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“Should we be worried?” I ask, quietly to Hex. “Properly worried, I mean.”

“Ask me again once I know the answer myself,” Hex says.

I glance at Dis, and he nods solemnly back at me. A small gesture that somehow conveys all of his concern.

This is not the reassurance I was hoping for. Neither shadow man has provided any reassurance at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I sit very still, watching stars scatter themselves across a sky that should be full of ordinary afternoon sun. Something starts quietly assembling itself in my mind, pieces I’ve been carrying around separately for weeks finally leaning towards each other in a way I can’t quite stop them doing. The prophecy. The rising dark. A crown resting somewhere new right now, in a realm I’ve never once laid eyes on, a whole world bending itself hard enough to reach clean through into mine and swallow its sun whole.

I don’t finish the thought. I actively refuse to finish it, sitting here on a hillside full of frightened strangers. But it sits there anyway, at the edge of everything, patient, enormous, entirely unbothered by whether I’m ready to look at it properly yet.

The darkness holds for what feels like considerably longer than a few minutes. Doubt starts to lance through my heart. What if this isn’t another portent? What if this is it? The dark has risen and I’ve lost the battle because I didn’t even know it had begun and now the world is doomed and it’s all my fault?

I rub at the star mark on my arm. It’s quiet, calm. Just an unexpected tattoo. I feel exactly the same inside, no new powers or anything.

I exhale heavily as calm softly flows through my veins. This isn’t it. I would know.

The light finally begins creeping back, wrong at first, too orange, too thin, before settling gradually into something like its proper colour again. The crowd erupts into that strange mixture you get after something frightening passes, relieved laughter tangled up with people still visibly shaken.

Felix lowers his glasses slowly, looking at me with an expression that isn’t quite fear and isn’t quite anything else I have a proper name for either.

“Well, that happened,” he says.

“Yes, it did,” I agree, though my own voice doesn’t sound entirely like mine.

Hex and Dis have gone quiet and still, folded neatly back into Felix and Adam’s shadows. Around us the crowd starts packing up in twos and threes, voices pitched lower than they were an hour ago. The man in the anorak is gathering his things too, muttering something about needing to check three separate websites before he’ll properly believe any of this happened.

I sit on the blanket a moment longer, looking up at a blue sky that wasn’t ordinary at all a few minutes ago. Thinking about last night. About a crown sitting somewhere it never has before. About the shape of the thought I’ve been refusing to finish since the darkness first fell.

I think about his hand against my jaw last night, steady and certain. I try very hard to hold on to that image, instead of the one currently elbowing its way in beside it.

I don’t truly know who Dark is going to be, now that he is the king of the Shadow Realm. How is the crown going to change him? Has it already done so?

I don’t have the facts, or any evidence. Not really. But I have the most horrible, cold little suspicion, sitting here with the last of the strange light finally fading properly from the horizon, that I already know exactly what he’s going to be.

I just haven’t let myself say it yet.

Chapter 21

Awkward Truth

We head back to Coffeelicious, because none of us can think of anywhere better to fall apart quietly. It’s already shut for the afternoon, and there’s something wonderfully steadying about being somewhere I know every single inch of. Right down to which floorboard creaks, and exactly how many sachets of sugar Felix has hoarded behind the till for emergencies that nobody’s ever officially told me about.

I let us in with my own key, which lives on a keyring shaped like a very small, very judgmental cat. Contrary to what half the customers seem to assume, I am also staff here, not just an extremely enthusiastic mascot in bunny ears.

I close the door behind the four of us and flick on the little lamp behind the counter rather than the main lights. The dark feels appropriate tonight. Also, I’m not sure my nerves could currently handle full brightness on top of everything else.

The chairs are still stacked from this afternoon, exactly where Felix left them hours ago, when he decided nobody needed to be attempting to sell flat whites while everyone was watching what should have been a normal partial eclipse. There’s something almost funny about that, in the way things get funny when you’re too tired and too frightened to process them properly.

I look around the empty coffee shop, and it hits me like a dagger to the heart.

I know this exact version of the shop. Unlit and quiet, streetlights instead of fairy lights, the espresso machine gone cold and patient under its cover. I was standing right about here once before, wearing nothing under my apron, listening to a man who isn’t technically a man tell me precisely what he’d choose, if choosing were ever allowed to be that simple. I don’t let myself finish the thought properly, mostly because I suspect if I do, I’ll just sit down on the floor and stay there. But it’s there anyway, the way it always is now, filed somewhere warm right next to every other thing I’ve been keeping about him.

I put the kettle on, because apparently no crisis in my entire life has ever managed without a cup of tea attached to it. As I go through the motions, I wonder how long it will take Magdalene to get here. She’d have seen the partial eclipse that unexpectedly turned full, just like everyone in the entire country. So I’m sure she’s on her way. It’s just times like this I really wish she wasn’t so devoutly, unshakeably convinced that mobile phones are tiny government spies sent to steal her aura.

Nobody says anything for a while. Hex has folded himself into the corner booth, uncharacteristically still, none of his usual sprawl or theatrics. Dis stands near the counter with his arms crossed, staring at nothing in particular. Adam and Felix are sitting close together, not quite touching, both of them looking at me like they’re waiting to see which direction I’m going to fall in.

I make the tea. I hand it around. I do all of this very carefully, very normally, because it gives me somewhere to put my hands while the actual thought sits there in my chest, enormous and patient, waiting for me to finally say it out loud.