Something moves across Hex’s face. A calculation. A hesitation. “Adam,” he says carefully. “Interfering with fate in the human realm is not something I should...”
“Can you help him.”
Not a question this time.
Hex is quiet for a moment. He looks at me with those red eyes, and I look back and I don’t say anything else because I don’t need to. It’s all there in my face, and he can read me better than I can read myself, and he knows it.
“Hex is going to come to you,” I tell Felix. “Just stay on the line. Just keep talking to me.”
“Adam,” says Felix, and his voice is smaller than I have ever heard it. “Tell him not to do anything dramatic.”
“He’s going to be dramatic,” I say. “That’s just who he is. You’re going to have to live with it.”
A sound from Felix that might be a laugh and might be a cough and is probably both.
Hex crosses the hallway to me. He puts one hand briefly on the side of my face, just for a second, and looks at me with an expression that I don’t have words for, and then he dissolves. Not gradually. All at once, like a candle going out, the shadows swallowing him whole.
He’s gone.
I press the phone back to my ear. “Felix. Talk to me.”
“I’m here.” More coughing. Shorter this time, more controlled, like he’s trying to conserve himself. “Your shadow prince is dramatically swooping in to save me, then.”
“Apparently.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Felix, your building is on fire.”
“I know. I’m just making conversation.” A pause. “Are you scared?”
“Yes,” I say honestly.
“Me too.” Another pause. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Your secret is safe.”
The crackling gets very loud for a moment and I grip the phone so hard my knuckles hurt and then Felix makes a sharp sound and says “oh” in a voice that sounds surprised and then the line goes muffled and chaotic and I stand in my hallway and wait.
The hairs on the back of my neck rise. Goosebumps dance down my skin.
I spin around.
The thing at the end of my hallway is not Hex.
It has Hex’s shape, roughly. The same tall outline, the same suggestion of broad shoulders. But the edges are wrong, ragged rather than fluid, and the eyes that glow in the darkness are not red. They are a pale, colourless white. Like light through fog. Like nothing I have seen before.
And it smiles at me. Too big. Far too wide.
I do not scream. I want to. Every instinct I have is screaming at every other instinct I have. But I think of Felix on the fourteenth floor with smoke in his lungs, and I plant my feet on the hallway floor of my uncle’s flat, and I look at this thing and I do not scream.
“You must be Wraith,” I say.
The thing tilts its head. All the way to the side, far further than a human neck could ever go. That wrong smile doesn’t move.
“Hex is going to come back,” I say. My voice is shaking. I let it shake. “And when he does, you are going to wish you’d picked a different Wednesday.”
Wraith moves. Fast, the way shadows move when they want to, no transition between there and here. One moment it is at the end of the hallway. The next moment it is directly in front of me and the cold coming off it is nothing like Hex’s cold, nothing like that particular winter chill I have come to find reassuring. This is empty cold. Wrong cold. The cold of something that doesn’t have warmth and never did.
