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Magdalene pats my hand, kind and entirely unhelpful. “The specifics were never the point, my darling. The point was always that you’d know, when it mattered.”

“Shall we do this properly,” Morgana interrupts, “rather than guessing about robins?”

“Please,” Felix says, with real feeling. “Actual information. From my actual coven. That would actually be quite nice.”

Morgana produces a small crystal pendulum from somewhere inside her robes, clear quartz on a fine silver chain. She beckons me over with brisk, practiced efficiency. I go, because refusing a witch’s pendulum feels, at this exact point in my life, like precisely the kind of decision that comes back to bite you.

“Palm up,” she says. “Still, please.”

I hold my hand out. She dangles the pendulum a few inches above my palm, patient, murmuring something under her breath that could be Latin or could be Welsh.

“Normally does a nice gentle little swing,” Dave narrates, for the benefit of anyone not close enough to see. “Clockwise for yes, that sort of thing. Nothing dramatic.”

For a moment it does exactly that, a small, unremarkable circle. Adam lowers his pen. Someone near the back lets out a breath they’d clearly been holding.

Then it stops. Dead still, hanging in the air like something’s reached out and pinned it there.

“That’s new,” Dave says, and the biscuit stops halfway to his mouth.

Heat climbs my arm before I’ve properly worked out what it is. It starts at the mark and spreads fast, wrist to elbow in the space of one heartbeat. I think, distantly, oh. Then the heat stops being heat at all and becomes something with far too much weight for one arm to be holding.

“Bunny,” Felix says, and his voice has gone careful and fast.

I look down. Light is coming out from under my own skin, properly out, the way water comes through a crack that’s finally given way after holding for years. It’s climbing, past my elbow, up past my shoulder. I hear a chair go over somewhere behind me. Then the light isn’t just coming out of me anymore. It’s moving. A proper visible wave of it rolls outward across the shop, the way water rolls off a dropped stone. It catches Dis and Hex at almost exactly the same moment, throwing both of them backward off their feet and straight through the shadows pooled behind them. Gone. Simply gone, the way a candle goes out.

“Dis!” Felix’s voice cracks clean in half on the single syllable. He’s moving before I’ve even registered he’s screamed it, shoving past Big Brian, past the table, both hands already reaching for empty space where Dis was standing a half second ago.

“Hex!” Adam’s up too, notebook falling, forgotten, hitting the floor face down. He’s staring at the spot where the corner booth used to have someone sprawled across it, white all the way to his lips.

The light keeps building around me regardless, indifferent to any of it. It fills the whole coffee shop with white, ceiling to floor, my own hand a black shape against it like I’m holding up a torch made of myself. Somewhere underneath the terror starting to claw up my throat, the small, detached part of my brain still capable of thinking anything at all thinks that I have never in my life felt so completely unable to stop something I’m the one doing.

“Where are they,” I say, or try to, though I’m not sure any actual sound makes it out.

Nobody answers. Felix is on his knees where Dis used to be, hands spread flat against the floorboards like he might feel something there if he just presses hard enough. Adam’s gone completely silent in a way that’s somehow worse than shouting would have been.

Then, all at once, the way a held breath finally lets go, the light drops out of me entirely. The shop is just the shop again, dim and ordinary, spots swimming across my vision. But there is nothing where Dis and Hex should be except two very frightened humans and a great deal of empty floor.

Then the shadows in the far corner ripple, ‌pour, and reassemble. Dis is standing there again, faintly rumpled, one eyebrow raised at his own hands like he’s checking they’re still attached. Hex is a few feet away, looking, for the first time since I’ve known him, genuinely surprised by something.

Felix is off the floor and across the room before either of them can say a word. He grabs two fistfuls of Dis’s shirt like he’s checking it’s real fabric on a real person and not going to dissolve the second he lets go.

“You absolute,” Felix starts, and doesn’t finish it. He just presses his forehead hard against Dis’s chest instead, shaking.

“I am entirely undamaged,” Dis says, sounding faintly bewildered by the fuss, one hand coming up to rest, careful and uncertain, against the back of Felix’s head. “Simply displaced. Briefly.”

Adam has already got both arms around Hex. He isn’t saying anything at all, just holding on. Hex, for once in his entire existence, doesn’t make a joke about it. He just wraps himself around Adam properly and lets him.

Morgana’s pendulum is still swinging on its chain, wild and wrong, trying to get as far from my hand as the chain will allow.

“Well,” Magdalene says finally, into the ringing quiet, her voice gone small and reverent in a way I’ve genuinely never heard from her before, not once, in my whole life. “There’s your precise.”

Nobody laughs. Felix, still wrapped around Dis, looks up at me properly for the first time. Whatever’s on my face must be bad, because his expression shifts instantly from relief into something much more careful.

“That,” Hex says eventually, extracting himself just far enough from Adam to actually speak, voice not quite as steady as he’d probably like it to be, “is an extremely promising development. And also, I would like it on record, extremely unpleasant to experience.”

“Morale,” Dis says, still not letting go of Felix, “will not be an issue. Combat readiness, however, appears to require some caution around blast radius.”

“I always knew,” Magdalene says, to nobody, to everybody, already reaching for a fresh scrap of paper, hand shaking slightly with the sheer size of her own delight. “Forty years, I said so, didn’t I say so...”