“Adam.”
“Felix, I have just walked through another dimension and kissed a shadow prince back to life, so I need a moment and a hot drink before I do anything else.”
A pause. “Fair enough,” says Felix.
I make the tea. I bring it through. I sit on the sofa next to Felix and pull half the blanket over myself, and we sit in the dark of the living room with our mugs and the candle guttering on the coffee table, and I tell him everything.
Felix listens with the focused attention of someone filing every detail. When I finish, he is quiet for a moment.
“You kept your eyes closed,” he says. “The whole time.”
“Fiend said to.”
“And you just did it. Walked blind through the Shadow Realm.”
“Yes.”
He looks at me. Something in his expression does a complicated thing that Felix very rarely lets his expressions do, something warm and fierce and proud all at once. Then he picks up his tea and drinks it and says nothing else, because Felix knows when words are not the point.
We sit.
The bond is different now. Fuller, stronger, the thread that was stretched thin and fraying is now solid and present in a way that makes me feel like I can breathe properly for the first time since he left. But the bond is not motionless. It is moving, pulsing with something that I don’t entirely have a framework for, sensations coming through it in waves that are not quite emotions and not quite physical but somewhere in between.
I set my mug down.
“Something’s happening,” I say.
Felix goes very still. “What kind of something?”
“I don’t know exactly.” I press my hand to my chest instinctively, as if physical touch will help me read the bond. “It’s moving. Fast. There’s something like…” I stop, trying to find words for things that don’t have words. “Urgency. Purpose. It feels like running towards something.”
“The fight,” says Felix, and his voice has gone flat and intent and rather bloodthirsty. “It’s resumed.”
I grip my mug. “Yes.”
Felix sits forward. “Is he winning?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell. I can feel him, but I can’t...
“Is he going to rip Dis apart?” Felix’s eyes are bright. “Because that absolute bastard burned my flat down. All my stuff. My vintage clothes. My early nineties emo record collection, Adam. Decades of carefully curated vinyl. Gone.” He says the last word with a quiet devastation that is somehow more alarming thanshouting would be. “I want Hex to destroy him. I want there to be nothing left.”
I look at him. “Felix.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are. That’s what concerns me.”
“He tried to kill me,” Felix says, very matter-of-factly. “His orders caused me to be used as bait to get Hex out of the flat so Wraith could take you. He burned my home down. He destroyed my record collection.” A pause. “If Hex doesn’t finish it, I will.”
I think about Dis in the alley. The sapphire-blue eyes and the formal posture, and the ancient, controlled weight of him. The way he spoke to Hex as if he had endless patience because his victory was so certain. I think about Hex and how I found him. All small and diminished.
“Felix,” I say carefully. “Dis is currently the king of the Shadow Realm. He is ancient and enormously powerful and genuinely frightening even to other shadow beings. And you are…”
“Don’t say it.”
“Four foot eleven.”
“I said don’t say it.”
