Page 78

My heart does something soft and enormous. Then, because I’m me, my brain immediately starts making a list. Tea. Terrible toast. A karaoke night, which Felix will complain about. Along with whole evenings where nothing happens at all, scheduled in advance, in pen.

“I’m going to give you so many ordinary evenings,” I tell him. “You’ll be sick of them. I’ll put them in the diary.”

“I do not believe that is possible,” he says, utterly sincere.

“Well,” Magdalene says, eventually, into the settling dark, pulling a fresh scrap of paper from somewhere inside her kaftan. “I’ve been thinking. There’ll need to be a verse for this. Something about refusal. About choosing love.” She’s already writing, squinting in the fading light. “The Book of Bunny, chapter one, verse one. I’ll workshop it.”

“There isn’t going to be a Book of Bunny,” I say.

“There’s absolutely going to be a Book of Bunny,” she says, not looking up. “Give it forty years.”

Forty years. I’ll be an elderly lawyer with a holy text. Honestly, there are worse retirement plans.

Dark, beside me, looks faintly alarmed for the first time all day. “Should I be concerned about this?”

“Extremely,” I say with a smile.

I decide not to explain further. I lean into his shoulder instead. Down in the city there’s a coffee shop to clean, a crown to sort out, coursework revision to catch up on, and about a hundred questions nobody has answered yet. They can all wait until morning. Tomorrow is a whole new day where anything can happen. For once, I mean it as a promise and not a coping mechanism.

I watch the last of the stars come out over a sky that finally belongs to itself again.

Chapter 30

Finally

The flat above the coffee shop still resembles something between a refugee camp and a slumber party, and nobody’s shown the slightest interest in going home.

Sleeping bags cover most of the floor. Someone’s hung bunting across the kitchen doorway. I genuinely don’t know whose idea that was. The whole place smells like candle wax and Dis’s macarons and the particular warm fug of too many bodies sharing too little space. I wouldn’t trade it for anywhere else in the entire world right now.

Felix, however, has apparently had enough, because he’s standing in the doorway with his coat already half on.

“I am too old for this shit,” he announces, to nobody in particular. “I require a proper bed. A duvet with a tog rating. Pillows that don’t smell of patchouli.”

“That’s Morgana’s doing,” I say.

“I’m aware. I’m still leaving.” He gives me a shoulder nudge on the way past, brisk and warm, Dis already falling into step behind him. “Text me tomorrow. Properly. With words, not just a thumbs up.”

“I make no promises,” I say.

“You never do,” he says.

The door’s barely clicked shut behind them when it bursts open again. No knock, no warning, Big Brian filling the whole frame, cheeks pink and rosy.

“There’s a party on the Downs,” he announces. “I started it myself, about an hour ago. Couldn’t get a foot to move in here without standing on someone, so I went and lit a fire where there was actually room to swing my arms. Word’s spread. There’s a fiddle now. And drums. Someone has called their mate with a sound-system”

The reaction is immediate and total. Dave’s up off the sofa before Big Brian’s finished the sentence. Two other coven members I only half recognise are already hunting for their shoes.

Hex is on his feet almost as fast, eyes bright.

“A fire, music and an entire hillside of people saying things they wouldn’t say if they knew someone was listening,” he says, delighted. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

“You’re going to cause trouble,” Adam says, not moving from the sofa.

“I’m going to cause a very small, very enjoyable amount of trouble, yes.” Hex grins. “Someone’s drink will mysteriously taste worse than it should. Someone’s shoe laces will become tangled. Nobody gets hurt.”

Adam sighs, the specific sigh of a man who hates parties with his whole heart and is about to attend one anyway. He hauls himself up. “Fine. But you’re explaining yourself to me afterwards. Everything you did. In order.”

“Half of it,” Hex says, already heading for the door.