Chapter 30
Happily Ever After
The kitchen window is open, and Bristol is doing something with the evening light that it only does in summer, that particular gold that makes even the ordinary terraces look like somewhere worth being.
The garden smells of whatever Hex has decided to grow in it, which is apparently everything, because Hex’s approach to the garden is the same as his approach to the flat in that he has very strong opinions and acts on them immediately and the results are, infuriatingly, excellent.
Felix is on his second glass of wine and has reached the stage of the evening where he stops performing contentment and just has it, which is always the best version of Felix.
He is sitting across the table with his rings on and his eyeliner perfect and his feet tucked up under him on the chair in a way that means he is comfortable and not going anywhere for a while yet, which is exactly right.
Hex is sitting next to me, which still strikes me sometimes as an extraordinary sentence. Hex, sitting next to me, in a house in Clifton, in the particular gold of a Bristol summer evening.
He has a glass of wine that he doesn’t drink because he doesn’t need to, but he holds it in the way he has learned to hold things in the human realm, with the easy familiarity of someone who has been here long enough to understand the texture of it.
He is telling Felix something that happened in the Shadow Realm last week, something involving a minor territorial dispute and Night’s response to it, which apparently involved a look of such devastating composure that the disputing parties simply stopped arguing and went home.
Felix is laughing. It’s a real laugh, the kind he doesn’t produce for just anyone.
“He just looked at them,” Hex says, and there is warmth in his voice that is always there when he talks about Night, the particular warmth of someone who made the right choice and knows it.
“Night could end wars with a raised eyebrow,” Felix says.
“He nearly did, last month.”
“Tell me everything.”
I lean back in my chair and let the conversation ebb and flow and wash over me.
The food is long finished and the wine is good and the evening is soft and warm.
And now Felix is telling stories about the coffee shop that still make me laugh even though I’ve heard them before and was there for most of the encounters.
Hex looks baffled by the specific nuances of human behaviour that Felix is describing, and that just adds to the hilarity.
We talk about the woman who came into the shop last Tuesday and spent twenty minutes explaining to Felix that coffee was bad for him, which Felix handled with a restraint I find genuinely impressive.
Felix pauses in his retelling. His dark eyes fix on me. “I deserve a raise for that, Boss.”
I chuckle as I sip my wine. “Yes, I guess you do.” Because he does.
He purses his lips for a moment and then waves his hand airily. “Actually, just take it off my rent.”
“Fine,” I agree.
We both know that him living in the flat above the coffee shop is perfect for everyone. He gets a home. I get someone keeping an eye on my business at all hours. Rent money is just a formality.
The conversation drifts on. We talk about the garden and the cornicing in the front room that turns out to be original Georgian and that Hex has feelings about, which is a sentence I never expected to be ordinary and is.
It is all very ordinary. That is the best thing about it.
An ordinary dinner with a witch and a former shadow prince, in our house in Clifton.
My mother came to see it in March. She stood in the hallway with an expression I recognised from the night Hex turned up to the family dinner in someone else’s body and comprehensively dismantled her entire opinion about my worth. It was the expression of a woman recalibrating.
She said it was very nice.
High praise.
James, apparently, is still trying to find the private island golf course in Reykjavik. I’m told he’s written several emails. I find this privately hilarious every single day.
My uncle’s flat is his again now. I went back once, to collect the last few things, and stood in the kitchen for a moment looking at the shelf where the mugs used to be in their descending row.
My uncle’s mugs are there now. The crystals are gone.
The spice rack is not organised by frequency of use.
I closed the door and didn’t look back.
Around ten, Felix uncurls from the chair with the efficient grace of someone who knows when an evening is complete.
“Right,” he says. “I should go.”
“I’ll walk you,” says Hex.
Felix looks at him. Something moves in those sharp dark eyes. “Fine. But I have conditions.”
Hex looks interested in the way he always looks interested when Felix has conditions, which is the look of someone who has learned that Felix’s conditions are usually thinly veiled chaos. “Go on.”
“If we pass anyone on the way back who deserves it,” Felix says, “I want you to let yourself be seen. Properly seen. None of this subtle cold-in-the-air business. Full red eyes, shadow tentacles, the works.”
Hex is quiet for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth moves. “Define deserves it.”
“Anyone who’s unpleasant in public after ten o’clock on a weeknight,” says Felix, immediately and with great precision, which suggests this definition has been considered for some time. “Littering counts. Aggressive cycling counts. That man who always shouts at the bus counts, you’ve seen him.”
“I have seen him,” Hex agrees.
“I just think,” Felix says, with perfect reasonableness, “that watching people scream and piss themselves never gets old. And I’ve had a long week.”
Hex looks at me.
I look at Hex.
“Don’t,” I say.
Hex grins. It is the full grin, the one that has too many teeth and that I have completely given up trying to find alarming. “It is extremely funny,” he says.
“It’s really not...”
“It absolutely is,” says Felix.
They look at each other with the specific understanding of two beings who have agreed on something and are not going to be talked out of it.
I am not going to be able to stop this. I have not been able to stop things like this for approximately six months and I have made a certain peace with it, which is its own kind of growth.
“Fine,” I say. “Go terrorise Bristol.”
Felix gives me the brief, businesslike shoulder pat that is his version of everything words can’t carry, and which I have come to understand means more than most people’s speeches. I pat him back. He picks up his jacket.
Hex pauses at the door and looks at me, and it is only a moment, only a second of those red eyes steady on mine, but the look contains everything it always contains, and I don’t need it to be any longer.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
They leave. The front door closes. Through the open kitchen window I hear them on the front path, and then the gate, and then the sound of a Bristol summer night swallowing them up, and then nothing.
I clear the table. I load the dishwasher with the focused efficiency of someone who has been doing this long enough that it doesn’t require thought, the glasses and the plates and the good cutlery that Hex chose because Hex has opinions about cutlery that I chose not to argue with.
I wipe down the counter. I turn off the kitchen light.
I go through the house, turning off lights.
The front room with its Georgian cornicing and the lamp that Hex moved three weeks ago, and that I have decided is better where he put it.
The hallway with the print Felix gave us for the housewarming, which I didn’t expect to love as much as I do.
Then finally, I reach the landing with its small and tasteful chandelier, and all of the house is dark except for the bedroom.
I have a quick shower in the ensuite, and then change into my new silk pyjamas. Blue ones, because Hex says I look extra delicious in blue. I like to think he gets the words delicious and handsome mixed up, but I have a feeling that he doesn’t.
I go to bed.
It is a very good bed. This is something I feel strongly about and have felt strongly about since we bought it, because good sleep is important and the mattress in my uncle’s flat was not adequate for a human adult and certainly not adequate for a shadow prince, though Hex’s relationship with physical sleep remains something I am still learning the parameters of.
The bedroom is warm and the window is open and through it comes the particular smell of a Bristol summer night, someone’s late barbecue a few gardens over and the green smell of the garden below and the distant general smell of a city that is still going on without requiring anything from me.
I lie in bed and look at the ceiling, which does not have a crack that looks like a rabbit.
This ceiling is smooth and high and the cornicing up here is probably original too, and I have spent a certain amount of time looking at it contentedly, which is not something I would have predicted about myself six months ago.
My book is on the nightstand. I pick it up. I read approximately one page before my attention drifts, the way it does at this time of night in this house with the window open and the wine warm in my chest and nothing requiring urgent attention anywhere in any realm.
I am, for the record, very happy.
That is not something I have always known how to say.
It used to have qualifications attached to it, small asterisks and footnotes and reasons why it might not last or might not count or might not be as real as it felt.
It doesn’t have those anymore. It is just a fact, the way the house is a fact and the coffee shop is a fact and the ring on the nightstand is a fact.
I am very happy. That’s it. Full stop.
I look up from my book.
Hex is in the doorway.
Red eyes burning steady in the dark. The familiar shape of him, entirely himself, looking at me with the expression I know better than I know anything. He is, I notice, very pleased with himself, which means the walk was eventful and I have decided not to ask.
I look at his broad shoulders and his height and his hair and his expression, all of it exactly the same as the first night and completely different in every way that matters. He is looking at me with those red eyes and he is exactly where he is supposed to be.
The first time I saw him. I was a paralysed figure in a dark room, heart hammering, convinced I was losing my mind. The monster in the doorway. The terrible certain knowledge that something was there and the complete inability to do anything about it.
I think about everything between then and now.
Every morning and every rearranged shelf and every cup of tea.
The hallway with Wraith. The alley with Dis.
The bedroom with Fiend telling me how to use the ring.
The Shadow Realm with its wrong gravity and its grasping hands and the bond pulling me forward through the dark.
The crown on the kitchen table. The kettle going on.
I think about all of it and I look at Hex in the doorway with his red eyes and I feel nothing except that this is exactly right and has always been going to be exactly right and the only surprising thing, really, is that it took us this long.
I put my book down.
I hold the covers up.
“There you are,” I say. “Come to bed.”
Hex comes to bed. The light goes out. The red eyes glow softly in the dark.
Everything is exactly as it should be.