Dis holds me. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t tell me it’s alright or that it’s over or any of the things people say when they don’t know what else to do with someone else’s pain. He just holds me, those arms solid and real around me, and the shadows settle close and quiet like something drawing in to keep the cold out, and the circle hums its familiar frequency underneath my feet, and I cry until I’m completely empty.
It takes a while.
When I’m done, I just stand there. Face definitely destroyed. Still in my coffee shop apron, which has plaster dust on it now and possibly some of Bunny’s blood from where he was hit, and I should check on Bunny, I should go back down, there are a hundred things that need doing and I’m standing in a summoning circle in my living room being held by the being I summoned for revenge and it’s the safest I’ve felt since I was too small to understand that the adults around me didn’t want me.
“You survived,” Dis says, very quietly, into my hair.
“I did,” I say into his shoulder.
We stand there a bit longer.
Downstairs, distantly, I hear the coffee shop door. Adam’s voice, high with worry. Hex’s quieter response. The sounds of people who love each other finding each other after something frightening, which is its own kind of thing, its own ordinary miracle.
I should go down. Or invite them up. I know I should.
“In a minute,” Dis says, as if he can hear me thinking it. Which, through the connection we have built between us, through feeding and Scrabble and terrible daytime television and hands through circles holding what needed to be held, he probably can.
“Yeah,” I say. “In a minute.”
I stay exactly where I am.
Chapter 27
If You Love Them Let Them Go
Theplasticonthewindow wakes me. It’s been flapping since the window went in Wraith’s first attack. A soft, irregular sound that I’ve been sleeping through because I’ve been exhausted enough to sleep through anything. But the morning light streams through a tear, bright and grey and very clear, and something about the combination of the light and the sound pulls me up out of sleep before I’m ready for it.
I’m on the futon. In the circle. Snuggling.
Again.
I lie very still and take stock. This is becoming a habit, which is its own kind of information that I’m going to have to deal with at some point. The futon is warm. The circle hums quietly. Outside, Bristol is starting its day with complete indifference to what happened in this building yesterday. The plastic flaps.
I didn’t go downstairs last night. I meant to. I told Hex five minutes, and then I was in Dis’s arms crying, and five minutes became considerably longer, and by the time I wasdone it was late and the coffee shop was quiet below, and I just... didn’t. I stayed. And nobody came up, which means they made a collective decision to leave me to it, which means they probably assumed I was in my own bedroom doing something manageable like holding it together on my own, not in the summoning circle doing something unmanageable like falling apart completely in the arms of my captive shadow king.
Which is fine. That’s fine. We’ll deal with all of that later.
The morning light is very clear.
It has the quality that morning light sometimes has, particularly after something significant, of making everything obvious. Of cutting through all the complicated feelings and the wilful blindness and the elaborate self-deceptions, and leaving just the plain shape of things.
The plain shape of things is this. Bunny nearly died yesterday. The coffee shop is destroyed. An unknown enemy is still out there somewhere, with motives and resources I don’t fully understand yet, and as long as Dis is here, bound in the circle, the circle is a target. The wards helped, and they bought time, but they also trapped me downstairs while Dis raged above, unable to reach me, and that’s not protection, for anyone, that’s a liability.
And Dis is a shadow king. Former, technically, but still. He is ancient and powerful, and perfectly capable of looking after himself. He doesn’t need the circle. He doesn’t need to be here. He has survived worse than whatever is currently after him, and running, as unglamorous as it sounds, is a genuinely effective strategy for beings who can melt through walls.
It’s time.
I’ve known it for a while, if I’m honest. The revenge stopped making sense a long time ago, and I’ve been finding other reasons to keep him here and I’ve been very creative about it, but the morning light doesn’t have much patience for creativity.
I sit up.
Dis is awake, as always. He’s watching me with those blue eyes, steady and calm and attentive, the way he watches everything. There’s something in his expression that suggests he has been thinking about more or less the same things I have.
I look at him. He looks at me. The plastic flaps. Bristol carries on outside.
“I have to let you go, don’t I,” I say. It doesn’t come out as a question.
“Yes,” Dis says.
