“Ahhh!” he squeaks and steps back. “Hex vanished, mid sentence, we were talking about runner beans and then he just whispered your name and disappeared…” He stops, shakes his head, and starts again. “Hex why aren’t you fighting Dis! Quick! Before he does something terrible!”
“Adam.” Hex’s voice is steady. “The attack was from Wraith. Dis is not attacking. He is bound.”
Adam’s eyes are huge and unblinking. “Wraith was here… Dis is bound?”
Adam stares at the circle properly now, really looking at it, and I watch him notice the faint shimmer of the wards, still fizzing from the fight. And the careful way Dis is standing within an exact boundary, despite the absence of any chains or visible restraint.
It’s pretty clear, even to the untrained eye, that Dis isn’t going anywhere.
“Bound,” Adam repeats. “Bound how. Bound since when.”
“Since the dark moon,” answers Hex. “By Felix’s weaving.”
Adam turns to look at Hex very slowly. “You knew about this.”
It’s not a question, but Hex answers it like one anyway.
“Yes,” he says.
Adam goes very pale.
Hex’s voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t defend itself, just states the thing plainly, the way he states most things. “I sensed a disturbance in the magical landscape of Bristol. It carried Felix’s signature. I understood, fairly quickly, what he was attempting.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
Adam takes his helmet off. He sets it down on the arm of the sofa with the particular care of someone who doesn’t entirely trust his own hands right now. “Why not?”
“Because I judged it as not mine to share,” Hex says. “Felix had been deeply wronged. Vengeance is not a crime in the Shadow Realm, and I made a decision to give him room to pursue it without interference. That decision was mine to make. Keeping it from you was also my decision, and I see now that it was the wrong one.”
“That’s not.” Adam stops. Starts again, his voice catching slightly. “Hex, we don’t keep things from each other. That’s meant to be the whole point.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
“Because I judged this as separate from that promise. I was wrong to judge it that way.” Something shifts in Hex’s expression, the careful composure cracking just slightly, just enough to show something underneath it that looks almost like fear. “I am sorry. Not for the choice to let Felix do what he needed to do. For the choice to keep it from you.”
Adam doesn’t say anything. He sits down on the sofa, slowly, like his legs have decided independently that this is necessary. He’s not looking at Hex anymore. He’s looking at the middle distance, processing, and I recognise the particular expression of someone trying to work out how something they trusted completely just became slightly less simple.
I cannot watch this anymore.
“Tea,” I announce, to nobody, and flee to the kitchen.
I fill the kettle. I find mugs. My hands are doing the motions while my brain replays the conversation I just witnessed, the thing I caused without ever meaning to.
The kettle boils far too quickly. The quickest any kettle has ever boiled in the history of kettles. Stupid thing clearly hates me and is refusing to offer me any sort of refuge. As soon as I have a moment, I’m throwing the traitorous thing out.
With great trepidation, I carry the mugs back through, and find that Hex has joined Adam on the sofa, and Adam has gone very still. Not angry-still, not the stillness that precedes an explosion. Just still in the way that people go still when something has hurt them and they’re deciding how to hold it. He’s sitting beside Hex on my second-hand sofa, and the rift between them is subtle but completely visible if you know what you are looking at.
Two people who are so thoroughly in love it’s occasionally nauseating, sitting six inches apart with something unspoken lodged between them.
Something I put there.
I am the world’s worst person.
And now I’m faced with the dilemma of where to put myself. The sofa has Adam and Hex on it, sitting that careful six inches apart, both of them present and neither of them quite resolved. Joining them feels like picking a side. The futon is in the circle, with Dis, and sitting down next to my captive shadow being, feels like an even worse declaration of allegiance.
