Page 38

“I am aware,” he says. “I have been three streets over, telling myself I was patrolling for portals.”

“Were you patrolling?” I ask, already fairly certain of the answer.

“No,” he admits, not even attempting to make it convincing.

I laugh, and it comes out wobblier than I want it to. Somewhere between amused and close to properly crying.

He doesn’t move any closer. He keeps exactly the distance the pause is supposed to demand, though I can see what it costs him to hold it.

“For what it’s worth,” I say, mostly to give my chest something to do other than ache, “growing up on the commune gave me absolutely no useful training for this specific situation. I can tell you how to purify water with a coffee filter and a great deal of faith. Nobody once covered what to do when a several-hundred-year-old shadow man starts loitering by your local swings.”

He tilts his head slightly, considering that properly. “I do not believe that is a gap in your education anyone could reasonably have anticipated.”

“You’d be amazed what they anticipated.” I shrug. “There was a whole afternoon on yoghurt making. Genuinely useless, as it turns out, given how my life’s actually gone.”

He doesn’t laugh, not exactly, but something around his eyes does the quiet version of it, the closest thing he has to one. For a moment we just stand there in the settling dark, comfortable in a way neither of us is supposed to be allowed right now.

It occurs to me, in the quiet, that I’ve spent days filling every spare hour with something, anything. Long walks and reorganising things that didn’t need it, purely so I wouldn’t have to sit still with how much I miss him. Watching him watch me, I find myself wondering whether he’s been doing something similar, in whatever way a several-hundred-year-old shadow man goes about not sitting still with a thing.

“What do you actually do,” I ask, once we’ve both stopped smiling long enough to remember we’re supposed to be being sensible, “on the nights you’re not pretending to patrol”

He considers this for longer than the question probably warrants, turning it over the careful way he turns over everything.

“I have been practising toast,” he says eventually.

I blink. “Toast.”

“Toast,” he says again, as if repeating it might make it sound like a perfectly reasonable pastime for an ancient shadow being.

“You’ve taken up toast.” I stare at him. “As a discipline.”

“I would not go that far,” he says. “I would call it an ongoing project.”

I press a hand to my chest, delighted despite myself. “Who on earth agreed to teach you? Please don’t say Hex, I refuse to believe Hex has ever operated a toaster unsupervised in his entire existence.”

“Fiend,” he says.

I blink again, faster this time. “W… Who’s Fiend?” The stammer catches me off guard. I don’t think I’ve ever properly lied to him before, not like this, not outright, and some old instinct seems to be objecting to the attempt on principle. And trying to sound like I don’t know, is only making Felix’s exact words surface louder in my head, right when I most need them gone. Nightmare twink who can get pregnant.

“My brother’s betrothed,” Dark says.

Something in the careful, level way he says it tells me there’s a great deal more sitting inside that sentence than the three words he’s actually given me. For a moment neither of us says anything at all, the unspoken part of it settling quietly into the space between us instead. If Night steps down. If Dark takes a crown he never wanted. A realm doesn’t simply hand a man an empty throne. It hands him everything that comes bolted to it, apparently, betrothed included. Neither of us is quite ready to say that part out loud on a pavement at nine in the evening.

I decide, quite deliberately, not to ask the question actually sitting on the end of my tongue. Not tonight.

“Right,” I say instead, a beat too brightly, mostly to stop the silence turning into something heavier than either of us can carry standing out here. “And how’s Fiend’s toast?”

“Terrible,” he says. Something in him eases slightly, grateful, I think, that I’ve let the rest of it go for now. “I do not believe Fiend has successfully produced a single edible slice either. He simply enjoys supervising. He stood over the toaster for the better part of an hour last night describing, at considerable length, everything I was doing incorrectly, without once offering to demonstrate the correct method himself. I am not certain he has ever actually eaten toast. I am not certain the Shadow Realm has ever seen a toaster prior to my acquiring one.”

“You brought a toaster into the Shadow Realm?” I ask, faintly.

“It seemed the sensible way to practise,” he says, entirely serious.

A laugh bubbles up out of me and it sounds alarmingly unhinged. “Fiend sounds like a spectacularly unhelpful teacher regardless of the location of toasters.” Unable to drop it even though I want to.

“He is.” He shakes his head slightly, the memory of it clearly still fresh. “I have burned seventeen slices this week under his instruction. I do not believe a single one has been fit to eat.”

“Then why keep at it,” I ask, “if your only teacher’s as hopeless as you are?”