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“Looking at me like that,” I say.

“I am not doing anything,” he says softly, almost a whisper, while his glowing eyes swirl with light and fix on my lips.

“Your eyes are doing something,” I squeak.

He doesn’t answer. The silence between us changes shape entirely, thick and warm and charged with something neither of us has named since the pause began. He leans in, slowly, the way he did that very first time in the library. I feel my whole body lean towards him before I’ve properly decided to, drawn in by what feels like months of wanting and days of missing, and by a night that’s already asked far too much of both of us.

His mouth is inches from mine. I can feel the strange chill of him. I can see every careful line of his handsome face in the dim light, amber eyes half-lidded, waiting, wanting, exactly as much as I do. Rain hammers the window behind him, streetlight catching the water running down the glass in long, silver lines. For one long, suspended moment, the whole world seems to have narrowed down to this exact half-inch of space between us.

I want this so badly it aches, a physical thing, low in my chest. It spreads down through my whole body like the tea I haven’t finished, warm and insistent and impossible to ignore.

And that’s exactly why I can’t. I can’t kiss him and move on and forget. Can’t kiss him and not keep him.

He’s not mine to keep. He belongs to his people and they need him. Just like this realm needs me.

I close my eyes.

“Please go,” I whisper, and I hate how small it sounds, how much it costs to say two words that mean the exact opposite of everything my body’s currently begging for.

The cold air shifts, reluctant, aching in its own way. I can feel it even without seeing it. When I open my eyes again, the chair across from me is empty, my tea steaming softly, the rain still hammering against the windows like it hasn’t noticed anything has changed at all.

Chapter 17

Behold

The bell above the door goes off like it’s been personally offended, which by now I recognise as Magdalene’s signature entrance regardless of how gently she’s actually pushed it. She sweeps into Coffeelicious wearing a kaftan the colour of a bruise, both arms already raised like she’s mid-ceremony rather than mid-doorway.

“The first portent approaches,” she announces to the shop at large. “We must go to the highest point in the city. Immediately.”

“We’re mid shift, Magdalene,” I explain with a mixture of alarm and hope. Maybe if we ignore the end times, they will go away?

“Higher purposes do not respect shift patterns, Bunny.”

Felix sets his cloth down on the counter, considerably more serious about this than I expect. “Which portent?”

That surprises me. I brace for the usual eye-roll, the usual dry dismissal. It doesn’t come.

“You believe her,” I say.

“Yes,” Felix says, simply. “I just don’t particularly want today to be the day.”

Magdalene looks, for a moment, genuinely touched by this, before visibly deciding not to make anything of it. She busies herself instead with straightening a stack of napkins that didn’t need straightening. It’s the closest thing to embarrassment I’ve ever seen from her.

Adam, hovering near the till, glances between us. “So we’re going?”

“We’re going,” Felix says, already untying his apron.

“Cabot Tower,” Magdalene says decisively, as if the location itself proves her point. “The highest ground for miles. It must be witnessed from there. It is written.”

“Of course it is,” Felix says, already shrugging his coat on. “Never once written somewhere with a lift.”

“The universe does not consult my knees before choosing its locations, Felix.”

“Clearly not.”

Magdalene doesn’t rise to it, doesn’t even bother with her usual theatrical flourish. Something in her stillness makes Felix’s eye roll falter slightly before he’s even finished it.

“The universe doesn’t consult me on any of this, actually,” Magdalene says, with sudden, weary dignity. “You have no idea how tiring it is, being right about things nobody wants to be true.”