Page 16

“They lie, m’love,” Magdalene says. “They wear kindness like a coat over rot.”

“He’s not lying. He’s called Dark. That’s his name, not a description.” I take a breath, aware of how ridiculous the next part is going to sound, and decide to say it anyway, because it’s true and because it’s the only thing I can think of that might actually land. “He’s a shadow man. He lives with me, sort of. And Felix’s boyfriend is one too, and I’m not even going to get into the fact that Adam’s engaged to one, because that’s a whole separate conversation and we do not have time for it today. He makes genuinely excellent peanut butter sandwiches, Dark does, not Adam’s fiance, even though he puts the peanut butter on completely the wrong part, and he has never once, not one single time, done anything except try to keep me safe.”

The shop goes quiet again, for the third time this afternoon, and Magdalene’s hand, still hovering with its palmful of salt, hangs frozen in the air between us. Somewhere behind me, I feel my shadow being very, very still, that particular tension that means he’s calculating exactly how fast Magdalene can move versus how fast he can.

I hope it’s faster. I’m still haunted by the look on Adam’s face when he told me about the time he threw salt on Hex, and I really, really don’t want that to happen to Dark. For selfish reasons too, since I don’t think I could cope with that level of trauma.

Magdalene studies me for a long moment. Then, slowly, she studies the corner, eyes narrowing, head tilting, the particular assessing look she used to give storm clouds before deciding whether they warranted moving the washing in.

Felix, beside me, lets the crackle at his fingertips die down, though he doesn’t sit back down properly. He stays half poised, watching Magdalene with the wary attention of someone who isn’t quite ready to stand down yet. Adam breathes out slowly, the colour starting to creep back into his face.

“Hm,” she says, at last, and pours the salt carefully back into its pouch, tying the string with brisk, unhurried fingers, entirely unbothered by how close she came to flinging it across my coffee shop two seconds earlier. “Dark spirits are always drawn to the light, m’dear. It’s simply their nature. Moths to a flame. It doesn’t mean this one means you harm. Merely that he cannot help himself.”

Felix is watching her properly now, head tilted slightly, something working behind his eyes that isn’t quite recognition, not yet, more the itch of a resemblance he can’t place. “You know,” he says slowly, “you’ve got the exact same way of tying a knot as someone I know. Same little flick at the end.”

“Lots of people tie knots the same way,” Magdalene says, breezily, not looking up, and something about the speed of the answer makes me think it isn’t quite as breezy as it wants to sound.

Felix doesn’t push it, though I catch him filing the thought away carefully, the way you’d tuck a receipt into a pocket to deal with properly later.

“Dark is not,” I start, and stop, because I’m not entirely sure what I was about to say, or why my chest has gone suddenly, uncomfortably tight.

“It is to be expected,” Magdalene says, settling back onto her stool, already moving on, already reaching for the next thread of her explanation like the last two minutes hadn’t happened at all. “You’ll find they gather round you more and more as the prophecy nears its fullness. It’s not a comment on you, Brian. It’s simply what light does. It draws the dark towards it, the way the moon draws the tide.”

The conversation moves on. Felix asks a question about timing, about how anyone’s meant to know when exactly this reckoning is supposed to arrive, and Magdalene launches into an answer involving three separate phases of the Mayan Calendar and a reference to Brian Two’s worm composting that I only half hear.

I don’t move on with it.

Moths to a flame. Simply what light does. It doesn’t mean this one means you harm.

I think about every quiet moment over the last few months. Every time he trailed behind me in careful silence. The time he chased off the mugger without being asked. The time he sat in my kitchen making objectively terrible toast because he wanted to. And of course, Sebastian’s trouser mishap.

I feel something small and cold settle where the warmth had been a minute ago. Is that all it ever was? Not choice. Not me, specifically, not Bunny, not Brian, not any actual version of who I am underneath the cheerful noise. Just tide pulled by a moon it never chose to answer to, something ancient and helpless doing exactly what it was always going to do the moment I came close enough.

I glance towards the corner where he has retreated, towards him, hoping for something, some flicker of reassurance I can hold on to against the small, cold thing sitting in my chest.

He’s watching me. Steady, quiet, unreadable in the particular way he gets when something’s happening behind his eyes that he isn’t ready to hand over yet. I search his face for anything, confirmation, denial, anything at all, and find only that same careful stillness he’s always worn. I’m good at reading his silences. But I can’t read this.

I don’t know what he’s thinking.

I realise, with a small, sinking feeling, that I don’t actually know if he’s always known who I was. Whether any of it, the trailing, the toast, the grin in a crowded corridor, was ever about me at all, rather than about whatever it is I apparently am.

I turn back to the table, to Magdalene’s voice still moving steadily through lunar cycles, to Felix’s occasional dry interjection, and try very hard to look like a person who isn’t quietly falling apart in the middle of a closed coffee shop.

I don’t think I manage it especially well.

Felix, at least, seems to notice, throwing me a glance across the table that isn’t quite a question but isn’t nothing either, the sort of look that says later, we’re talking about whatever that was, without needing a single word attached to it. I give him the smallest nod I can manage and go back to nodding along at Magdalene, who has now moved on to explaining why the number thirteen carries particular weight in the old texts, something about the phases of the moon and the original circle of founders, none of which I properly absorb.

I keep stealing glances at the corner instead. He hasn’t moved. Hasn’t spoken again since the salt nearly hit the air between us, and I find myself wondering, with a small, uncomfortable twist, whether that’s restraint or whether it’s simply that he genuinely has nothing to say to contradict what Magdalene’s just handed me.

Moths to a flame. It doesn’t mean this one means you harm. Merely that he cannot help himself.

I had thought, on quiet nights walking home with him three paces behind me, that whatever this was between us had chosen itself. That out of everyone he could have watched over, he’d somehow landed on me, specifically, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything except the actual shape of who I am. It’s a strange thing, realising how much I wanted that to be true without ever properly noticing I wanted it, and an even stranger thing, sitting here now, wondering if I’ve been quietly congratulating myself on being chosen by something that was only ever following its nature.

Magdalene’s voice rises and falls around me, cheerful and certain, utterly unaware she’s just knocked something loose in my chest that I don’t yet know how to put back.

Chapter 8

Shocking Solution