“I’m fine.”
“The entities…”
“I kept my eyes closed,” I say. “Fiend told me.”
His hands tighten on me, just briefly, with the ferocity I recognise from the hallway with the blown lightbulbs. “You walked through this realm blind.”
“Yes.”
“For me.”
“Yes.”
He is quiet for a moment. I can feel him, so much more present than he was a minute ago, the power of him rebuilding itself around the edges, the shadow prince reassembling from the inside out. Not fully. Not yet. But enough.
“You need to go back,” he says.
“I know.”
“The ring will take you. Just take it off and think of home.”
I don’t move immediately. I stay with my forehead against his for a moment longer, in the cold dark of a realm that tried to stop me and failed, and I hold on to him.
“Win,” I say.
“I intend to.”
“And then come home.”
He’s quiet for just a moment. “Yes,” he says softly. “And then I’ll come home.”
I pull back. I find his hand in the dark and hold it for one more second, his cold fingers in mine, and then I let go.
I take the ring off.
I think of home.
The cold disappears. The dark disappears. The wrongness and the mist and the gravity that pulls from the wrong direction all disappear at once and I am sitting on my bedroom floor in the normal-dark with the ring in my hand and my heart going very fast and Bristol doing its quiet ordinary Bristol thing outside the window.
I sit there for a long moment.
Then I get up, put the ring on the nightstand, and go to make tea. Because he’s not gone. He’s there, and he’s stronger and he knows I’m waiting and that is going to have to be enough for tonight.
It’s enough.
Chapter 28
Honey, I’m Home
FelixisawakewhenI come out of the bedroom.
He is sitting cross-legged on the sofa with his blanket around his shoulders and his earrings catching the candlelight, and an expression that says he felt something through whatever witch-sense he has, and it woke him up and he has been sitting here waiting for me to emerge and explain myself.
I walk to the kitchen and put the kettle on.
“Adam,” he calls after me.
“Tea first,” I say.
