“I know that,” I say. “But I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s a door,” he says simply. “He gave you a door. To him. To where he is.” He pauses, and those purple eyes hold mine with aseriousness that is completely at odds with his usual performance. “You can cross over. Find him. Give him what he needs.”
The room is very quiet.
“What does he need?” I ask, even though some part of me already knows.
“You,” says Fiend, and he says it simply and directly, like the most obvious thing in any realm. “He needs you. The bond. What’s in it.” He gestures vaguely in a way that somehow communicates love and power and connection simultaneously. “What has always been in it, since the beginning. He needs the strength you give him.”
I look at the ring. The small gold ring, warm in my hands, that has been on my nightstand and in my pocket and at the centre of things I didn’t understand for this entire story.
“Is it safe for a human to cross over to the Shadow Realm?” I say.
“Not at all.” He examines his nails. “But you’ll survive. Mostly.”
“Mostly.”
“You’ll be fine,” he says, in the tone of someone who is approximately ninety per cent certain of this and has decided the remaining ten per cent is not helpful information. “The ring will bring you back. It’s designed to. It knows you’re human. It knows where you belong.” He pauses. “Probably.”
“Probably,” I repeat.
“The important thing,” he says, ignoring this, “is to keep your eyes closed. Whatever happens. Whatever you hear or feel, or think you sense. Do not open your eyes. The Shadow Realm is not built for human eyes, and if you open them you will see things you cannot process, and it will go very badly.”
“Define very badly.”
He gives me a look that declines to define very badly.
“Follow your heart,” he says, and he says it like it is a precise instruction rather than a sentiment, like there is an actual navigational mechanism in my chest that will take me where I needto go if I trust it. “It will lead you to him. It has always led you to him. You know that.”
I think about walking home faster than usual because something was paying attention to Bristol. I think about the hallway and Wraith and the bond calling Hex across a city in the dark. I think about the kitchen at four in the morning and a ring on a table that neither of us looked at directly. But most of all, I think about Hex. My Hex. The shadow that lurked under my bed as a child, and who now resides in my heart. The man who has always been there, always a part of my life in one way or another.
“Follow my heart, and then?” I say.
“And then you find him and you give him everything you have.” He tilts his head, that extraordinary face very still. “And the ring brings you home.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“That sounds very simple.”
“Most true things are,” says Fiend, which is the most genuinely wise thing I have ever heard him say and lands completely differently from everything else he has said tonight.
He looks at me. I look at him. The purple eyes are very bright and very serious, and there is something in them that is, underneath everything, rooting for me.
“You have the power to save us all, Barista Adam of Bristol.” His voice is like a whisper, and a plea.
I swallow tightly. This isn’t just about Hex. This is about kingdoms and realms and people on thrones who shouldn’t be. It’s about people being forced to marry creatures like Dis.
“You can save us, if you are brave enough,” he says quietly.
I look at the ring in my hands.
I think about Hex in the kitchen sayingyou know what I’m sayingand me sayingI want to hear you say itand him sayingyou, only you.
I think about a thread stretched thin across realms, fraying, flagging, holding on.
I put the ring on.
