“Whatever you have to say,” I say, and my voice is very steady, steadier than I feel, steadier than I have any right to be right now. “I don’t want to hear it. You had fifteen years to say it and you didn’t, so you can keep it. Whatever it is. However long you’ve been carrying it around.” I hold his gaze. “Keep it.”
The man who is my father looks at me. He looks at me for a long moment with those dark eyes that I have apparently inherited, because that’s the kind of joke the universe enjoys making. He looks like someone who has rehearsed something, somewhere, in some quiet room, and has just understood that the rehearsal was for a conversation that isn’t going to happen today and possibly isn’t going to happen at all.
His shoulders drop, just slightly. The careful composure settles into something quieter. The face of someone accepting a consequence they know they deserve.
“Fair enough,” he says.
I look at Hex and Dark, still pinned to the wall. Hex’s red eyes have been moving between me and my father with the focused attention of someone who is filing everything away for future reference. Dark’s amber eyes are fixed on Bunny, who is sitting on the floor with his back against the counter, looking slightly battered and a littledazed, watching the whole scene with the wide, interested expression of someone watching something important happen.
“Get your new minion to release them,” I say, as I point to Hex and Dark. “They are my friends.”
My dad lifts one perfect, confident and manly eyebrow, at me having shadow beings for friends, but wisely, he says nothing. He simply turns to Wraith. A small gesture, nothing more, and the silver webs dissolve.
Dark is across the coffee shop in an instant. Not toward Wraith. Not toward the exit. Straight to Bunny, crouching in front of him, those amber eyes scanning him with an intensity that is completely focused and completely personal and has nothing tactical in it whatsoever. Bunny looks up at him and smiles, the real one, the enormous one, and says something too quiet for me to catch, and Dark’s expression does something I’ve never seen a shadow being’s expression do before.
I look away. That’s not mine to watch.
Hex peels himself off the wall with the careful dignity of someone who has just been stuck to a wall and is choosing not to make a fuss about it. He straightens. He looks at my dad with the measured assessment of someone meeting a significant force for the first time.
My dad looks back at him with the same quality of assessment.
“You can keep that one,” I say, pointing at Wraith, before anyone can have any kind of moment about anything. “Go. Take him with you. And never darken my door again.”
My dad opens his mouth. I watch him consider whatever he was going to say. I watch him decide, clearly,that he has no right to say it. Not here, not now, possibly not ever, and that he knows this, and that knowing it is its own kind of thing to carry.
He closes his mouth. He nods.
He looks at me once more, just for a second, with those familiar dark eyes. There’s something in them I don’t have the capacity to process right now. Something that looks like it has been there for a long time and has gotten very tired of being carried around.
Not my problem.
He shakes the amulet once, a small, precise movement. Wraith shudders. Then he comes apart, those terrible pale eyes going last, dissolving into a coil of dark smoke that winds itself into the amulet like something returning home. The amulet sits there in my dad’s fist, bright with it, humming quietly.
My dad puts it in his coat pocket.
He walks to the door. The one that no longer has a full complement of glass in it. He steps through it without looking back, the long black coat settling around him, and then he’s on the street and he’s gone, and the door swings gently behind him, glass rattling faintly in what remains of the frame.
The coffee shop is very quiet.
Hex is looking at me. I look back at him. There’s a conversation coming, I know there is, about all the things that just happened and what they mean and what happens next. Adam is probably three minutes away on his bicycle, cycling with the focused panic of someone whose fiancé just communicated some kind of emergency and left without explaining it fully. Because Hex wouldn’t have the sense to lock him in a cupboard.
I know all of this.
I also know that I have been on the floor of my destroyed coffee shop thinking I was going to die while the person upstairs couldn’t reach me and felt everything I felt through a connection that has been building since the first feeding, and that there is exactly one place I want to be right now and it is not explaining things to Hex or managing Adam’s feelings about the splinters that used to be furniture or thinking about insurance claims for catastrophic supernatural damage.
“Give me five minutes,” I say to Hex.
He looks at me. Those red eyes steady and knowing, and not asking anything I’m not ready to answer.
He nods.
I turn on my heel and go upstairs.
I don’t slow down in the hallway. I don’t stop to take a breath or compose myself or do any of the things I would normally do before walking into a situation that requires me to be okay. I push the flat door open and I cross the living room in about four steps and I step across the boundary of the circle and Dis is there, right there, already facing me, waiting, and I walk straight into him without stopping and his arms come around me before I’ve finished the thought.
I burst into tears.
Not the controlled kind. Not the kind you can pass off as something else, tiredness or dust in your eyes or the cold air coming through the broken windows. The kind that have been building since I was thirteen years old in a cold room while people who were supposed to love me decided I wasn’t worth keeping. The kind that have been stored up through every cold night and every flat that wasn’treally home and every time I managed something difficult completely alone because there was no one to call. The kind that fifteen years of keeping everything together with insufficient materials has been generating quietly in the background, waiting for somewhere safe enough to go.
