Page 58

“I need to clear my head,” I say, which isn’t exactly a lie. What I need is to make space for the fact that I’m in love with the man I’m meant to destroy. My destiny was to defeat the rising dark, once and for all. But I went and fell in love with him instead. Gave him my first kiss. My first everything. And despite all of it, I cannot reconcile Dark with the big bad evil who is going to end the world unless I end him first. How can they possibly be the same person? How?

But needing to clear my head is the version of the truth that gets me out the door alone, and alone is what I want.

Magdalene squeezes my hand on the way out, says something about strength gathering in the quiet, which I choose to take as a blessing rather than a warning. Then I’m properly outside, the night gone properly cold.

The city is quiet, empty, subdued. Everyone instinctively staying in the place that feels safest. Home.

Bristol is properly rattled tonight, and isn’t bothering to hide it, not after the sky nearly ate itself a few hours ago.

I don’t go the direct way home. I’m not sure my legs would agree to it even if I asked nicely. Instead, I let them carry me the long way, past the closed shops and the bus stop where a man is loudly explaining eclipses to nobody in particular. Eventually, entirely without meaning to, I end up straight at the gates of the park.

It’s shut, obviously. It’s always shut at this hour, padlock exactly where it’s always been. The low iron fence beside it does its usual unconvincing job of keeping anyone out who’s even slightly motivated. I stand there for a moment, looking at that padlock, and something in my chest does a complicated twisting thing that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite the opposite either.

You wish to trespass, he said to me, a note of worry in his calm, quiet voice. As if he was deeply concerned about pushing me too hard.

And then, at the end of that night time picnic, he promised to find somewhere unlocked next time. But there never was a next time, and now there never will be.

I look round once, out of pure habit, checking for wardens or security guards or anyone official looking who might take a dim view of a grown man climbing council property at midnight, while everyone else is sensibly at home, watching the news channels trying to explain what they’re still calling an unexplained astronomical event.

I have, I realise, already half prepared an explanation for a park warden who does not exist. Something about needing air, something reasonable and boring. Apparently my nervous system hasn’t been fully briefed on which catastrophes deserve my attention tonight, because it’s filing getting told off by a man with a torch somewhere alarmingly close to the actual end of the world.

Nobody comes. I climb over, far less gracefully than I did while holding his hand. This time I catch my sleeve on the top rail and swear quietly at it in a way Magdalene would not approve of.

The oak’s exactly where we left it, enormous and patient in the middle of the grass. There’s a bench near its base I don’t remember from before, a small brass plaque screwed into the back of it. I lean down to read it, out of nothing better to do. In loving memory of Doris, who thought this was the best bench in Bristol, and would want you to enjoy it too.

I sit down properly at that, right on Doris’s bench. Something in me loosens slightly at the sheer, uncomplicated ordinariness of a woman having opinions about seating, in a world that currently contains prophecies and eclipses and ancient shadow kings. Apparently, even the apocalypse leaves room for someone’s nan to have a favourite spot.

I don’t let myself look at the specific patch of grass. I look at it anyway. Blanket too small for two people, cheese eaten straight from the packet because he forgot about knives, him examining a single piece of cheddar like it might be evidence in an ongoing investigation. I did not have the word for lonely, he told me, that night, so plainly it nearly undid me on the spot.

I sit on Doris’s bench and let myself have exactly one full minute of missing him properly. The version of him from that night, unhurried and curious and entirely mine. Then I make myself stop, because there isn’t room left in me tonight for missing someone who might no longer entirely exist in the way I’m picturing.

That’s when the shadows start moving wrong.

Not creeping, not spreading, nothing so ordinary as that. They gather instead, pulling inward from every direction at once. The grass and the bench and Doris’s careful little plaque all lose their edges as the dark around them thickens and pools towards one single point, a few feet from where I’m sitting. The streetlamp on the other side of the fence flickers, once, twice, then simply gives up entirely. The second one follows it a heartbeat later, darkness rolling towards me lamp by lamp, like something is switching the whole world off on purpose.

I know exactly who this is before I’ve had a single conscious thought about it. Some part of me that doesn’t consult the rest of me at all simply knows, with total, bone-deep certainty, the way you know your own name. I don’t have time right now to examine what that says about me, because knowing who does absolutely nothing to answer the much more urgent question of what.

He took a throne today. The throne of the Shadow Realm. Became the rising dark. His ascension to power was so powerful it turned a partial eclipse not so partial. I have no idea what a person looks like on the other side of that, whether gentleness survives power or gets left behind with everything else that didn’t fit the new shape.

Sitting here on a dead woman’s bench in a locked park at midnight, watching darkness eat streetlight in one direction after another, I find myself genuinely, properly afraid. Not of some faceless prophecy villain, but of him. Of what might be wearing his outline right now, here to finish this before I’ve even worked out what finishing it is supposed to mean.

My whole body goes very still, the particular stillness of something deciding whether running is even an option worth considering.

Then the dark finishes gathering, and two amber eyes open in the middle of it. Every single thing in me that was braced to run simply stops.

It’s him. It’s still him. Bigger somehow, weightier, wrapped in something that wasn’t there before, but underneath all of it, unmistakably, entirely, it’s him.

“Bunny,” he says, and his voice is exactly the same, low and careful and mine. I feel my whole chest cave inward with relief so total it’s almost worse than the fear was.

“You’re still you,” I say, before I can stop myself, standing up so fast the back of my knees hit Doris’s bench and I nearly topple over.

“I did not expect that to be in question,” he says.

“You were crowned king today,” I say. “I’ve read enough stories to know that’s usually the exact point where people turn evil.”

Something moves across his face that might, in a less catastrophic week, have been amusement. “I am aware of how I currently look,” he says. “I did not come here to alarm you.”

“Well, you’ve absolutely alarmed me,” I say. “Ten out of ten. Full marks.”