Chapter 25
Not Missing You
The flat is very quiet.
I knew it would be. I prepared for it, in the way you prepare for things you know are coming and still aren’t ready for when they arrive.
I told myself it would be fine. I told myself I liked having the flat to myself.
I told myself that before Hex arrived, I was perfectly content with the silence and I would be perfectly content with it again.
I lied to myself quite comprehensively, as it turns out.
It’s been three days, and every day the quiet is getting louder. And nothing is like how it was before Hex arrived.
The mugs are in their descending row. The spice rack has been reorganised for the last time. The books are alphabetical. The crystals face whatever direction Hex decided was correct, and I will never know his reasoning, and I am not going to move them to find out.
I sigh heavily and drag myself to the kitchen. I make one cup of tea instead of two, and the single mug sitting on the counter is the loneliest thing I have ever seen.
I drink it standing up because sitting at the table feels wrong.
Too much empty space where the other chair is.
I had considered moving the chair back to where it used to be, before Hex repositioned it to the slightly different angle he preferred, but I haven’t.
I don’t know when I’m going to. It’s possible I’m going to leave it at that slightly different angle indefinitely, which is not something I’m going to examine too closely.
Something else I’m not going to examine, is how I’ve been making mental notes to tell him things.
Small things. The man who came in and ordered a coffee and then spent twenty minutes explaining to me why he didn’t actually like coffee.
The pigeon that has developed an interest in my windowsill crystals and visits every morning now, which Hex would have found extremely funny in a way he would have expressed as withering commentary.
The seasonal menu at Coffeelicious has a new addition, something called a Midnight Spice Latte that is absolutely a marketing attempt to capitalise on the fact that apparently Bristol has a reputation for supernatural activity now, and I cannot tell anyone why that is darkly hilarious.
I can’t tell Hex any of it. Because he is not here. He’s gone and I’m never going to see him again.
The doorbell buzzes. Loud and jarring. Jolting me from my thoughts.
I glance down and realise I’m holding a half-empty cup of tea that’s gone cold. I tip it down the sink and answer the door.
It’s Felix
He didn’t tell me he was coming. But I’m not surprised that he has just appeared at my door at seven in the evening with his bag and an expression that says he has made a decision. And before I can say anything, he is inside and putting the kettle on.
“I was fine on my own,” I say.
“No you weren’t,” he says.
“I wasn’t about to fall apart.”
“Yes you were.” He opens the cupboard and takes out two mugs without hesitation, and it takes me a moment to realise that he’s reaching for the right ones without looking, because he knows which mugs I use, because he knows me. “Sit down.”
I sit down.
Felix makes the tea with the focused efficiency he brings to everything, and sets a mug in front of me and sits across the table in Hex’s spot, and looks at me with those sharp dark eyes that have never once in our entire friendship let me get away with anything.
“How bad?” he says.
“It’s fine.”
“Adam.”
I look at the mug. “It’s fine,” I say again, which is true in all the ways that matter practically and completely untrue in every other sense. “I knew what it was going to be. He had to go. He had a whole realm to reclaim. That’s not… I’m not going to be pathetic about it.”
“Grieving somebody isn’t pathetic.”
“I’m not grieving. He’s not dead.”
“No,” Felix says. “He’s just somewhere you can’t reach him.” A pause. “That’s pretty much the same thing.”
I drink my tea. The flat is considerably less quiet with Felix in it, not because Felix is loud but because Felix is present in a way that takes up space without trying to. The kettle is still warm. There are two mugs on the table.
It’s not the same. It’s not nothing either.
“The coven,” I say, because talking about something else is a very effective strategy. “How was it?”
Felix wraps both hands around his mug. “Useful,” he says.
“Morgana has some interesting texts. There is a significant amount of lore on summoning and binding. There are things I want to look into when I have more time.” He says it with the particular neutrality that means he has done a great deal of looking into already and is not going to tell me the details until he is ready.
I think about the things he has mentioned.
The very considered, extremely deliberate thing he hinted he was going to do.
I think about Felix cross-legged on a coven floor surrounded by texts about the Shadow Realm and beings that burn down buildings, and I decide, not for the first time, that my strange goth colleague is considerably more formidable than he appears.
“Felix,” I say.
“Adam,” he says back, in exactly the same tone, which means he knows what I’m about to say and is not going to discuss it.
I let it go.
We eat the pasta I make because it is the easiest thing, and because routine is useful.
And then Felix does the washing up, which is its own form of kindness.
We watch something on television that neither of us is paying attention to.
Felix falls asleep on the sofa around ten with his eyeliner slightly smudged, and I put the spare blanket over him and turn the television off.
I go to bed.
The bed is very large and very quiet, and Hex’s side still smells faintly of something dark and cold and particular to him that has no name in any human language.
I have not changed the sheets. I am aware that this is not entirely healthy behaviour, both mentally and hygienically, and I am choosing not to care.
I lie in the dark and look at the ceiling. The crack is still there, the one that looks like a rabbit if you squint, unchanged by any of it.
I’ve taken to keeping the ring on the bedside table at night now, close enough to pick up in the dark. I close my hand around it. It’s warm. It’s always warm, which shouldn’t be possible for a piece of metal sitting in a cold room, but it is, and I’ve stopped questioning it.
I think about what Night said. You’re stronger than you know.
I think about what Fiend said. The things you need are closer than they appear.
I think about what Hex said, in the kitchen at four in the morning with the Bristol foxes screaming outside and the tea cooling between us. There are things I am not ready to leave.
I turn the ring over in my fingers in the dark. Round and round, the metal smooth and warm and entirely itself.
In the Shadow Realm, somewhere I cannot reach and cannot imagine, Hex is doing what he went back to do.
Taking back what was taken from him. Fighting a war.
And I am here in my uncle’s flat in Bristol with the alphabetised books and the wrongly ordered mugs and the crystals facing the right direction and a chair at a slightly different angle.
I am here, and he is there, and the bond is a thread stretched thin across whatever distance separates our realms, and I can feel it if I concentrate, a faint warmth at the edge of my awareness, steady and present.
He’s there. He’s not gone.
I hold the ring and breathe and wait for sleep to come.
In the morning, Felix will make toast badly and I will fix it and we will not talk about the things we are not talking about and I will go to work and come home and the flat will be quiet and the armchair will be empty and all of it will be exactly as fine as it needs to be.
I can do this.
I turn the ring one more time and set it back on the nightstand and close my eyes.
I can do this.