He finishes his coffee. Leaves a fiver on the counter, which covers nearly twice what the coffee costs, and it was free anyway because he’s a friend. At least, I thought he was.
He leaves without saying another word, the door chiming behind him with the same cheerful note it always has, completely indifferent to the fact that my chest feels like something has sat down heavily on it.
I stand behind the counter and stare at the door for a long moment.
A coven vote. A formal coven vote on whether I get to stay.
I’ve been here before. Not with this coven, not with these people, but the feeling is identical. The specific flavour of being assessed, being weighed up, being found potentially lacking. Thirteen years old in a cold room while people who were supposed to love me decided whether I was worth keeping. The vote hadn’t even been close, as it turned out.
I become aware that I’m gripping the edge of the counter hard enough that my knuckles have gone white.
I let go. Breathe. Pick up Dave’s fiver and put it in the tip jar.
“I’m taking my break,” I say to the back room, where Bunny is still pretending very hard to be busy.
“Sure!” he calls back, with studied casualness. “Take as long as you need!”
I take the stairs two at a time.
I shove the flat door open and slam it closed behind me. I stand in my own hallway for a moment, breathing, and then I walk to the wall and punch it. Not hard enough to go through it, just hard enough to hurt, just hardenough to give the thing in my chest somewhere to go. My knuckles sting. The plaster is slightly scuffed. Good.
I’m aware that Dis is watching me from the living room. The TV remote is in his hand because I’m entirely too soft and I gave it to him before I left. But the TV screen is dark. Apparently I’m more entertaining than Midsomer Murders.
I lean my forehead against the wall. The plaster is cold against my skin.
“Something vexes you?” Dis says, with a slight uncertainty in his voice, as though he has observed the evidence and reached the conclusion but isn’t quite confident in his interpretation.
I turn around.
An ancient shadow king, sitting on a second-hand futon in a summoning circle, asking me with mild academic interest if something vexes me, after watching me slam the door and punch my own wall. I look at him. He looks back at me with those burning blue eyes, careful and attentive.
The laugh that comes out of me is not entirely sane. It bubbles up from somewhere near the bottom of my lungs and comes out with the slightly hysterical quality of something that has been under pressure for too long. I end up sitting on the hallway floor with my back against the wall, laughing in a way that isn’t entirely distinguishable from crying, while Dis watches with the expression of someone who has correctly identified that there is nothing useful they can do but is paying close attention anyway.
When it settles, I feel emptied out. Raw and strange and lighter, somehow, than I did before.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t apologise,” Dis says. “Tell me what happened.”
So I do. I sit on my hallway floor and I tell him about Dave and the Esbats and the coven vote and Morgana’s formal processes and the particular way that threat sits inside me because I’ve been here before, in a different room with different people, and last time nobody fought for me to stay. I tell him about being thirteen and cold and homeless, which I’ve already told him over the Scrabble board, but somehow it’s different saying it now, in the immediate aftermath of the thing that is pulling up those same roots. My voice comes out flatter than I intend. More matter-of-fact than I feel.
Dis listens the way he always listens, with his whole attention, not filling in the gaps or trying to redirect. When I stop talking, the flat is quiet except for the distant sounds of Bristol going about its day below the window.
“If I were free,” Dis says finally, “I would offer to help you wreak considerable and creative revenge on both your birth coven and your current one.”
Despite everything, I feel the corner of my mouth move. “Thanks for the offer, Disney.”
“I mean it. The people who discarded you deserve to understand the consequences of that decision at considerable length.”
“Very cathartic, I’m sure.” I look at the ceiling. “But revenge isn’t always the answer. I don’t actually want to burn them down. I just want…” I stop, because finishing that sentence requires more honesty than I’m ready for. I want them to have wanted me. I want to not care whether they want me or not. Both of those things at once, which is one of the more inconvenient things about being a person.
Dis is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is different. Considered, as though he’s choosing each word deliberately.
“There is a mistake,” he says, “that I have seen made many times, by many people who were capable of better. They return to the battlefield where they first lost. They believe that winning there, finally, will give them the thing they didn’t get the first time.” He pauses. “It never does. The battlefield doesn’t hold what you’re looking for. It hasn’t held it for a very long time. Whatever you needed that they didn’t give you, it isn’t there waiting. It was never going to be there.”
I sit with that for a moment. The hallway is quiet. The plaster is still cold against the back of my skull.
“So what do I do?” I ask.
