I look at the mug. “It’s fine,” I say again, which is true in all the ways that matter practically and completely untrue in every other sense. “I knew what it was going to be. He had to go. He had a whole realm to reclaim. That’s not… I’m not going to be pathetic about it.”
“Grieving somebody isn’t pathetic.”
“I’m not grieving. He’s not dead.”
“No,” Felix says. “He’s just somewhere you can’t reach him.” A pause. “That’s pretty much the same thing.”
I drink my tea. The flat is considerably less quiet with Felix in it, not because Felix is loud but because Felix is present in a way that takes up space without trying to. The kettle is still warm. There are two mugs on the table.
It’s not the same. It’s not nothing either.
“The coven,” I say, because talking about something else is a very effective strategy. “How was it?”
Felix wraps both hands around his mug. “Useful,” he says. “Morgana has some interesting texts. There is a significant amount of lore on summoning and binding. There are things I want to look into when I have more time.” He says it with the particular neutrality that means he has done a great deal of looking into already and is not going to tell me the details until he is ready.
I think about the things he has mentioned. The very considered, extremely deliberate thing he hinted he was going to do. I think about Felix cross-legged on a coven floor surrounded by texts about the Shadow Realm and beings that burn down buildings,and I decide, not for the first time, that my strange goth colleague is considerably more formidable than he appears.
“Felix,” I say.
“Adam,” he says back, in exactly the same tone, which means he knows what I’m about to say and is not going to discuss it.
I let it go.
We eat the pasta I make because it is the easiest thing, and because routine is useful. And then Felix does the washing up, which is its own form of kindness. We watch something on television that neither of us is paying attention to. Felix falls asleep on the sofa around ten with his eyeliner slightly smudged, and I put the spare blanket over him and turn the television off.
I go to bed.
The bed is very large and very quiet, and Hex’s side still smells faintly of something dark and cold and particular to him that has no name in any human language. I have not changed the sheets. I am aware that this is not entirely healthy behaviour, both mentally and hygienically, and I am choosing not to care.
I lie in the dark and look at the ceiling. The crack is still there, the one that looks like a rabbit if you squint, unchanged by any of it.
I’ve taken to keeping the ring on the bedside table at night now, close enough to pick up in the dark. I close my hand around it. It’s warm. It’s always warm, which shouldn’t be possible for a piece of metal sitting in a cold room, but it is, and I’ve stopped questioning it.
I think about what Night said.You’re stronger than you know.
I think about what Fiend said.The things you need are closer than they appear.
I think about what Hex said, in the kitchen at four in the morning with the Bristol foxes screaming outside and the tea cooling between us.There are things I am not ready to leave.
I turn the ring over in my fingers in the dark. Round and round, the metal smooth and warm and entirely itself.
In the Shadow Realm, somewhere I cannot reach and cannot imagine, Hex is doing what he went back to do. Taking back what was taken from him. Fighting a war. And I am here in my uncle’s flat in Bristol with the alphabetised books and the wrongly ordered mugs and the crystals facing the right direction and a chair at a slightly different angle.
I am here, and he is there, and the bond is a thread stretched thin across whatever distance separates our realms, and I can feel it if I concentrate, a faint warmth at the edge of my awareness, steady and present.
He’s there. He’s not gone.
I hold the ring and breathe and wait for sleep to come.
In the morning, Felix will make toast badly and I will fix it and we will not talk about the things we are not talking about and I will go to work and come home and the flat will be quiet and the armchair will be empty and all of it will be exactly as fine as it needs to be.
I can do this.
I turn the ring one more time and set it back on the nightstand and close my eyes.
I can do this.
Chapter 26
