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Adam’s doing the same thing while looking at Hex. Two humans who love two shadow beings, both suddenly aware that the sides being drawn here aren’t abstract at all, aren’t hypothetical. Not the sort of thing you can simply decide not to think about until it goes away.

Nobody’s said it plainly yet, the actual shape of the choice sitting in front of all of us. But I can see it settling into both their faces at once, the same slow, terrible arithmetic.

I did this. I’m the one who finally said the words out loud. I’m the one with the prophecy. I’m the reason people are having to make such huge decisions. It feels like this is all my fault, even though some quieter, more sensible part of me knows perfectly well the sides were always going to draw themselves eventually, whether I handed them the sentence to do it with or not.

Hex crosses the room without a word and drops to his knees in front of Adam, taking both his hands. There’s nothing performed about it, none of the usual dramatic flourish he brings to absolutely everything else he does.

“My place is by your side, My Love,” he says, low, certain, none of his usual performance in it at all. “Whatever happens. Whatever anyone else decides this is supposed to be. I am not leaving you to face it, and I am not standing against you either.”

Adam’s breath catches audibly.

Something in my own throat goes tight watching it. This ancient, powerful being on his knees on my employer’s slightly sticky floor, for the ordinary human he loves, no theatre in it anywhere. I think, rather uselessly, that whatever this prophecy imagines it’s owed, it clearly didn’t account for people simply refusing to let go of each other.

Dis straightens, solemn, and turns to look at me properly, giving me the full weight of his attention.

“I pledge my allegiance to the light,” he says, formal and weighty, as if he’s reciting something he’s said before in circumstances considerably grander than a closed coffee shop. Then, quieter, dropping the formality entirely, “My Little Witch is human. He needs the light to prevail, or he is not safe. That is not a complicated calculation for me to make.”

Felix makes a small, strangled sound that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite the opposite.

“Careful,” he says, voice wobbling slightly. “Almost sounded like you cared there, Disney.”

“I have never once claimed otherwise,” Dis says.

“You’ve claimed otherwise constantly,” Felix says. “You claimed otherwise this morning, over the burnt bagel.”

“That was a comment on your baking technique,” Dis says. “Not my feelings.”

“Sure it was,” Felix says, entirely unconvinced.

I feel something in my chest loosen slightly, watching all of them arrange themselves so plainly around me, no hesitation, no calculation beyond the ones they’ve already made. Whatever’s coming, whatever the prophecy actually wants from any of us, I’m apparently not facing it as alone as the last hour made it feel. There’s something almost overwhelming about realising that properly, all at once, in a closed coffee shop.

For a moment, nobody says anything else. The five of us just sit here in the half-dark, tea cooling, the shop holding its breath around us the way shops do after hours. I let myself have that moment properly, unhurried, before whatever comes next arrives to take it away again.

The bell above the door goes off like it’s been personally offended. Magdalene sweeps in, breathless, kaftan askew, sandals slapping against the floor with none of her usual ceremony.

“You saw it,” I say, before she’s even fully through the door.

“I saw it,” she gasps, one hand pressed to her chest, the other clutching the doorframe. She looks as though she’s not entirely confident her legs will hold her up much longer. “Brian. Bunny. The whole sky. I have never in forty years witnessed anything like it, and I have witnessed a great many things.”

“We know what it means,” I say, quietly. “Or we think we do.”

She stops properly then, taking in the room, and this time her eyes find Hex and Dis properly, not cataloguing, not surprised, just two more faces to account for in whatever’s coming. “Hex,” she says, with a small nod, the same brisk acknowledgement she’d give any of her own flock arriving late to a gathering. “Dis.” Nothing more than that, no questions about what they are or why they’re here, as though the matter settled itself the moment she decided it had.

I find myself wondering, watching her do it so easily, how long she’s actually been able to see them properly, whether the tower was really the first time or simply the first time she let any of us catch her at it. Then I wonder why I’m surprised. This is a woman who held a congregation together on goat omens and sheer force of will for forty years. Of course she’d have been watching far more carefully than anyone gave her credit for.

“You’ve worked it out,” she says. Not a question.

“I think so. Yes.”

“Tell me,” she says.

I take a breath, and tell her.

Chapter 22

Reluctant Nemesis

Felix offers to walk me home. So does Adam. Hex half rises from the corner booth too, before I shake my head at all three of them in quick succession.