Chapter 27
Love Conquers All
The ring slides onto my finger.
The world ends.
Not dramatically. Not with fire or sound or any of the things you might expect. Just a sudden absolute wrongness, a sensation like stepping off a kerb you didn’t know was there, and then the bedroom is gone and there is nothing where it used to be except a sensation of darkness.
I keep my eyes closed.
This is the most important thing. Fiend said it, and I heard him and I am keeping my eyes closed.
Whatever is here, whatever the Shadow Realm is made of, I am not going to look at it.
I am going to stand in it blind and trust the thing in my chest that has been pointing towards Hex since the night he first appeared in my bedroom.
The cold arrives next. Not Hex’s cold, not that particular winter clarity I’ve spent weeks learning to find reassuring.
This is something older and deeper, the cold of a place that has never been warm and doesn’t understand the concept.
It goes straight through my skin as if I’m not there at all and settles somewhere in my chest and stays.
The ground under my feet is wrong. Not unstable exactly, but uncertain.
The gravity is slightly off, pulling from an angle that isn’t quite down, as if the Shadow Realm has strong opinions about which direction things should fall and those opinions don’t entirely align with mine. I plant my feet carefully and breathe.
In. Out.
I follow my heart.
That is not a metaphor. Or rather it is, but it’s also a literal navigational fact, because there is a direction in my chest that is not north or south or any compass point with a name, and it is pulling me forward with the gentle insistence of something that knows exactly where it’s going even if I don’t.
The bond. Stretched thin, flagging, but still there. Still holding.
I follow it.
The air around me is thick with something that isn’t quite mist and isn’t quite smoke.
I can feel it moving against my skin when I walk, the particular sensation of passing through something that doesn’t want to be passed through.
It smells of nothing. The complete and total absence of smell, which is somehow worse than any smell there could have been.
Then the whispering starts.
Not words, at first. Just sound. The suggestion of voices at the very edge of audibility, layered over each other in frequencies that don’t quite resolve into anything I can interpret.
But they know I’m there. I can feel that.
The whispering has a quality of attention to it, a turning towards, the way a room changes when everyone in it looks at the same thing at once.
I keep walking. Eyes closed. Following the thread.
The whispers get louder.
Words, now. Or things shaped like words, pressing against the edge of meaning without quite breaking through.
Turn back. Turn back. Turn back. Not threatening exactly.
More like a recording of a warning, played on a loop by something that doesn’t understand what warnings are for, only that they are supposed to stop things from continuing.
I continue.
The ground dips unexpectedly and I stumble, catching myself, arms out in the dark, and for one terrible instant, the instinct to open my eyes and see what I’m about to fall into is overwhelming. I breathe through it. I think about Hex running out of time.
I keep going.
The voices multiply. Not Turn back anymore. Something more personal now, as if the realm has taken a closer look at me and decided to be specific. He doesn’t need you. You’re just a human. You don’t belong here. You can’t save him. You’re too small. Too ordinary. Too late.
None of it is wrong, exactly. I am just a human. I am quite ordinary. I might be too late.
None of it is enough to stop me.
Something touches my arm.
I make a sound. I will not pretend otherwise. I make a sound and I stop walking, and every instinct I have fires simultaneously, the overwhelming primal certainty that there is something right next to me that I cannot see and I need to see it right now.
I do not open my eyes.
I stand very still in the cold dark with whatever it is at my arm and I think about Felix asleep on my sofa.
I think about Fiend perched on the desk chair with that look underneath the theatrics, that desperate pleading look that he was far too proud to voice.
I think about Night saying you’re stronger than you know.
Then I think about Hex in the kitchen at four in the morning saying I’m not ready to leave.
I take a step forward.
The thing at my arm tightens. Not violently. More like a question. A test. Something checking whether I’m going to make this easy or difficult.
I am going to make this extremely difficult.
I walk.
The grip intensifies. Something else joins it, at my other arm, at my shoulder, the cold of them completely different from the ambient cold of the realm, specific and intentional and pressing into me from all sides now, and the voices are very loud, a wall of sound that has given up on words entirely and is just noise, layered and pressing and trying to fill up all the space in my head where determination lives.
I walk and I do not open my eyes and I follow the thread in my chest that is pulling me forward and I think about nothing except the next step and the one after that and the warmth of the ring on my finger that should not be warm in this cold and is.
And then the hands let go.
All at once. Like a decision made collectively. The voices drop away. The cold remains, the ever-present bone-deep cold of this place, but the pressure of being pushed against recedes completely. Silence.
I stop walking.
The thread in my chest is not pointing forward anymore. It is pointing down.
I open my senses rather than my eyes. I lower myself carefully to whatever passes for ground here and reach out with my hands in the dark.
I find him.
He is very small.
That is the first thing and it is the worst thing.
Hex, who fills rooms, who takes up space in dimensions that aren’t even his, who stands in doorways and makes them look like they were built for exactly him.
Small. Curled in on himself, folded down to something that barely seems to take up any space at all.
I run my hands over him carefully, learning him by touch, and I can feel how diminished he is, the wrongness of him being this contained, this still.
“Hex.” My voice sounds strange in this place. Absorbed immediately, given back nothing. “I’m here.”
No response.
The bond pulses. Weak, unsteady, the thread fraying worse up close than it felt from the human realm. But it’s there. He’s there.
I find his face with my hands. I lean forward. I keep my eyes closed.
I kiss him.
It is not like any kiss we have had before.
Not the devastating composure of the early days, nor the quiet tenderness of the kitchen, nor any of the passionate things that came after.
This is different. This is deliberate. I pour everything I have into it, everything I am, every morning and every rearranged bookshelf and every cup of tea and every night lying awake listening to Bristol and feeling the thread of him in the dark.
The fear in the hallway as he fought Wraith.
The pride watching him receive Night and Dark’s bow.
The mugs in their wrong order that I have not moved and am never going to move. All of it. Everything.
The cold surrounding us changes.
Hex shifts under my hands. Something in him responds, reaching back for what I’m giving in the way a person reaches for warmth when they have been cold for too long, automatic and desperate and entirely without pretence.
The bond flares between us, suddenly fierce and solid where it was fraying, and I feel the power of it moving, flowing from me to him through the place where our mouths meet.
He grows.
Not quickly. Gradually, under my hands, he becomes more.
The smallness of him expands, the wrongness of him being this diminished, correcting itself degree by degree as he takes in what I’m giving him.
His hands find me. They are cold and not quite solid, but they find me with the certainty of someone who knows exactly what they are reaching for.
He pulls back first.
“Adam.” His voice is rough and strange in this place, but it is his voice and it is saying my name and I press my forehead to his and breathe. “My love. How…”
“Fiend,” I say simply.
A pause. “Of course.” Something that might be a laugh in better circumstances. “My love.” The words land the way they always land, like he means them more than he has words for. “You should not be here.”
“No,” I agree. “But I am.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“The entities…”
“I kept my eyes closed,” I say. “Fiend told me.”
His hands tighten on me, just briefly, with the ferocity I recognise from the hallway with the blown lightbulbs. “You walked through this realm blind.”
“Yes.”
“For me.”
“Yes.”
He is quiet for a moment. I can feel him, so much more present than he was a minute ago, the power of him rebuilding itself around the edges, the shadow prince reassembling from the inside out. Not fully. Not yet. But enough.
“You need to go back,” he says.
“I know.”
“The ring will take you. Just take it off and think of home.”
I don’t move immediately. I stay with my forehead against his for a moment longer, in the cold dark of a realm that tried to stop me and failed, and I hold on to him.
“Win,” I say.
“I intend to.”
“And then come home.”
He’s quiet for just a moment. “Yes,” he says softly. “And then I’ll come home.”
I pull back. I find his hand in the dark and hold it for one more second, his cold fingers in mine, and then I let go.
I take the ring off.
I think of home.
The cold disappears. The dark disappears.
The wrongness and the mist and the gravity that pulls from the wrong direction all disappear at once and I am sitting on my bedroom floor in the normal-dark with the ring in my hand and my heart going very fast and Bristol doing its quiet ordinary Bristol thing outside the window.
I sit there for a long moment.
Then I get up, put the ring on the nightstand, and go to make tea. Because he’s not gone. He’s there, and he’s stronger and he knows I’m waiting and that is going to have to be enough for tonight.
It’s enough.