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“You told me I was special at every single dinner for twenty years,” I say.

“Special is not the same as informed,” Magdalene says.

“It really felt the same from where I was sitting,” I say.

“The goats,” she continues, undeterred, “were always meant to be the final sign. Thirteen of them, standing in a perfect circle, facing inward, beneath a full moon. It’s precise. Symbolic. The circle representing wholeness, the inward facing representing the gathering of forces before the reckoning.”

“Or,” I offer, gently, “goats occasionally do strange things for reasons nobody fully understands, and this might just be one of those times.”

“Brian,” Magdalene says.

“I’m just saying, in the spirit of balance, that goats are unpredictable animals,” I say.

“The goats have never once stood in a perfect circle in forty years of goat keeping,” Magdalene says, with the flat, immovable certainty of someone who has clearly had this exact argument with herself already and won. “Not once. Until three nights ago.”

I don’t have a good answer to that, mostly because, deep down, in the part of me that spent the better part of twenty years absorbing every piece of this belief system whether I meant to or not, I don’t entirely disagree with her.

Felix reappears at my elbow, having apparently dealt with the queue through sheer force of will, and folds his arms, looking between me and Magdalene with the particular narrow-eyed focus he usually reserves for troublesome customers and unstable summoning circles.

“So let me get this straight,” he says. “You’ve known your whole life that you’re prophesied to end some ancient battle between light and dark, and the reason it’s relevant now is a goat formation.”

“When you say it like that it does sound slightly odd,” I say.

“There is no not-odd way to say it, Bunny,” Felix says.

“Fair point,” I say.

Magdalene moves on to describing the exact positioning of the thirteenth goat, apparently the linchpin of the entire formation, and Adam is nodding along with the glazed, valiant expression of a man in far over his depth and determined not to show it. Felix, beside me, exhales slowly through his nose.

“Right,” he says. “Well. I’m going to need you to help me close early today, because I don’t think any of us are getting through the rest of this shift pretending everything’s normal, and also because I want to hear the rest of this properly, sitting down, with tea, and possibly something stronger than tea.”

“That seems fair,” I say.

“And you,” he adds, pointing a finger somewhere at the general vicinity of my shoulder, at the shape he still can’t quite see, “are staying for this conversation too. I have questions for you specifically.”

There’s a pause, and then, faint but unmistakable, my shadow’s voice.

“That is reasonable,” he says.

Felix looks briefly unsettled by receiving a clear and audible reply in public, then squares his shoulders like a man reminding himself he’s dealt with stranger things than this before breakfast, which, to be fair, he probably has.

High Priestess Magdalene is apparently too busy reciting a poem about the prophetic power of goats to notice that one of the people at the table isn’t visible or human.

I flip the sign on the door to closed a full three hours early, giving an apologetic wave to the two customers who were about to come in and who look faintly outraged about it.

Felix, not so apologetically, shoos the remaining customers out of the coffee shop.

I lock the door behind them and turn back to face the small, strange, entirely well-meaning collection of people currently gathered in my workplace, waiting for me to explain my not insignificant part in the end of the world.

“Right,” I say, echoing Felix and taking a breath. “Where do you want me to start?”

Chapter 7

Salty

“Wherever feels right to you, Brian,” Magdalene says, folding her hands in her lap with the serene patience of someone who’s genuinely waited forty years for this exact conversation. She settles further into the stool like she means to be there a good while yet.

I pull a chair around from the nearest table and sit, mostly because my legs have started to feel slightly unreliable. And Felix drops into the seat beside me with his arms folded and an expression that says he intends to extract every possible detail from this conversation, whether I like it or not. Adam drifts towards the till out of sheer habit, hand halfway to the espresso machine before he remembers we’re closed. Then he blinks at his own hand like it’s betrayed him, and comes to sit down at the table instead, looking faintly sheepish about it.