Chapter 28
Honey, I’m Home
Felix is awake when I come out of the bedroom.
He is sitting cross-legged on the sofa with his blanket around his shoulders and his earrings catching the candlelight, and an expression that says he felt something through whatever witch-sense he has, and it woke him up and he has been sitting here waiting for me to emerge and explain myself.
I walk to the kitchen and put the kettle on.
“Adam,” he calls after me.
“Tea first,” I say.
“Adam.”
“Felix, I have just walked through another dimension and kissed a shadow prince back to life, so I need a moment and a hot drink before I do anything else.”
A pause. “Fair enough,” says Felix.
I make the tea. I bring it through. I sit on the sofa next to Felix and pull half the blanket over myself, and we sit in the dark of the living room with our mugs and the candle guttering on the coffee table, and I tell him everything.
Felix listens with the focused attention of someone filing every detail. When I finish, he is quiet for a moment.
“You kept your eyes closed,” he says. “The whole time.”
“Fiend said to.”
“And you just did it. Walked blind through the Shadow Realm.”
“Yes.”
He looks at me. Something in his expression does a complicated thing that Felix very rarely lets his expressions do, something warm and fierce and proud all at once. Then he picks up his tea and drinks it and says nothing else, because Felix knows when words are not the point.
We sit.
The bond is different now. Fuller, stronger, the thread that was stretched thin and fraying is now solid and present in a way that makes me feel like I can breathe properly for the first time since he left.
But the bond is not motionless. It is moving, pulsing with something that I don’t entirely have a framework for, sensations coming through it in waves that are not quite emotions and not quite physical but somewhere in between.
I set my mug down.
“Something’s happening,” I say.
Felix goes very still. “What kind of something?”
“I don’t know exactly.” I press my hand to my chest instinctively, as if physical touch will help me read the bond. “It’s moving. Fast. There’s something like…” I stop, trying to find words for things that don’t have words. “Urgency. Purpose. It feels like running towards something.”
“The fight,” says Felix, and his voice has gone flat and intent and rather bloodthirsty. “It’s resumed.”
I grip my mug. “Yes.”
Felix sits forward. “Is he winning?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell. I can feel him, but I can’t...
“Is he going to rip Dis apart?” Felix’s eyes are bright.
“Because that absolute bastard burned my flat down. All my stuff. My vintage clothes. My early nineties emo record collection, Adam. Decades of carefully curated vinyl. Gone.” He says the last word with a quiet devastation that is somehow more alarming than shouting would be.
“I want Hex to destroy him. I want there to be nothing left.”
I look at him. “Felix.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are. That’s what concerns me.”
“He tried to kill me,” Felix says, very matter-of-factly. “His orders caused me to be used as bait to get Hex out of the flat so Wraith could take you. He burned my home down. He destroyed my record collection.” A pause. “If Hex doesn’t finish it, I will.”
I think about Dis in the alley. The sapphire-blue eyes and the formal posture, and the ancient, controlled weight of him. The way he spoke to Hex as if he had endless patience because his victory was so certain. I think about Hex and how I found him. All small and diminished.
“Felix,” I say carefully. “Dis is currently the king of the Shadow Realm. He is ancient and enormously powerful and genuinely frightening even to other shadow beings. And you are…”
“Don’t say it.”
“Four foot eleven.”
“I said don’t say it.”
“And a witch, yes, but still a human witch, and I say this with enormous affection and complete confidence in your abilities, but...”
“Adam.” Felix’s voice is very calm. “I have been doing research. I have texts from Morgana’s collection that most people don’t even know exist. I have plans.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “He burned my record collection.”
I open my mouth. Close it. There is genuinely nothing useful to say to this, I know Felix well enough to know that when he gets that particular look there is no talking him out of anything, and also I have a feeling that whatever Felix is planning is going to be extremely significant and possibly more effective than any of my objections and the best thing I can do is stay out of the way and maybe keep the kettle on.
“Right,” I say.
“Good.”
We drink our tea.
The bond shifts again. A wave of something that is not quite pain and not quite exhilaration but somewhere between both, the feeling of something enormous and difficult being done, of power expenditure on a scale I can’t quite fathom, and underneath it all a clarity that is entirely Hex, that particular quality of controlled purpose that I know the way I know my own heartbeat now.
I breathe through it.
“Well?” says Felix.
“Still fighting,” I say. “But he’s… he feels like himself. Fully himself.”
Felix’s jaw sets. “Good.”
Time passes in the particular way it passes when you’re waiting for something you can’t influence and can barely track.
Felix makes more tea at some point. I lose track of how many mugs we go through.
The candle burns down. Bristol goes through its quiet dark hours outside the window, indifferent as always.
Getting ready for morning as if it’s just going to be another day.
Then something changes.
It is not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself.
It is simply that the quality of the bond shifts, between one breath and the next, from the urgency and the movement and the controlled expenditure of power to something else entirely.
Something that settles. Something that is, underneath everything else, satisfied.
I sit very still.
“Adam,” says Felix quietly.
“Yes,” I say. “I think…” My throat closes up completely and unexpectedly and I have to stop and start again. “I think it’s over.”
Felix exhales. Long and slow and very controlled, the breath of someone who has been holding themselves together for quite some time and is choosing to continue doing so. He sets his mug down. He looks at the window.
“Good,” he says, for the third time, and this time it means something completely different from the other two.
We wait.
I don’t know what I expect exactly. The shadows to move. The temperature to drop. The particular quality of presence that means Hex is making himself known in a room. Some kind of dramatic announcement of return.
What happens is a knock on the front door.
Three times. Unhurried. Entirely ordinary.
I look at Felix. Felix looks at me.
I get up and answer it.
Hex is standing in the hallway of my uncle’s Bristol flat, looking like someone who has just fought a war.
Which is totally fair, because he has. There is a quality of recent violence around him, and he is less solid than usual, slightly translucent at the edges.
His shadowy shirt, which I can just about make out under all his shadows, is ripped.
His hair is a little dishevelled. His eyes are burning very red and very steady.
He is holding something.
Dangling it casually by his side as if it’s of little importance. The way a normal person would carry a water bottle.
It is a crown. Not a decorative thing. An actual crown, gold and heavy and dark and old, the kind of object that has weight beyond its physical weight, that carries centuries of significance in every line of it.
He is holding it the way you hold something you just happen to have brought with you.
He looks at me.
“Hello, My Love,” he says.
“Hello, Hex,” I say.
We stand there for a moment.
From behind me, the sofa creaks. The sound of Felix standing up with great purpose.
“That,” says Felix, “is absolutely my cue to leave. I am so not being the third wheel again. Ever.”
I hear him grab his bag. I hear the particular swift, purposeful quality of Felix in motion, the sound of someone who has made a decision and is executing it immediately.
He shoulders past Hex in the doorway without breaking stride, four foot eleven of absolute certainty making a shadow prince step aside without question, and then he is gone down the hallway, footsteps quick and fading, and the front door closes behind him with a click that leaves everything very quiet.
Hex looks at the empty hallway. Then back at me.
I step back. He comes in.
I look at him. He looks at me. His eyes are very red and very steady and entirely certain.
Outside, Bristol carries on.
I close the front door.