Thesilencestretchesforabout three seconds.
Then I get up off the floor.
My knees are bruised, and my shoulder is going to be spectacular tomorrow, and there is plaster dust in my hair, and the coffee shop that I have spent the past several months building into something that feels like mine is a complete wreck around me. I brush myself off. I look at the man standing in the middle of it with the amulet in his fist.
“What the fuck,” I say. “Are you the arch-nemesis of the Shadow Realm?”
He blinks. “No. I just got here.”
I stare at him.
Despite everything, the history, the past, the hurt, I can tell he isn’t bullshitting. Besides, if he was the grand architect of everything, the nameless somebody who wants Dis dead, he would be sure to boast about it.
No, Dad just happened to walk into my life with extraordinary timing. Which tracts.
“So,” I breathe raggedly. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
A pause. “Your coven contacted me. They were worried about you.”
He looks around the destroyed coffee shop. The scarred ceiling. The missing windows. The two enormous shadow beings pinned to the wall. The splinters that used to be furniture. His gaze moves across all of it with the calm assessment of someone who has encountered magical disaster before and knows how to read the aftermath. Then it comes back to me, and there is a very brief, very controlled expression that might be relief at finding me upright, followed by something else entirely.
“Rightly so,” he says.
The old familiarity of it, the slight weight of judgement in those two words, lands exactly the way it always used to. Like he can’t help it. Like he is still the person who looked at his thirteen-year-old son and found him lacking and said so. Like fifteen years hasn’t quite worn that particular groove smooth.
I feel the old rage come up through me like something that has been waiting patiently in the basement for exactly this moment.
But I’m not going to vent, or rage. Because despite my dad’s opinion, I’m not too emotional. And I’m going to focus on the here and now. The situation at hand. The practical questions that need answers. Not the ones I’ve always longed to have addressed.
“How,” I say, very carefully, “are you controlling that thing.”
I point at Wraith, who is standing completely still in the middle of the coffee shop with his head down,twitching faintly, looking about as threatening as a wet kitten. Because my dad can do that to people.
My dad glances at Wraith with the brief, assessing look of someone checking on a problem they’ve already solved. “I saw it was bound to a cursed amulet,” he says. “So I called the amulet to me. It was a simple solution.”
A simple solution.
I think about the first attack, me running naked around my own living room while Dis sent crows through the window as a last resort. The fear I’ve felt since, every time the wards twitched. The unknown enemy that Fiend warned me about, with those purple eyes full of something I couldn’t quite read. The second attack, twenty minutes ago, with Bunny’s hand in mine on the floor and my death walking toward me in a straight line.
A simple solution. He saw the shape of it and called the amulet to him, and it was a simple solution.
I’ve known powerful witches. I’ve spent my whole life in the company of witches. But watching someone call a cursed amulet out of the air from across a room while maintaining a shield against something as powerful as Wraith, because it’s the obvious thing to do, as if it’s barely worth mentioning, is a different category of thing entirely. It’s intelligent as well as strong.
I came from this. Whatever I am, whatever small clever magic I’ve managed to build for myself out of insufficient raw material, I came from this.
Yet I didn’t see it. The simple solution did not occur to me. Would never have occurred to me. I am his son, but I will forever be so much less than he is. In all ways.
I hate that. I hate that so much it makes my back teeth ache.
“Well,” I say. “Mr Most Perfect And Clever Witch Who Ever Lived.” My voice comes out sharper than I intend, which is to say exactly as sharp as I intend. “You can piss off now.”
Something moves across his face. He opens his mouth.
“Felix…”
“No.”
He closes his mouth.
