Chapter 21
Patience is a Virtue
Felix doesn’t want me to go in.
He says this while wrapped in my spare duvet on the sofa, with a mug of something herbal that Hex found at the back of the cupboard and that smells aggressively of chamomile, looking approximately seventy per cent recovered and one hundred per cent determined not to show the thirty per cent that isn’t.
“It’s Saturday,” he says. “Coffeelicious on a Saturday without me is a disaster.”
“Which is exactly why I should go in.”
“You’re not supposed to be working today.”
“Felix. Your flat burned down three days ago. You’re not working. Someone has to.”
He pulls the duvet tighter with the expression of someone who wants to argue but doesn’t have the energy.
“Take Hex.”
“I can’t take Hex.”
“Why not?”
“Because he is entirely too distracting, and I’ll burn the beans and boil the milk. And that’s if he behaves and doesn’t start rearranging things, or terrifying the customers.”
Felix makes a sound that concedes my point without admitting it out loud. Hex, in the armchair, looks up from whatever he has been doing with Felix’s phone. Felix showed him the internet yesterday, and the consequences are ongoing.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him.
“I know,” says Hex.
His tone implies that he knows, because he is going to make sure of it. And that’s just fine by me.
I put my work clothes on and walk to Coffeelicious in the November grey, hands in my pockets, the ring pressing warm against my fingers where I’ve taken to carrying it loose rather than leaving it in various places in the flat.
Fiend told me to keep it close. I don’t know why I trust that, given that Fiend is completely unreadable and possibly chaos in a very beautiful package, but I do.
Saturday lives up to its reputation. From the moment I unlock the doors it is relentless.
The morning crowd and then the brunch crowd and then the people who come in for a quiet afternoon coffee and are visibly surprised by how many other people had the same idea.
I am on the machine alone for three hours before Maya comes in for her afternoon shift and the relief is significant.
I am fine. It is fine. Everything is completely fine.
I take the bin bags out to the alley at the back at half three, because the bins need doing and because five minutes of cold November air and the quiet of the alley behind the row of shops sounds like exactly what I need before the Saturday late afternoon rush hits.
I am halfway to the bins when I become aware that I am not alone.
Peterson is standing at the alley entrance.
Behind him are two men who have the particular quality of men who get paid to stand behind people and look threatening.
They are doing this very effectively. They are not the same two men who first threatened me.
I think Hex scared those thugs off permanently. These guys have no idea.
I stop walking.
“Mr Peterson,” I say, because what else is there to say.
He looks different from the last time I saw him in Coffeelicious. Less controlled. The expensive suit is the same, but something in his face has come loose, that polished certainty cracked down the middle. He looks like a man who has been having a bad week and has decided it is my fault.
“Do you know,” he says, walking towards me with the slow, deliberate pace of someone who has thought about this moment and rehearsed it, “what it’s like? To have people laughing at you? Because of a barista?”
“I imagine it’s unpleasant,” I say. The bag of rubbish is in my hand. It is not a useful weapon, but it is what I have.
“Everyone is mocking me.” His voice has an edge I haven’t heard before, something raw underneath the entitlement. “A man in my position, with my contacts, made to look a fool by someone who makes coffee for a living. Do you have any idea how that feels?”
“I think,” I say carefully, “that you might want to consider whether I’m actually the problem here.”
He stops in front of me. The two men flank him, close enough that the alley suddenly feels considerably smaller than it did thirty seconds ago.
“No,” says Peterson. “I’ve considered it quite thoroughly. You’re the problem.”
The thing is, two weeks ago, this would have worked. Two weeks ago, cornered in an alley by Peterson and two very large men, I would have apologised. I would have folded. I would have given him whatever he wanted just to make the awful feeling stop.
But two weeks ago I hadn’t seen my mother’s withering assessment of my life be decimated over a dinner table by a handsome man possessed by My Lover.
I hadn’t faced down Wraith in my own hallway.
I hadn’t talked to Felix while his home burned around him, and held myself together by sheer stubbornness.
I am not the same person who apologised to a man for a latte having milk in it.
“I’m not going to apologise,” I say. “I’m not going to post anything on social media. I’m not going to do any of the things you’re about to ask me to do. And I’d like you to leave.”
Peterson stares at me. His jaw does that complicated thing it does. “In my line of work, reputation is everything.”
Then one of the men behind him takes a step forward.
The temperature in the alley drops.
Not subtly. Immediately, definitively, a cold that has nothing to do with November and everything to do with something that has run out of patience.
The shadows at the far end of the alley move.
Hex steps out of them, and he is not the Hex who burns toast or even the princely Hex. He is something older and colder than all of those, the shadows still moving around him, his eyes burning so red they throw light on the alley walls.
He looks at me first. Just for a second. Just to check.
Then he looks at Peterson.
“My love,” he says, and his voice is very calm, the particular calm of something that does not need to raise its voice because nothing within a considerable radius is going to argue with it. “You really do need to stop getting into these predicaments.”
Peterson has gone the colour of old chalk.
“Who…” he starts.
“You threatened Adam,” says Hex, still in that terrible calm voice. “You sent men to his workplace. You cornered My Love in an alley.” He tilts his head. “You’ve been a persistent problem and now you have found the end of my patience.”
“I don’t know what you...”
“I’m not interested,” says Hex, “in what you know.”
What happens next is something I will have to live with for quite some time. Not because it disturbs me, exactly. More because I watch it happen and I feel something that I am fairly sure I should not feel, which is an extremely uncharitable sense of satisfaction.
The two men behind Peterson are simply gone. Between one blink and the next, swallowed by the shadows at the edges of the alley so completely and so silently that the only evidence they were ever there is the fact that Peterson turns around and finds himself alone.
Then Hex looks at Peterson.
And Peterson makes a sound that is not dignified, and runs.
He doesn’t get far.
I look at the alley wall. I am finding the alley wall extremely interesting. I study it with great focus for approximately forty-five seconds.
If I paid attention, I’d probably hear sounds. Noises that sound like a grown man being detached from his head. But I’m not listening, so everything is fine.
When I look back, the alley is empty.
Hex is standing in front of me. His eyes are still burning, but the terrible cold has begun to ease, the shadows settling back into ordinary shadow behaviour. He looks at me with an expression that is composed and careful, and underneath both of those things, checking.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Completely.” I look at the empty alley. “Did you…”
“Yes.”
“And the two men?”
“They’ll find their way out eventually.” A pause. “They won’t remember the alley. Or you.”
I nod. I look at the bin bag still in my hand. I walk to the dumpster and put it in with the focused energy of a person completing a task and not thinking about anything else at all.
“Hex,” I say, to the dumpster.
“Adam.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I turn around. He is still watching me with that careful expression, and I think he is waiting to see if I am frightened. If watching him be what he is, has shifted something in me the way the Wraith fight might have done.
I think about what Felix said. He’s like a bonfire in the dark. Brilliant if you need to warm yourself up.
“We should get back inside,” I say. “The afternoon rush.”
Something in Hex’s face settles. “Yes.”
We turn back towards the door to the kitchen.
The air at the far end of the alley changes.
Not the way it changes when Hex arrives, that flood of familiar crisp winter cold and shadow. Different. A compression of space, a sense of something very large and very controlled making itself present in a way that is impossible to ignore and completely impossible to miss.
I stop walking.
A figure stands at the alley entrance where Peterson stood three minutes ago.
He is tall, taller even than Hex, and still in a way that nothing ordinary is ever still, the absolute stillness of something that has decided to be visible and is doing so as a deliberate act.
He is dressed in something dark and structured that has the quality of armour without quite being armour, but is still formality weaponised.
His eyes are sapphire blue. Glowing. Not Hex’s watchful red. Brighter than that. Colder. The blue of something that has spent a very long time looking at everything and found most of it wanting.
He is looking at Hex.
Hex has gone very still beside me.
The figure at the end of the alley glances at me. Just once. Brief, assessing, taking in everything in a single look with the efficiency of someone who does not need to look twice. Then back to Hex.
“You’ve been busy,” he says. His voice is deep and carries the particular weight of someone who has not had to raise it in a very long time because things simply happen when he speaks. “The exile who refused to fade. And now this.” He glances at the empty alley. A slight pause. “Efficient.”
“Dis,” says Hex calmly.
My heart thumps against my ribcage. Dis? The Dis? Usurper and throne stealer and Hex’s mortal enemy? The shadow king that Wraith was going to bring me to?
Oh no. Oh fucking no. This can’t be good. Can’t be good at all.
“Hex,” intones Dis solemnly.
Hex grins. “How lovely to see you.”
Those cold blue eyes move over Hex with the calculating attention of someone taking inventory.
“I intended to challenge you,” Dis says. Conversational. As if they are discussing weather. “I was going to settle this.”
“And?” says Hex.
“And you were occupied.” Dis clasps his hands behind his back in a gesture that is so precisely formal it borders on the theatrical.
“It would have been dishonourable to attack during another fight. And it would be dishonourable to challenge you now, when you have spent power in a realm that extracts a cost.” A pause, precise and weighted. “I do not wish to win that way.”
The alley is very quiet.
“How do you wish to win?” Hex asks.
“When you are at full strength,” says Dis. “When you have had time to recover and the challenge is fair. When no one can whisper that my victory is undeserved.” Something moves in his expression, too controlled to name. “I have waited this long. I can afford patience.”
I look at him. He is, I realise, extraordinary in a way that is completely different from Hex, different from Night and Dark, completely different from Fiend.
There is nothing warm in him, nothing that is performing or holding back.
He is simply himself, entirely, and what he is is the most controlled and deliberate person I have ever encountered.
He glances at me again. That same brief, assessing look. And then something very small happens in his face, something I almost miss. Not warmth. Not quite. Something more like the very early edge of curiosity.
“Your human,” he says to Hex, not unkindly. “The bonded.” A pause. “Unexpected.”
“Yes,” says Hex.
Dis looks at me for one more moment. I look back. I don’t know what he sees. Whatever it is, his expression gives nothing away.
Then he inclines his head to Hex. Precisely. Formally. The gesture of someone who has a code and keeps it even when keeping it costs them something.
“Until next time,” he says.
And then he is gone, the way he appeared, without drama, without shadow theatrics. Just gone, the alley ordinary again in an instant, as if the last minute never happened.
Hex and I stand in the November cold and look at the empty alley entrance.
“That was Dis,” I say.
“Yes.”
“He’s all… honourable.”
“Yes.”
I think about that. I think about the cold blue eyes and the formal posture and that tiny flicker of something when he looked at me. I think about Fiend, passed along as a political asset to that man, that precise and ancient and deeply unreadable man.
“Hex,” I say.
“Adam.”
“When this is over. When you go back and do what you have to do.” I stop. Start again. “Is… is everything going to be okay?”
Hex is quiet for a long moment. “That,” he says carefully, “is a very complicated question.”
I look at the alley entrance one more time.
“Right,” I say. “The afternoon rush.”
We go back inside.