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I’ve only seen Felix’s dad once before, briefly, at the end of the last time Wraith showed up in this exact shop. He was the one who calmly walked out with Wraith bound to a cursed amulet.

“He’s trying to help you,” he says, breathing hard. There’s something in the way he says it, exhausted and certain and entirely without room for argument, that lands harder than any spell in the room could have managed. “Look at him. Actually look.”

Hex looks. His fist doesn’t fall, not immediately, but something in his stance shifts. Uncertain now instead of murderous. In the space that uncertainty opens up, Wraith moves, quick and small and desperate, one hand thrown out towards the tear.

The portal shudders. Folds. Closes with a sound like a held breath finally released after being held far too long. The violet light goes out all at once, leaving the shop in ordinary, grey afternoon dark. It’s littered with broken tables and blood and a silence so complete I can hear my own heart going far too fast in my ears.

Wraith is still crouched on the floor, shaking. As the last of that unnatural light fades from the shop, his shape fades with it. The tall, wrong, terrifying thing unravels into something else entirely. Someone else entirely. A boy who can’t be older than nineteen, slight and achingly young. He has a heart shaped face with a small snub nose and enormous eyes that make him look like something built specifically to be protected. His dark hair is cropped close at the sides and swept forward, like some sort of Kpop idol. Shadows still cling soft round the edges of him, the way they cling to every shadow man I’ve ever met. But his knees are pulled up hard to his chest, and he flinches at every sound in the room, like each one might be the one that finally hurts him properly.

Felix’s dad doesn’t hesitate. He crosses the space between them and simply stands in front of him. Solid, deliberate, a wall between Wraith and every single other person, his whole body angled like he’s done this before.

Nobody moves for a long moment.

Felix is the one who finally breaks it. He presses a hand to the cut above his eyebrow, breathing hard. He looks at the boy shaking on his coffee shop floor like he isn’t entirely sure what he’s looking at anymore. Something complicated moves behind his eyes that I don’t think he’s fully worked out himself yet.

“Thank you,” he says, quietly. He means it, and the words cost him something visible. “For the help. Again. But you can go now.”

Something flickers across his dad’s face at that, quick and old and painful, gone almost before I’ve properly caught it. It’s the particular look of a man who came here hoping, somewhere underneath everything else, that today might be the day something between him and Felix started mending. And who’s been handed instead the exact same door he’s been shown before. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t ask for anything more than what’s being offered.

“Of course,” he says. There’s no bitterness in it, only something quieter and sadder than that. The sound of someone who’s long since stopped believing he’s owed anything different. He gathers Wraith up with a gentleness I wasn’t expecting from him, careful hands, careful voice. The two of them are gone before anyone thinks to ask a single one of the several hundred questions currently crowding the room.

I look around at the wreckage. At Felix, bleeding, watching the door his father just walked through with an expression I can’t fully name. At Morgana, swaying, one hand still pressed hard to her side. At Hex, still faintly translucent at the edges, breathing hard, staring at the space where the portal used to be like it might reopen out of pure spite.

At the empty air where Dark’s eyes found mine, right before all of this started. I still don’t know. I still can’t tell whether what I saw in them was grief, or fury, or the exact same helpless horror currently sitting in my own chest. Two worlds, trying to tear each other apart over a war neither of us actually wants.

Chapter 26

Lemon Drizzle

The shop looks like something out of a disaster film, if disaster films were shot on a considerably smaller budget and set exclusively in coffee shops. Every table’s overturned except the two nearest the window. Even those are sitting at an angle that suggests they’d rather not be involved in whatever’s happening here. The stockroom door is hanging off one hinge where the portal used to be. It swings slightly in a draught that shouldn’t exist, given every window in the place is still theoretically closed. There’s a scorch mark on the ceiling I can’t account for and don’t especially want an explanation of. The pastry case has somehow survived entirely intact. That feels less like good luck and more like the universe having a very specific sense of humour about what does and doesn’t deserve protecting today.

I’m on my knees behind the counter with the first aid kit, doing the only genuinely useful thing I’ve managed all afternoon. I’m holding a wad of paper towels against the side of Felix’s head.

“These are the good ones,” he says. “The soft ones. I was saving them.”

“You were saving the paper towels?” I ask.

“They’re expensive,” he says. “Do you know what two-ply costs now?”

“You’re bleeding on them regardless of what you paid,” I point out.

“I’m aware, thank you,” he says. “I can feel it happening. That’s rather the problem.”

“Well,” I say, aiming for something light, something like my usual self, “at least the coffee machine survived. Silver linings.”

Felix looks at me. The coffee machine did not survive. There’s a chunk missing out of it roughly the size of a fist. It’s currently making a small, distressed ticking noise that suggests it may never make a flat white again.

“Right,” I say, into his silence. “Not my finest one.”

I try again a minute later, something about how at least nobody’s going to complain about the ambience now. That one doesn’t land either. Somewhere around the third failed attempt, I stop trying to be the version of me that finds the bright side of things. Apparently today doesn’t have one, and I don’t currently have the energy to keep manufacturing one that isn’t there.

Hex is a few feet away, sprawled in one of the chairs that survived. He’s still faintly translucent at the edges, in a way that makes my stomach lurch every time I look at it. One arm is held awkwardly against his ribs. He catches me looking and grins, wide and easy and entirely unconvincing.

“You should see the other guy,” he says.

“The other guy was your friend two days ago,” I say, before I can stop myself. I wince. I can’t take the words back, as much as I want to.

Hex’s grin doesn’t fully leave his face, but something behind it does. Quick and gone. He shrugs instead of answering properly, examining his own fraying edges like they’re mildly interesting rather than actively distressing.