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“Occupational hazard of choosing a side,” he says, lightly. He reaches for a biscuit from the tray someone’s rescued from the wreckage and eats it with exaggerated enthusiasm, the way you eat something specifically to prove you’re fine. “Barely felt it. Ten out of ten fight, honestly. Very invigorating. Would recommend.”

“Hex,” I say.

“I’m simply saying it builds character,” Hex says airily.

“You’re translucent,” I say.

“I’ve been reliably informed that translucent is very fashionable this season.” He pops another biscuit into his mouth before I can push further. I let it go. I don’t think either of us has the energy right now to make him talk about it properly. Chasing him past a joke has never once worked on Hex in the entire time I’ve known him.

The bell above the door goes off with real force, somehow still functioning despite everything else in this shop currently not functioning. Half the commune spills in at once. Big Brian first, then Brian Three, then several other people, all of them carrying armfuls of freshly cut hazel branches like they’ve just come from the world’s strangest florist.

“We felt it,” Big Brian announces, dropping his armful onto the one table still standing at a reasonable angle. “Whole city’s gone strange. There’s a flood on Whiteladies Road that wasn’t there an hour ago. Water coming up out of a drain that’s never once flooded in living memory. Someone’s greenhouse caught fire in Redland for no reason anybody can find. Radio’s calling it a gas leak. It isn’t a gas leak.”

“We were out gathering hazel,” Brian Three adds. He surveys the wreckage with the calm of a man who has seen considerably stranger things in his time, and who fully intends to have opinions about the tea situation before anything else. “For wands. Protection ones. Seemed prudent given the weather.”

“The weather?” Felix repeats, from under his paper towels.

“The metaphorical weather,” Big Brian clarifies, unbothered, already surveying the wreckage for somewhere useful to put his branches down.

Morgana’s propped against what’s left of the counter, one hand still pressed to her side, pale but steady. It’s Dis who finally says what I think everyone’s been quietly thinking since the portal closed.

“He is dangerous,” Dis says, meaning Wraith. His arms are folded, shadows coiled tight around him the way they do when he’s thinking hard about something he doesn’t like. “He closed that tear with a single gesture. That is not a small thing. I have seen what it takes to seal a breach of that size, and it should not have been possible for one person alone. He has been freed from the amulet and we do not know what controls him now, or whether anything does.”

“He also just saved all our lives,” Adam points out, from where he’s sweeping broken glass into a dustpan with the particular focus of someone who needs his hands occupied on something small and manageable.

“That does not make him safe,” Dis says. “It makes him powerful and unaccounted for, which is, if anything, worse.”

“Can he be trusted?” Hex says. There’s an edge underneath the casual delivery that wasn’t there a moment ago, something sharper riding along under the words. “Especially given who was standing next to him. Felix, is your father actually trustworthy, or are we meant to just take that on faith because he shouted the right thing at the right moment?”

The shop goes very quiet. Even Big Brian stops mid-armful, sensing the shift the way you sense weather changing.

Felix goes rigid under my hands, the paper towels forgotten entirely. When he speaks, his voice has gone thin and young, in a way I’ve never once heard from him before. Nothing like his usual dry control. “Don’t. Please don’t. Not here. Not in front of everyone.”

“I’m not attacking,” Hex says. “I’m asking a reasonable...”

“I don’t know if he’s trustworthy,” Felix says, too fast and too raw. It’s like he’s been holding the sentence back with both hands and it’s finally slipped. “I don’t know anything about him. That’s rather the entire problem. I would very much like to not do this here, in front of fifteen people who don’t know the first thing about it.”

“I’m not trying to upset you,” Hex says. “I’m trying to work out if the man currently walking round Bristol with a shadow being nobody understands, is a liability we should be worried about.”

“Then ask literally anyone else,” Felix says, “at literally any other time.”

Dis is on his feet, shadows gone sharp and dark around him. He stands between Felix and Hex with a stillness that’s somehow more alarming than shouting would have been. “Enough. This is not the moment, nor the place, nor your business to press.”

“I wasn’t trying to press anything,” Hex says. “I asked a question...”

“You asked it knowing exactly where it would land,” Dis says.

“Don’t tell me what I knew,” Hex snaps.

“I have known you for centuries, Hex,” Dis says. “I know precisely what you knew. I know precisely why you chose that particular moment, in front of this particular audience, to ask it.”

They’re close now, both of them, shadows pooling thick around their feet and spreading dark across the already ruined floor. For one horrible second, it looks like it might actually turn physical. Two people who were fighting shoulder to shoulder an hour ago, about to come apart over something that isn’t even really about Wraith at all. Not underneath it. Not really.

“Stop it,” Adam says. His voice cracks straight down the middle. The dustpan clatters to the floor, glass scattering everywhere again. “Please. Just. Stop. Haven’t we had enough of this today? Haven’t we had enough of this for the entire week?”

That does what nothing else managed to. Hex’s shoulders drop first, all the fight going out of him at once, like something’s been switched off. He crosses to Adam instead and pulls him in, murmuring something too quiet for me to hear. Dis stands down slowly, shadows settling reluctantly. He doesn’t look at Hex again. He just moves to stand beside Felix, one hand resting carefully on his shoulder, the other still faintly clenched.

I try, one more time, to say something useful. Something about how at least we’re all still standing, at least nobody’s actually dead, look on the bright side. The words get about halfway out of my mouth before I realise nobody’s listening. I’m not sure I even believe them myself.