I take a step forward.
The thing at my arm tightens. Not violently. More like a question. A test. Something checking whether I’m going to make this easy or difficult.
I am going to make this extremely difficult.
I walk.
The grip intensifies. Something else joins it, at my other arm, at my shoulder, the cold of them completely different from theambient cold of the realm, specific and intentional and pressing into me from all sides now, and the voices are very loud, a wall of sound that has given up on words entirely and is just noise, layered and pressing and trying to fill up all the space in my head where determination lives.
I walk and I do not open my eyes and I follow the thread in my chest that is pulling me forward and I think about nothing except the next step and the one after that and the warmth of the ring on my finger that should not be warm in this cold and is.
And then the hands let go.
All at once. Like a decision made collectively. The voices drop away. The cold remains, the ever-present bone-deep cold of this place, but the pressure of being pushed against recedes completely. Silence.
I stop walking.
The thread in my chest is not pointing forward anymore. It is pointing down.
I open my senses rather than my eyes. I lower myself carefully to whatever passes for ground here and reach out with my hands in the dark.
I find him.
He is very small.
That is the first thing and it is the worst thing. Hex, who fills rooms, who takes up space in dimensions that aren’t even his, who stands in doorways and makes them look like they were built for exactly him. Small. Curled in on himself, folded down to something that barely seems to take up any space at all. I run my hands over him carefully, learning him by touch, and I can feel how diminished he is, the wrongness of him being this contained, this still.
“Hex.” My voice sounds strange in this place. Absorbed immediately, given back nothing. “I’m here.”
No response.
The bond pulses. Weak, unsteady, the thread fraying worse up close than it felt from the human realm. But it’s there. He’s there.
I find his face with my hands. I lean forward. I keep my eyes closed.
I kiss him.
It is not like any kiss we have had before. Not the devastating composure of the early days, nor the quiet tenderness of the kitchen, nor any of the passionate things that came after. This is different. This is deliberate. I pour everything I have into it, everything I am, every morning and every rearranged bookshelf and every cup of tea and every night lying awake listening to Bristol and feeling the thread of him in the dark. The fear in the hallway as he fought Wraith. The pride watching him receive Night and Dark’s bow. The mugs in their wrong order that I have not moved and am never going to move. All of it. Everything.
The cold surrounding us changes.
Hex shifts under my hands. Something in him responds, reaching back for what I’m giving in the way a person reaches for warmth when they have been cold for too long, automatic and desperate and entirely without pretence. The bond flares between us, suddenly fierce and solid where it was fraying, and I feel the power of it moving, flowing from me to him through the place where our mouths meet.
He grows.
Not quickly. Gradually, under my hands, he becomes more. The smallness of him expands, the wrongness of him being this diminished, correcting itself degree by degree as he takes in what I’m giving him. His hands find me. They are cold and not quite solid, but they find me with the certainty of someone who knows exactly what they are reaching for.
He pulls back first.
“Adam.” His voice is rough and strange in this place, but it is his voice and it is saying my name and I press my forehead to his and breathe. “My love. How…”
“Fiend,” I say simply.
A pause. “Of course.” Something that might be a laugh in better circumstances. “My love.” The words land the way they always land, like he means them more than he has words for. “You should not be here.”
“No,” I agree. “But I am.”
“Are you hurt?”
