Chapter 26
Follow Your Heart
Idon’t know what wakes me.
Not a sound. Not the fox outside, not Felix shifting on the sofa, not Bristol doing any of its ordinary Bristol nighttime things. Just a sudden sharp awareness of being awake, sitting up in the dark with my heart already going too fast before I’ve fully worked out why.
Then the pain hits.
It is not gradual. It does not build. It arrives all at once, a vicious twisting agony somewhere in my abdomen, and I double over with a sound I am not going to describe because it is not dignified and I have some standards left.
I am dying. Obviously. I am twenty-six years old and I am having some kind of catastrophic internal event and Felix is asleep on my sofa and I need to call an ambulance and I cannot currently straighten up enough to reach my phone, and I don’t have enough breath to shout for help.
I breathe through it. In and out. The way you breathe through something when you have no other options.
The pain doesn’t ease exactly. But in the breathing, in the forced stillness of trying to get through it, something shifts.
A quality to it I hadn’t noticed in the first shrieking panic of it.
It is pain, yes, absolutely pain, genuinely impressive pain that I would like to never experience again. But it doesn’t feel like mine.
I know my body. I know the particular landscape of my own aches and ailments and the occasional dramatic overreaction of my lower back after a long shift, as well as the way my guts cramp when I’ve had too much dairy.
This doesn’t feel like any of those things.
This feels like something coming from somewhere else, transmitted through a channel that isn’t quite physical, arriving via a route that bypasses the normal business of nerves and tissue and goes somewhere deeper.
The bond.
The realisation doesn’t arrive gently.
“No,” I say out loud to the dark bedroom. “No, no, no…”
I lunge for the ring on the nightstand. I hold it in both hands and I concentrate, the way I’ve learnt to concentrate on the thread of the bond when I want to feel whether it’s still there. I reach for it.
It’s there. It’s still there. But it’s wrong, fraying at the edges, pulsing with something that is not the steady warm presence I’ve been checking every night since he left.
It’s desperate. It’s flagging. It is the thread pulled taut to the very edge of what a thread can bear and starting, very slowly, to fray.
He’s hurt. He’s badly hurt, and somewhere in a realm I cannot reach he is running out of what he needs to survive and I am sitting here in my uncle’s flat in Bristol completely and utterly useless and I cannot do anything, I cannot do a single thing, there is nothing I can…
“You’re catastrophising,” says a voice from the corner of my bedroom. “Quite impressively.”
I spin around.
Fiend is sitting on my desk chair, which he has turned around so he is straddling it backwards, his arms folded across the top of it, his extraordinary face propped on his forearms, waist-length black hair tumbling all the way down to the seat.
He looks like someone who has been there for a while and has been waiting with great patience for the screaming to stop.
He also looks, at close range in my bedroom, at what must be two in the morning, even more unreasonably beautiful than I remembered. This seems deeply unfair under the circumstances.
“How long have you been sitting there?” I demand.
“A few minutes.” He tilts his head. “You were processing. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“You didn’t want to interrupt my panic attack?”
“It was very expressive. Very succulent. It would have been a tragedy to waste all that nourishment.”
I blink rapidly in the dark as I frantically try to get my mind to abort its attempt at processing. I don’t want to know. I really don’t. I already feel several kinds of violated, I really don’t need anymore.
Fiend unfolds himself from the chair with the fluid, boneless grace he brings to all movement, and stands, looking at me with those purple eyes that are bright and steady and missing absolutely nothing.
“He’s hurt,” he says, and the lightness is still in his voice, but there is something under it now, the same thing I saw when he told Hex to take care of himself. Something old and tired and genuinely concerned. “The fight did not go as planned.”
“I know he’s hurt,” I snap. “I can feel it. The bond…”
“Yes.” Fiend looks at the ring in my hands. Then at me. “You can help him.”
I stare at him. “I’m a barista from Bristol.”
“You’re considerably more than that, and you know it.” He sounds almost impatient, which on Fiend is extraordinary because Fiend in my living room was all theatrical languor. This Fiend is something slightly different. More direct. More urgent. “The ring. It isn’t just a ring.”
“I know that,” I say. “But I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s a door,” he says simply. “He gave you a door. To him. To where he is.” He pauses, and those purple eyes hold mine with a seriousness that is completely at odds with his usual performance. “You can cross over. Find him. Give him what he needs.”
The room is very quiet.
“What does he need?” I ask, even though some part of me already knows.
“You,” says Fiend, and he says it simply and directly, like the most obvious thing in any realm.
“He needs you. The bond. What’s in it.” He gestures vaguely in a way that somehow communicates love and power and connection simultaneously.
“What has always been in it, since the beginning. He needs the strength you give him.”
I look at the ring. The small gold ring, warm in my hands, that has been on my nightstand and in my pocket and at the centre of things I didn’t understand for this entire story.
“Is it safe for a human to cross over to the Shadow Realm?” I say.
“Not at all.” He examines his nails. “But you’ll survive. Mostly.”
“Mostly.”
“You’ll be fine,” he says, in the tone of someone who is approximately ninety per cent certain of this and has decided the remaining ten per cent is not helpful information. “The ring will bring you back. It’s designed to. It knows you’re human. It knows where you belong.” He pauses. “Probably.”
“Probably,” I repeat.
“The important thing,” he says, ignoring this, “is to keep your eyes closed. Whatever happens. Whatever you hear or feel, or think you sense. Do not open your eyes. The Shadow Realm is not built for human eyes, and if you open them you will see things you cannot process, and it will go very badly.”
“Define very badly.”
He gives me a look that declines to define very badly.
“Follow your heart,” he says, and he says it like it is a precise instruction rather than a sentiment, like there is an actual navigational mechanism in my chest that will take me where I need to go if I trust it. “It will lead you to him. It has always led you to him. You know that.”
I think about walking home faster than usual because something was paying attention to Bristol.
I think about the hallway and Wraith and the bond calling Hex across a city in the dark.
I think about the kitchen at four in the morning and a ring on a table that neither of us looked at directly.
But most of all, I think about Hex. My Hex.
The shadow that lurked under my bed as a child, and who now resides in my heart.
The man who has always been there, always a part of my life in one way or another.
“Follow my heart, and then?” I say.
“And then you find him and you give him everything you have.” He tilts his head, that extraordinary face very still. “And the ring brings you home.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“That sounds very simple.”
“Most true things are,” says Fiend, which is the most genuinely wise thing I have ever heard him say and lands completely differently from everything else he has said tonight.
He looks at me. I look at him. The purple eyes are very bright and very serious, and there is something in them that is, underneath everything, rooting for me.
“You have the power to save us all, Barista Adam of Bristol.” His voice is like a whisper, and a plea.
I swallow tightly. This isn’t just about Hex. This is about kingdoms and realms and people on thrones who shouldn’t be. It’s about people being forced to marry creatures like Dis.
“You can save us, if you are brave enough,” he says quietly.
I look at the ring in my hands.
I think about Hex in the kitchen saying you know what I’m saying and me saying I want to hear you say it and him saying you, only you.
I think about a thread stretched thin across realms, fraying, flagging, holding on.
I put the ring on.