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“The robins,” Big Brian murmurs to himself, satisfied, nodding.

“Cool,” Dave says, and picks his biscuit back up off the floor, examines it, and eats it anyway.

The conversation moves into a kind of giddy, relieved chaos I don’t have the energy to properly participate in. Hex is delighted, in the specific way that means he immediately starts speculating out loud about tactical advantages. He gestures at me like I’m a particularly promising weapon he’s just been issued. Dis actually looks pleased, murmuring something about momentum that Adam scrambles to write down. Big Brian claims the robins predicted exactly this, and nobody has the heart to ask him how. Magdalene starts drafting something on a fresh piece of paper that I strongly suspect is going to become scripture within the decade, muttering about needing a proper verse for it. Even Morgana allows herself something that might, on anyone else, be called a smile. Beside her, Dave simply continues to eat biscuits, entirely unbothered, as though people lighting up like a bonfire happens at most social events he attends.

I sit very still and let all of it happen around me, nodding when nodding seems required. I think about the fact that I have just watched an entire roomful of people I love, feel hope, real hope, at the sight of me lighting up like that. Because it means I might actually be able to do the thing the prophecy apparently built me for.

Nobody in this room has asked what that actually requires of the person underneath the prophecy.

I think about Dark saying he cannot let his people be destroyed. I think about the throne he never asked for, and the sharpness he told me about once, the one he didn’t have a purpose for until now.

I look around this coffee shop at Felix’s coven and my own strange, sprawling family, all of them cheerfully arming themselves to help me end the rising dark.

Nobody’s asking why.

Only how. And when.

I want to ask something. I can feel the shape of it sitting right behind my teeth. Why, why are we doing this? What if the dark on the other end of all that light, hasn’t actually done anything to deserve it?

And look, I’ve already nearly hurt two people I love just by existing.

But the room’s long since moved past me, loud with relief and adrenaline. And there is nobody left to ask.

Chapter 24

Come inside

Sleep is not currently interested in me, and the feeling appears to be mutual. Sleepless nights are apparently my new normal.

Once again, I’ve tried all my usual tricks. Counting things. Reciting the specifics of contract formation to myself. That’s usually reliable, since law is the one thing I can always fall properly into and lose track of the time inside. Tonight it’s doing nothing at all except reminding me that offer and acceptance apparently doesn’t apply to prophecies. Nobody asked if I accepted any of this before posting it straight into my life anyway.

Every time I close my eyes, I see the flare of light again. I see Dis and Hex simply not there anymore. Gone, the exact way you’d blow out a candle. Felix on his knees on the floorboards, reaching for a person who wasn’t there to be reached.

I did that. Not the prophecy, not Dark, not fate. Me. Something coming out of my own arm, out of my own skin, because apparently that’s what I am now. I nearly folded two people I love clean out of existence, just by standing in a room and letting it happen.

Why does that get to be the plan? Why is nobody else asking that? Why is everybody so relieved and so hopeful and so ready to arm me for a fight against someone whose only stated crime is refusing to let his own people be destroyed?

I turn onto my side and try to work out whether I’m only asking this because I’m annoyingly, chronically incapable of thinking badly of anyone. Up to and including people who, by any sensible measure, deserve it. I have never once in my life managed to properly hate somebody. I forgave the man who tried to mug me on Park Street before he’d even finished running away. I forgive every rude customer in the coffee shop. I’ve never managed to stay properly annoyed at anyone for longer than a day, not even people who’ve genuinely earned it. Even Sebastian.

Maybe this is just that. Maybe I’m doing the thing I always do. Finding the good in the person everyone else has decided is the villain, because I am constitutionally, hopelessly unable to hold a grudge. Even against people who’d probably benefit from being held to one occasionally.

I honestly don’t know. Perhaps that’s simply the shape I come in. The boy who’s never managed to stay properly angry at anyone, still hunting for the good in the one thing this entire prophecy insists doesn’t have any left.

I give up on sleep and pad through to the kitchen to put the kettle on, because if there’s one thing the commune has taught me, it’s that no crisis, existential or otherwise, has ever been improved by skipping the tea.

While it boils, I go to check my bedroom window, the way I have every single night since I met him. An old habit worn smooth from repetition. Half hoping and half dreading, and mostly just needing to look, even though I know exactly what I’m going to find. Nothing. An ordinary bush, doing nothing in particular, in an ordinary bit of Bristol dark.

Except it isn’t nothing.

He’s there. Properly there. Not a shadow along a wall or a suggestion of something too still to be natural. Just him, standing in the shrubbery beneath my window, the exact same way he stood there for countless nights.

My whole chest does something complicated and enormous.

He looks different tonight. More solid than ever. Dark fabric and old-fashioned tailoring that belongs somewhere with a throne in it, his long hair loose around his shoulders.

His amber eyes are already fixed on my window. Already found me. They glow steady in the dark like he’s been standing there simply for the chance to look at me like that. Like I’m the single most precious thing currently existing in either of our worlds.

I don’t think about it. I don’t let myself think about it, because thinking about it is exactly the sort of thing that stops people doing the brave, stupid, necessary thing before they’ve had the chance to actually do it.