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I’m crouched behind the counter still. Still forgotten in the middle of all of it, and that’s when I see them.

My bunny ears. The ones I’ve worn behind this counter every day since Felix bought them for me. Squashed flat under an overturned table leg. One of the ears bent at an angle that isn’t coming back from, pink fabric torn clean through at the base, the little plastic headband snapped in two places.

I pick them up anyway. I don’t know why.

It feels, somehow, like the most honest casualty of the entire afternoon. More honest than the tables or the window or even the blood. This small, stupid, ridiculous thing that made me happy every single day I put it on. That customers laughed at and children pointed at and Dark once looked at like it was the single most fascinating object he’d ever encountered. Now lying broken on the floor of a shop that used to be the safest place I knew.

“Right,” Magdalene says, into the last of the tension. She sweeps into the middle of the wreckage like she’s been waiting for exactly this gap to make her announcement in. “We’re not doing this. Any of it. Not separately.”

“Doing what?” Felix says wearily.

“This.” She gestures at the whole shop, the whole afternoon, the whole impossible several days stacked one on top of the other. “Going back to our separate homes tonight as though a tear in the world didn’t just open directly in this exact spot. The veil is thin here. That means it will thin again. We stay together, all of us, here, where we can actually do something the moment it does, rather than scattered across Bristol finding out by government-surveyed text message and greenhouse fires.”

Nobody argues. I think everyone’s too tired to argue, or too frightened not to agree, or possibly both at once.

“The flat upstairs is empty,” Felix says, after a moment. “Since me and Dis moved out. It’s just sitting there gathering dust.”

“Then that settles it,” Magdalene says, delighted. She’s already moving on to logistics with the terrifying efficiency of a woman who has organised considerably larger gatherings than this on considerably less notice, including several festivals. “Camp beds. Sleeping bags. Big Brian, you’ll bring the good blankets from the van, the wool ones, not the scratchy synthetic ones you tried to fob me off with at the solstice.”

“Those are perfectly good blankets,” Big Brian says, wounded.

“They are an insult to sheep everywhere,” Magdalene says.

“I’ll make a cake,” Dis offers, unprompted, into the middle of this.

Adam’s mouth twitches, the first almost-smile since any of this started. “Please not the choux buns.”

“The choux buns were a learning process,” Dis says.

“They collapsed,” Adam says. “Three separate times.”

“The lemon drizzle has never once failed me,” Dis says, with immense dignity.

That, apparently, settles it, since nobody who’s actually eaten Dis’s lemon drizzle is about to argue with him about cake.

Big Brian, who has no context whatsoever for any of this, looks faintly bewildered. “He bakes?”

“Extensively,” Felix says. “Ask him about the spreadsheet.”

“There is no spreadsheet,” Dis says stiffly.

“There is absolutely a spreadsheet,” Felix says.

The shop fills with noise after that, quickly. The particular busy noise of people making a plan and immediately throwing themselves into it. Big Brian is already listing what needs fetching from the van. Morgana is directing two of the coven towards salvaging what’s left of the crystal grids. Adam and Hex murmur together in the corner. Felix stubbornly rights tables one by one.

I stand in the middle of all of it, unmoving, my broken bunny ears held against my chest with both hands. Nobody notices, not for a long moment, that I haven’t moved at all.

Everyone else has somewhere to put this. A cake to bake, blankets to fetch, tables to right, a shoulder to lean into. I have a pair of ruined ears and an ex sort-of-boyfriend on the other side of a war I never agreed to. And no earthly idea, standing here in the wreckage of the one place I always thought was a haven, what I’m actually supposed to do with either.

Chapter 27

Dream Date

The flat above the shop fills up slowly, the way anywhere fills up when nobody quite knows the rules of the place yet. Camp beds wedged between boxes Felix never got round to taking to his new house. Sleeping bags claimed and reclaimed twice before anyone settles on a corner they can live with.

Dis, true to his word, produces a lemon drizzle at eleven at night. Everyone eats it anyway, standing round the tiny kitchen in various states of bruised and bandaged. Apparently grief and terror are both improved slightly by cake.

By the time the last light gets switched off, there are far too many people breathing in the dark of a flat built for one.