Page 3 of Shadow Lord

Chapter 2

Bad Coffee

Ifinish my exam with forty minutes to spare and hand it in with what I am fairly sure is the biggest smile in the entire hall. The girl who was next to me looks like she’s just crawled out of a burning building. The boy in front looks personally betrayed by the concept of consideration.

I skip down the front steps of the exam hall into the grey Bristol morning feeling absolutely marvellous, because I love exams. I really do. There’s something wonderful about being handed a problem and a blank page and told, right, sort it out, you’ve got two hours. It’s the closest thing to a puzzle, and I’ve always liked puzzles.

I text Felix a string of celebratory emojis on the walk to the coffee shop. He does not reply, which either means he’s busy or he’s decided emojis are beneath him. Possibly both.

My shadow is somewhere behind me, keeping pace the way he always does, three or four steps back and pretending very hard that he isn’t there. I don’t turn around to check. I never need to. It’s a bit like knowing your own heartbeat is happening without having to put a hand on your chest to confirm it.

“Contract law is done,” I tell him, over my shoulder, cheerfully. “I think it went brilliantly. I wrote an entire paragraph about postal acceptance that I’m rather proud of.”

Nothing. Obviously. But I like to think he’s proud of me anyway. He has a very supportive silence.

Coffeelicious comes into view at the end of the road, tucked between the charity shop and the vegan bakery, fairy lights strung along the inside of the window. I love this place. I loved it from the first shift, actually, walked in for my interview and thought, oh, this is going to be my favourite thing, and I was completely right.

I push through the door and the smell of coffee hits me. Rich and warm and comforting, like being hugged by something that also happens to be extremely caffeinated.

Felix is behind the counter, small and sharp and entirely unbothered by the world, black bob cut in a line so precise it looks drawn on with a ruler, dark purple lipstick, enough eyeliner to survive a shipwreck. He’s wearing his usual black on black on slightly darker black, pentagram earrings catching the light every time he moves his head, and he manages to make steaming milk look like something you should be a little afraid of.

“How may we serve you!” I announce to the shop at large, which is possibly unnecessary given there are only two customers in at the moment and it looks as if both of them have already ordered, but I believe in setting the tone early.

Felix, behind the espresso machine, does not look up. “You’re not even on shift yet, Bunny.”

“I’m early!” I say.

“You’re always early,” Felix says.

“Punctuality is a virtue,” I say, tying my apron on and putting on my bunny ears, which live on a hook by the till specifically so I never have to be without them. “High Priestess Magdalene used to say that lateness is the first symptom of spiritual decay.”

“High Priestess Magdalene sounds like she’d love a good HR policy,” Felix says.

“She would hate HR,” I say. “HR implies rules that apply to everyone equally. She prefers rules that apply to everyone except her.”

Felix snorts, which from Felix counts as an outright laugh, and slides a coffee across the counter to me without being asked. It’s exactly how I like it, obviously, because Felix notices everything even when he pretends not to, and he’d rather set himself on fire than admit that’s what he’s doing.

“How was the exam?” he asks, in the tone of someone who has decided to ask purely so I’ll stop looking at him expectantly.

“Wonderful,” I say. “Genuinely wonderful. I could have sat there for another two hours.”

“You’re deranged,” Felix says.

“I prefer enthusiastic,” I say.

“Deranged,” Felix says again, with the confidence of a man who has never once been wrong in his life, and goes back to steaming milk.

The morning settles into its usual rhythm. Customers trickle in. I greet every single one of them with the exact same energy, because I don’t believe in rationing enthusiasm, that’s not how it works, it’s not a finite resource I need to save up for the nice customers. A woman in scrubs coming off a night shift gets the same ‘How may we serve you’ as the man in the expensive coat who orders an oat milk flat white and then looks personally aggrieved that we don’t have his exact brand of oat milk.

“We do have oat milk,” I tell him, beaming. “It’s just a different oat milk. I promise it still comes from an oat.”

He does not find this as funny as I do, but he does order the coffee, so I count that as a win.

My shadow has taken up his usual corner, the one by the window that nobody else ever seems to want, tucked half behind the big potted plant Felix insists on keeping alive purely through spite. I can just about make him out if I squint, the suggestion of shoulders, the faint gleam of something amber where his eyes should be. He watches the shop the way he watches everything, patient and thorough, like he’s cataloguing every single person who walks through the door and deciding, individually, whether they deserve to be here.

Nobody else can see him. To everyone else in this coffee shop right now, I am just a cheerful young man in bunny ears making questionable jokes about oat milk. None of them know there is several thousand years of quiet, watchful danger folded into the corner by the plant, keeping an eye on absolutely everything, including, most of the time, me.

It’s a strange thing to carry around. Not a bad strange. Just a strange I don’t think most people would understand if I tried to explain it, so mostly I don’t try.