You Can't Always Get What You Want
Icomedownstairs,andDarkis in the corner. Amber eyes floating in a density of shadow in the far corner of the coffee shop that the morning light seems to slide off rather than illuminate.
He’s not invisible exactly, more like the human eye wants to skip past him, wants to find something more comfortable to land on. He’s large, in the way that shadow beings tend to be large, taking up space in a way that has nothing to do with physical dimensions.
Hex’s people. True to his word.
I nod at him. He inclines his head in return, establishing an understanding between us. He’s here. I know he’s here. We don’t need to discuss it.
I start the morning routine. Machine on. Pastries out. The first customers trickle in, order their coffees, sit at their tables, and not one of them registers that there is a very large, very still shadow being occupying the corner booth with the intensity of someone who has been askedto guard something and takes that responsibility extremely seriously.
The door chimes at half-past seven. Bunny comes through it with his pink bunny ears already on, a reusable coffee cup in one hand and his law textbook tucked under his arm.
“Good morning, Felix!” he announces brightly. “Good morning, coffee shop!”
Some of the customers return his greeting, seemingly genuinely happy to be accosted by unnecessary cheer over their morning coffee.
Bunny beams back at them. He gives a little wave as if he’s some sort of celebrity.
Then he sees Dark.
He stops.
I brace myself. Dark is not a gentle presence. He’s nothing like Hex, who has spent enough time in the human world to know how to make himself palatable when he wants to. Dark is raw and blunt, and the kind of dangerous that doesn’t bother to soften its edges.
Dark is staring at Bunny.
I watch it happen, the precise moment it happens, an expression crossing Dark’s face that I’ve never seen on any shadow being before. Not menace. Not assessment. Absolutely nothing, like something has wiped him clean of every response he’s ever learned and left him with no idea what to put there instead.
Bunny looks at Dark for a moment.
Then he smiles his enormous smile.
“Good morning to you too!” he says, cheerfully, and goes to put his apron on.
Dark doesn’t move. Dark doesn’t speak. Dark continues to sit in his corner with the expression of someone who has just walked into a door they didn’t see coming and is still working out what happened.
Two hours later, he’s still there. Bunny is still working. The coffee shop is doing its mid morning thing, the quiet period between the breakfast rush and the lunch crowd, and I’m wiping down the machine and watching the whole situation with the combination of fascination and exhausted resignation that seems to be my default state these days.
Bunny can see Dark. That much is clear. Most humans can’t, the eye-skipping effect is reliable enough that I’ve watched people nearly sit on Hex before now, but Bunny looks over at the corner periodically with the easy acknowledgement of someone who is aware of a presence and simply isn’t bothered by it. I have no idea why. I have a vague theory that people raised in cults, who have spent their formative years surrounded by things that most people would find deeply alarming and have learned to treat them as simply part of the landscape, develop a kind of supernatural awareness that more ordinarily raised people don’t have. And then there were whatever rituals Bunny grew up participating in without really understanding them. Maybe all of that leaves a residue. A sensitivity to things that exist outside the ordinary.
Or perhaps it’s simply because he’s already met Dis. His eyes have been opened to shadow beings. Or possibly Bunny is just Bunny, and Bunny contains multitudes, and I’ve stopped trying to fully explain him.
Dark, for his part, has clearly never encountered anything like Bunny before. He watches Bunny theway you’d watch something you have no category for, something that doesn’t fit any of the frameworks you have available. When Bunny is serving customers with absolute delight, Dark watches him. When Bunny is restocking the pastry display, while humming joyfully, Dark watches him. When Bunny drops something and laughs at himself and picks it up and keeps going, Dark watches that too, with the absorbed focus of someone studying a phenomenon they don’t understand but can’t look away from.
I should probably say something. I should probably explain that Bunny is a person, not a spectacle, and that staring is rude even when the person you’re staring at doesn’t mind, and that whatever Dark is doing in that corner he should probably dial it back a bit.
I think about the state of my own life. The unknown enemy with the amulet. The broken window. The Scrabble board. The hand through the circle.
I decide I have enough problems.
I’m still not entirely over my cold, for a start.
A woman comes up to the counter. Mid-forties, sharp blazer, the expression of someone who has already decided their day is not going well and is looking for somewhere to put that.
“I ordered a flat white ten minutes ago,” she says, with the particular emphasis of someone who feels strongly that this is a significant amount of time.
“I’ll check on that for you,” Bunny says, appearing from nowhere with his enormous smile.
