He doesn’t get far.
I look at the alley wall. I am finding the alley wall extremely interesting. I study it with great focus for approximately forty-five seconds.
If I paid attention, I’d probably hear sounds. Noises that sound like a grown man being detached from his head. But I’m not listening, so everything is fine.
When I look back, the alley is empty.
Hex is standing in front of me. His eyes are still burning, but the terrible cold has begun to ease, the shadows settling back into ordinary shadow behaviour. He looks at me with an expression that is composed and careful, and underneath both of those things, checking.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Completely.” I look at the empty alley. “Did you…”
“Yes.”
“And the two men?”
“They’ll find their way out eventually.” A pause. “They won’t remember the alley. Or you.”
I nod. I look at the bin bag still in my hand. I walk to the dumpster and put it in with the focused energy of a person completing a task and not thinking about anything else at all.
“Hex,” I say, to the dumpster.
“Adam.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I turn around. He is still watching me with that careful expression, and I think he is waiting to see if I am frightened. If watching him be what he is, has shifted something in me the way the Wraith fight might have done.
I think about what Felix said. He’s like a bonfire in the dark. Brilliant if you need to warm yourself up.
“We should get back inside,” I say. “The afternoon rush.”
Something in Hex’s face settles. “Yes.”
We turn back towards the door to the kitchen.
The air at the far end of the alley changes.
Not the way it changes when Hex arrives, that flood of familiar crisp winter cold and shadow. Different. A compression of space, a sense of something very large and very controlled making itself present in a way that is impossible to ignore and completely impossible to miss.
I stop walking.
A figure stands at the alley entrance where Peterson stood three minutes ago. He is tall, taller even than Hex, and still in a way that nothing ordinary is ever still, the absolute stillness of something that has decided to be visible and is doing so as a deliberate act. He is dressed in something dark and structured that has the quality of armour without quite being armour, but is still formality weaponised.
His eyes are sapphire blue. Glowing. Not Hex’s watchful red. Brighter than that. Colder. The blue of something that has spent a very long time looking at everything and found most of it wanting.
He is looking at Hex.
Hex has gone very still beside me.
The figure at the end of the alley glances at me. Just once. Brief, assessing, taking in everything in a single look with the efficiency of someone who does not need to look twice. Then back to Hex.
“You’ve been busy,” he says. His voice is deep and carries the particular weight of someone who has not had to raise it in a verylong time because things simply happen when he speaks. “The exile who refused to fade. And now this.” He glances at the empty alley. A slight pause. “Efficient.”
“Dis,” says Hex calmly.
