One long shadowy hand reaches towards my face.
The flat explodes with darkness.
Not Wraith’s darkness. Something else. Something that comes in from every corner and every crack and every shadow in the room all at once, flooding the hallway with a force that hits me like a physical thing and sends me stumbling back against the wall. The temperature drops so sharply I gasp. The lights blow out. Every single one, simultaneously, the pop of each bulb like punctuation.
And then Hex is there.
Not the Hex who reorganises my bookshelves. Not the Hex who calls me cute when I’m annoyed and reads the rota on my fridge and argues about candle arrangement. Not even the Hex who stood in my kitchen last night and received a bow from two shadow beings with quiet authority. This is most definitely not the Hex who kisses me so sweetly.
This Hex is something else entirely.
He is enormous. Not physically taller, not exactly, but the space he takes up has expanded far beyond his body, the shadows around him alive and moving and dense with something that makes the air feel thick and hard to breathe. His eyes are not glowing. They are burning. Furious, incandescent, the red so bright it burns into my retinas.
Wraith goes flying backwards. Propelled by a force I can’t name. One moment he is right next to me, touching my face and stealing the warmth out of my blood, and then suddenly he has been catapulted back to the far end of the hallway.
The thing that is not quite Hex stands between me and Wraith, and the sound that comes out of him is not a voice. It is not a language. It is something older than both of those things, something that vibrates in my chest and behind my eyes and in the base of my spine, and it means one thing with complete, unmistakable clarity.
LEAVE. NOW. WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
Wraith is still. That pale smile has gone.
For a long moment, nothing moves. The darkness breathes. The silence rings.
Then Wraith dissolves. Not dramatically. Just gone, as if he was never there, leaving nothing behind but cold air and the smell of something that feels like death.
The darkness contracts. Hex shrinks back into himself, the terrible enormity of him folding away until he is just a man-shaped shadow in my hallway again, red eyes dimming from furnace to ember. He turns to look at me.
I am pressed against the wall with my phone still in my hand and my heart trying to beat its way out of my body.
We look at each other.
“Felix,” I manage, and look down at my phone.
The call is still connected. Distantly, very distantly, I can hear Felix’s voice saying something. I press the phone to my ear.
“...are you still there? Adam? He dropped me on top of a fire engine, which is objectively hilarious, and I need you to know I am completely fine but I am going to need a very large drink and also possibly a new flat, so…”
“Felix.” My voice comes out wrong. Too high. Too thin.
A pause. “Adam. Are you okay?”
I look at Hex. Hex looks at me. He is back to himself, or mostly back to himself, but there is something in his expression that is new. Something that looks, underneath all the careful composure, a very long way from fine.
“I am,” I say. “I will be. Are you safe?”
“I’m on top of a fire engine in my pyjamas in the middle of Bristol, and there are a lot of very attractive firemen who have questions,” says Felix. “So yes. Relatively speaking.” Another pause. “He picked me up. Just appeared and picked me up and flew out of the window.”
“That does sound like him.”
“I have feelings about this,” says Felix. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He hangs up.
I lower the phone. The hallway is very quiet. The blown bulbs have left us in the dark, and the only light is Hex’s eyes, steady and red and fixed entirely on me.
I don’t know how long we stand there.
Eventually I say, “Thank you.”
