“Is there anything else you need me to do?” Brian asks, turning around with an expression of absolute readiness. He looks like a dog that has heard the word walk. “I could reorganise the pastry display. Or I could learn where everything is kept. Or I could just stand here, ready to greet the customers enthusiastically. I’m very good at that.”
“I can tell,” I say.
He grins. It is an enormous grin. It takes up most of his face.
Brian is a genuinely happy person. Just… happy down to his core. As if being happy is as easy as breathing.
I’ve never been happy like that. I’ve certainly never grinned like that, and I don’t think I ever will.
I look at that grin, and all I can think about is the smoke in my old flat, and the very specific and intimate experience of thinking this was how I die. I think about being collateral damage in someone else’s war, which I was not consulted about and did not consent to and am still, frankly, furious about.
I don’t grin like Brian does. Never have, definitely never will now. The smoke changed me.
And I did not hire this boy so that I could stand here watching him grin. I hired him so I could go upstairs and finish what I started.
“Go and see how the milk is stored,” I say. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t hum. Reorganise nothing without asking first.”
“Got it,” says Brian, with every appearance of sincere agreement. He points finger guns at me, which I have no response to, and disappears into the back.
I stand behind the counter in the quiet of my coffee shop and breathe.
From the back, I can hear him talking to himself as he moves around the storeroom. Small, happy sounds of discovery. “Oh, that’s where that goes. Oh, that’s clever. Oh, there’s a lot of oat milk.”
I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose, until I can feel my skull.
What have I done? I am fairly certain that hiring Brian is going to be a worse mistake than attempting to summon a shadow being.
And I am planning to summon a shadow being. So that is really saying something.
Chapter 2
Do You Want Lies With That?
ThehouseinCliftonis doing that thing again where it looks like it belongs in a magazine spread about people who have their lives together. Which is frankly offensive.
I stand on the pavement outside and stare up at the Georgian facade with the cornicing and the sash windows and the general air of smug architectural competence. Adam lives here now. Adam, who used to live in a flat with a crack in the ceiling that looked like a rabbit and a shower that only worked if you hit it in exactly the right spot.
Now he lives in a house. An actual house. With a garden and everything.
I blame Hex entirely.
The front door opens before I can knock. Adam is standing there with flour on his nose and an expression that is trying very hard to be casual and failing comprehensively.
“Felix! You’re early.”
I glance at my phone. “I’m exactly on time.”
“Right. Yes. Of course you are.” He steps back to let me in. “Come in. Hex is in the kitchen doing something with vegetables that he insists is necessary but looks like performance art.”
I follow him inside. The hallway smells like garlic and rosemary and something else I can’t quite place. Something that might be magic or might just be the particular scent of a house where a shadow being lives. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
The house is warm. That’s the first thing I always notice. Not temperature warm, although it is that too, but warm in the way that means people are happy here. The kind of warmth that soaks into the walls and the furniture and makes everything feel lived in.
It makes my chest ache in a way I refuse to acknowledge.
“Wine?” Adam asks, already heading towards the kitchen.
“Obviously.”
