesn’t change at all.
I look at Hex. Hex is looking at the ring. Something has shifted in his face but it’s gone too quickly for me to read.
“Why are you here?” Hex asks Fiend.
“To see how you’re getting on.” Fiend leans back into the sofa cushions with the boneless ease of someone who is entirely comfortable everywhere they’ve ever been.
“The answer is, very well, obviously. Better than expected. Better than Dis expected, certainly.” A pause.
“He knows you haven’t faded and he’s not happy. ”
“I know. Night and Dark told me”
“I’m saying it again because the degree of unhappiness is increasing and the timeline is accelerating.” The lightness in Fiend’s voice doesn’t change, but something underneath it does, very slightly. “You have less time than you think, my darling betrothed. And more resources than you know.”
The last sentence lands differently from the rest. Quieter. More precise. Like the difference between a joke and the thing the joke was covering.
I look at Hex. Hex is looking at Fiend with the wary, calculating expression of someone trying to work out whether they are being helped or played and not being able to determine which.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
Fiend looks at me. Those purple eyes are very steady, which is somehow more unsettling than any of his theatrics.
“It means,” he says, “that the things you need are closer than they appear.” His gaze drops briefly, pointedly, to the gold ring on the coffee table.
Then back up to my face. “I’d keep that close if I were you. ”
The kettle clicks in the kitchen.
Fiend stands. He is, in motion, even more extraordinary. All that hair moving with him, the dark impractical outfit somehow exactly right. The whole impression of somebody who knows precisely how beautiful they are and has decided it’s a useful tool and they are damn well going to use it.
He looks at Hex, and for just a moment the performance drops entirely. Underneath it is something old and tired and much more complicated than anything he’s said out loud.
“Take care of yourself,” he says quietly. “For once.”
Then he walks to the front door, opens it like a completely normal person, and closes it behind him.
Hex is across the room in an instant, wrenching the door open.
The hallway is empty. No footsteps on the stairs. No trace of cold air or displaced shadows. Just the ordinary smell of an ordinary Bristol building on an ordinary Thursday afternoon.
Hex stands in the doorway for a long moment.
Felix reappears with four mugs of tea, looks at the empty doorway, and sets one mug down on the coffee table where Fiend was sitting. “Polite,” he says, and sits back down.
I look at the gold ring on the coffee table. I pick it up and put it in my pocket.
Then I look at Hex, who has closed the front door and turned around and is now looking at me with an expression that is trying to be composed and not entirely succeeding.
My brain cells begin to function again. Slowly, very slowly, but thoughts are forming and opinions are taking shape and sheer and utter outrage is starting to form.
“My betrothed,” I say. “That’s like a fancy word for engaged, isn’t it?”
Hex opens his mouth.
“My betrothed,” I say again, spitting each vowel and consonant as if they have personally offended me.
“It was a political arrangement,” Hex says hurriedly. “Made before the coup. It was never… there was nothing between us. We never…”
“He’s very pretty.”
“Adam.” Hex is squirming, actually squirming.
“Extraordinarily pretty, actually. That hair.”
Felix slurps his tea. His eyes ping-pong between Hex and me as if he is relishing every single moment and doesn’t want to miss a thing.
“It was a political arrangement that was rendered null and void by my exile,” Hex says, with the focused urgency of a man who understands that he is losing ground and cannot identify how to stop it. “His family will have reassigned him by now. Probably to Dis. It was never a real...”
“To Dis,” I say, and something in that lands differently, a small cold note underneath the jealousy. Fiend being handed to Dis as a political asset. The tiredness in his face in that last moment before he left.
“Adam.” Hex crosses the room to me and stops very close, close enough that I have to tilt my head up slightly to look at him, which he knows perfectly well and absolutely does on purpose.
“There has never been anything between Fiend and me.
There is nothing. There was never going to be anything.
He and I understood each other perfectly and the arrangement was purely political and I need you to know that the only person in any realm that I… “
He stops.
I wait.
He looks at me with those red eyes and something in him is very unguarded in a way he usually isn’t, and I think about the kiss in the kitchen at four in the morning and the way he said My Love differently from how he normally says it, saying it like it was something he’d been thinking for a long time.
“The only person,” I prompt.
His jaw tightens. “You know what I’m saying.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
It’s the same thing I said in the kitchen. He recognises it. Something shifts in his expression. Exasperation and warmth and something deeper than both, all at once.
“You,” he says. Simply. Just that. “Only you.”
I look at him for a long moment.
Felix settles back on the sofa. “Yep. Being third wheel sucks big time,” he mutters.
“Okay,” I say to Hex.
Because his explanation is reasonable and he is squirming, actually squirming and looking panicked and flustered that I might not believe him, and people don’t act like that if they don’t care.
Hex blinks. “Okay.”
“Don’t push your luck though. If it turns out you have a secret attic wife or husband, I’m dumping you.”
Something that is unmistakably relief moves across his face, chased immediately by the familiar edge of amusement. “Noted.”
“Good.” I pick up my tea. “Also, your ex is terrifying.”
“He’s not my ex.”
“Your almost-ex.”
“He’s not...”
“The hair, Hex. The hair alone.”
Felix, on the sofa, makes a sound into his tea that is almost certainly a laugh.
Hex sits down in the armchair and looks at the ceiling with the expression of a man who has won something important but is not going to be allowed to enjoy it in peace.
I drink my tea.
The ring sits in my pocket, warm against my hand.
And somewhere in the Shadow Realm, or possibly somewhere else entirely, Fiend is doing whatever Fiend does and thinking whatever Fiend thinks, and I have absolutely no idea whether what just happened was helpful or a threat or something else entirely.
But he looked at the ring.
And he told me to keep it close.
I think I will.