“And a witch, yes, but still a human witch, and I say this with enormous affection and complete confidence in your abilities, but...”
“Adam.” Felix’s voice is very calm. “I have been doing research. I have texts from Morgana’s collection that most people don’t even know exist. I have plans.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “He burned my record collection.”
I open my mouth. Close it. There is genuinely nothing useful to say to this, I know Felix well enough to know that when he gets that particular look there is no talking him out of anything, and also I have a feeling that whatever Felix is planning is going to be extremely significant and possibly more effective than any of my objections and the best thing I can do is stay out of the way and maybe keep the kettle on.
“Right,” I say.
“Good.”
We drink our tea.
The bond shifts again. A wave of something that is not quite pain and not quite exhilaration but somewhere between both, the feeling of something enormous and difficult being done, of power expenditure on a scale I can’t quite fathom, and underneath it all a clarity that is entirely Hex, that particular quality of controlled purpose that I know the way I know my own heartbeat now.
I breathe through it.
“Well?” says Felix.
“Still fighting,” I say. “But he’s… he feels like himself. Fully himself.”
Felix’s jaw sets. “Good.”
Time passes in the particular way it passes when you’re waiting for something you can’t influence and can barely track. Felix makes more tea at some point. I lose track of how many mugs we go through. The candle burns down. Bristol goes through its quiet dark hours outside the window, indifferent as always. Getting ready for morning as if it’s just going to be another day.
Then something changes.
It is not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It is simply that the quality of the bond shifts, between one breath and the next, from the urgency and the movement and the controlled expenditure of power to something else entirely. Something that settles. Something that is, underneath everything else, satisfied.
I sit very still.
“Adam,” says Felix quietly.
“Yes,” I say. “I think…” My throat closes up completely and unexpectedly and I have to stop and start again. “I think it’s over.”
Felix exhales. Long and slow and very controlled, the breath of someone who has been holding themselves together for quite some time and is choosing to continue doing so. He sets his mug down. He looks at the window.
“Good,” he says, for the third time, and this time it means something completely different from the other two.
We wait.
I don’t know what I expect exactly. The shadows to move. The temperature to drop. The particular quality of presence that means Hex is making himself known in a room. Some kind of dramatic announcement of return.
What happens is a knock on the front door.
Three times. Unhurried. Entirely ordinary.
I look at Felix. Felix looks at me.
I get up and answer it.
Hex is standing in the hallway of my uncle’s Bristol flat, looking like someone who has just fought a war. Which is totally fair, because he has. There is a quality of recent violence around him, and he is less solid than usual, slightly translucent at the edges. His shadowy shirt, which I can just about make out under all his shadows, is ripped. His hair is a little dishevelled. His eyes are burning very red and very steady.
He is holding something.
Dangling it casually by his side as if it’s of little importance. The way a normal person would carry a water bottle.
It is a crown. Not a decorative thing. An actual crown, gold and heavy and dark and old, the kind of object that has weight beyond its physical weight, that carries centuries of significance in every line of it.
He is holding it the way you hold something you just happen to have brought with you.
