Chapter 23
It’s Not You, It’s Me
Night and Dark arrive on Monday evening, and the flat immediately feels different.
Not smaller, exactly. More purposeful. The way a room feels when the people in it have something important to do and are getting on with doing it.
They don’t bow this time, or rather Night inclines his head and Dark does something with his hand that might be a salute and might be something else entirely, a greeting between people who know each other well enough not to need the formality.
Hex receives it differently too. Not the princely stillness of their first visit. Something more relaxed than that, more like three people who have been through a great deal together and are about to go through more.
I make tea because it is the thing I know how to do and because my kitchen is the one part of this situation where I have any competence whatsoever.
Dark follows me in.
I am going to be entirely honest and admit that Dark following me into the kitchen requires a small adjustment period, because Dark in my kitchen is a considerable physical presence and the kitchen is not a large room.
He leans against the counter in the way that Hex leans against the counter, which is presumably a shadow being thing, and watches me fill the kettle with the amber eyes that are warm and steady and much easier to look at than I expected given how frightening he was the first time I saw him.
“You’re handling this well,” he says.
“I’m making tea,” I say. “Anyone can make tea.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I know it’s not what he meant. I busy myself with mugs. “I’m not sure I have much choice.”
“You have plenty of choice.” He crosses his arms. “You could have told him to leave days ago. Could have broken the bond. Could have decided this wasn’t worth it.”
I think about that. I think about all the mornings and all the rearranged bookshelves and the blue jumper and the family dinner and the hallway with the blown lightbulbs, but all the glass carefully swept up.
“No,” I say. “I really couldn’t have.”
Dark looks at me for a moment. Something shifts in his expression, settling into something warmer than before. “No,” he agrees. “I don’t think you could.”
We take the tea through. In the living room, Night and Hex are talking in low voices, heads close together, and there is something about the quality of their conversation that makes me slow my steps.
It’s not secretive exactly. Serious. The kind of serious that comes with genuine stakes and genuine history.
Night is talking, Hex is listening, and the easy charm has stepped aside again in favour of that older, quieter thing.
I set the mugs down and sit on the sofa and try to look like I’m not watching.
I am absolutely watching.
I notice things. Small things, the kind you file away without meaning to.
The way Hex tilts his head when Night says something he’s weighing up.
The particular set of his shoulders when he’s thinking, different from the lazy confidence he wears the rest of the time.
The sound of his voice in a language I don’t know, low and certain, nothing like the voice he uses with me, but is still entirely recognisably him.
I notice these things and I put them somewhere careful.
The preparation takes most of the evening.
I don’t understand any of it. There are conversations in a language I don’t know, and at one point all three of them do something together that makes the shadows in the room move in ways shadows are not supposed to, and the temperature fluctuates in a way that has nothing to do with the radiator.
I sit on the sofa with my tea and my book that I haven’t read a single word of and try to be useful by staying out of the way.
At some point, I take the ring out of my pocket.
I don’t decide to. The metal is warm from being carried all day, and I’m just turning it over in my fingers the way I’ve taken to doing when I’m thinking about something I’m not ready to think about directly, I do it without really noticing I’m doing it.
Night notices.
He goes very still in the middle of whatever he was saying. Not dramatically. Just a pause, a fraction of a second, the way someone pauses when they see something they weren’t expecting. His emerald eyes drop to my hand, to the ring, and then move immediately to Hex.
Hex doesn’t look up. He is looking at something Night brought with him, a piece of something dark and flat that might be a map or might be something else entirely, and his expression doesn’t change at all.
But he knows. I’m certain he knows without looking up that Night had seen it.
Dark has gone still too, across the room, with a different quality of stillness from his brother.
Where Night went quiet, Dark’s stillness has a weight to it, something that sits in the room without announcing itself.
He looks at the ring in my hand and then at Hex and then at Night, and something passes between the brothers in the way things pass between people who have known each other long enough not to need words for it.
I look at the ring. I look at Hex. He is still looking at the map or whatever it is, entirely absorbed, and he does not look at me.
“What?” I ask.
Night looks at me. The severity is very present tonight, the comfortable warmth of his earlier visit tucked away in favour of something more measured. He looks at me for a moment in silence.
“Nothing,” he says, and then, after a pause that turns the word into something more than nothing. “It simply confirms.”
I wait for more. More does not come.
I look at Dark. Dark is looking at the middle distance with the expression of a man who has opinions and has decided not to share them, which on Dark is an extremely loud way of saying something without saying it.
“Confirms what?” I ask.
“It’s not my place to say,” says Night, in a tone that suggests this is both accurate and a significant understatement, and he is not going to elaborate further.
I look at Hex. Hex studiously looks at the map-thing.
I put the ring back in my pocket. I pick up my book. I look at the words on the page without reading them.
On the other side of the room, Hex and Night resume their conversation, and Dark goes back to whatever Dark was doing. The shadows settle. The temperature stabilises. Everything is perfectly ordinary and nothing has been said, and I am going to sit here and not think about it.
I don’t think about it for approximately four minutes.
Then I look at Hex again. He is talking to Dark now, and Dark is listening with the focused attention people bring to serious things, and Hex is gesturing at something on the maybe-map and his expression is intent and certain and completely in command of himself.
He looks like a prince going home. He looks like exactly what he is.
A week. Maybe less.
Around nine o’clock, Dark moves with the unhurried ease of someone with no particular relationship to normal human tiredness, and announces that he has to return to the Realm.
Night stands without comment, gathering whatever it is that Night carries with him, which seems to be mostly an air of quiet authority and a quality of attention that notices everything.
At the edge of the thick shadows in the corner of the room, Dark pauses and looks at me.
“I am honoured to have met you,” he says.
“Me?” I say.
“Yes.” He says it simply, not elaborating, and gives me one of those looks that manages to communicate a great deal without saying anything specific.
Night, at the threshold, glances back. His green eyes find mine and hold for a moment, and whatever is in that look is complicated and old and not unkind.
“You’re stronger than you know,” he says.
And then they’re gone, the flat settling back into its ordinary self around their absence.
I sit on the sofa. Hex stands in the middle of the room, looking at the space where Night and Dark were. A few seconds pass. Bristol does its quiet Bristol thing outside the window.
“A week,” I say.
“Yes.” He turns to look at me. “Maybe less.”
I nod. I have the ring in my pocket and my book on my knee and the mugs on the shelf in the wrong order, and all the things I’m not saying out loud, arranged very carefully in the box where I keep them.
“Right,” I say. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Hex crosses the room and sits beside me on the sofa, close enough that I can feel the familiar winter chill of him, and when I move to get up, his hand catches mine.
“In a minute,” he says quietly.
I settle back down.
The candle burns on the coffee table, and outside a fox takes its chances with the Bristol night, and somewhere in the Shadow Realm, things are moving into position for something that is coming whether either of us is ready for it or not.
His thumb moves over my knuckles, back and forth, a slow, steady rhythm. A gentle touch. Grounding and bittersweet. A confirmation that we are both still here. For now.
He’s not going to say anything. I’m not going to say anything. There is nothing to say.
I turn my hand over and hold on.
It’s the only thing I can do.