As surreal as it was to be wandering around an unfamiliar city with a celebrity, I had to admit I was terrified of the potential scene this could cause. Luckily for us, though the Silent Swansong were popular across the water, they hadn’t really broken it big in the UK, so we were able to saunter through the streets without interruption while it was quiet.

Neither of us knew the city well enough to make a beeline for any particular café, so we ended up lumping for a greasy spoon with a sun-bleached and weather-battered red and white sign. It seemed like a safe bet to me—the customers sitting outside on white plastic chairs seemed to be in an age range that would still consider Elvis Presley to be modern. The chances of anyone recognising Magnus were slim.

Magnus himself was happy to agree, though I suspected this was just because he’d said hearing a Brit say “greasy spoon” was a highlight of his trip here.

Inside the café was even smaller than my hotel room, with a few tiny tables pushed up against the walls and one in the centre of a checkboard floor. Only one other couple was dining inside, and neither the old lady with white cotton-candy hair nor her husband paid us any mind as we made for a table at the other side of the room.

We sat ourselves down on the stainless steel chairs, and I quickly picked up a laminated menu and hid behind it, if only to avoid looking at the rather amusing sight of a rock star, chains and all, slumming it in a greasy spoon. That and the idea of going to breakfast with Magnus was still making my pale face blotch up all red.

“What are you having?” Magnus’ voice asked me from behind the menu. “I’ll get these. It’s the least I can do after your help last night.”

“Um…I will have…” I pulled out each word as long as I could, realising I hadn’t actually been reading the menu while hiding behind it. “Scrambled eggs on toast, please. Oh, and a black coffee. Please.”

“Eggs, toast, coffee, got it,” Magnus said, and I peered over the top of my menu to watch him glancing down at his own copy in one hand. He pulled a face, brow furrowing, and he flipped the menu to look at the other side. “God, these places never have anything vegan…”

The menu I was holding slipped out of my loose grip and skidded to the floor.

“What?”

“Hm?” Magnus glanced up at me, eyebrow cocked ever so slightly. “Oh, I’m vegan.”

I blinked. A smile tickled my mouth, my head caught somewhere between a nod and a shake.

“You’re…vegan?”

“Yeah?”

For whatever ungodly reason, the proverbial ghost of the poor rat Magnus had eaten floated between us, unheeded by Magnus himself.

I couldn’t help myself.

“So when did rat become certified by the Vegan Society?” I scoffed.

Magnus slammed forward into the table, one hand hitting the top of it as the other dropped his menu and went to cover my mouth. I kicked back in my chair, pushing myself out of his reach, all smiles lost in a cold heartbeat.

“Shh!” Magnus hissed, casting a worried look over to the old couple at the other side of the room. They didn’t react, having missed the entire episode. “Jesus Christ…”

He sat back in his chair with a flop, shoulders drooping and colour slowly returning to his face. “I told you, that wasn’t me…”

The silence that settled between us was not a comfortable one. I was eager to break it, so I pushed a little further:

“So, are you going to tell me what really happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do." I swiftly countered his dismissal with a wave of one hand. “Why’re you hanging around if not? Can’t be for my sparkling conversation, and if you were really just wanting to cover this all up again you could have bounced out with my phone this morning. But you came back. Why?”

Magnus’ bottom lip jutted out in a thoughtful pout, though he didn’t seem to want to look at me. Scowling at the floor off to my right, he spoke in a sombre tone.

“There’s a loneliness in holding a secret. I guess I slept on it and grew to like the idea of finally telling someone. But I’m too stuck in my ways.”

My heart broke at the sight of him baring his soul so honestly to someone he had just met. It was as though I could hear the whispers of his past circling around him, hints of tearful nights and a terrible burden pressing down on him. The sorrow was sour and sharp, and as much as I wanted to know the cause, I now wanted to help him more than I wanted to pry.

I held my hand out to Magnus, palm up and fingers curling to beckon him.

“Pass me my phone,” I said, and he looked up in alarm. “I’ll unlock it for you. You can delete it yourself and then you’ll have nothing to worry about. You’ll know for sure it’s gone, and no one will ever know about all that…weirdness. Whatever it was.”

Magnus’ whole face lit up with excitement, as though I had just told him Christmas was coming early. He jumped to his feet, scrambling to pull my phone out of his back pocket and nearly dropping it on the table in his haste to hand it to me. I rolled my eyes and smirked as I took the device from him, pressing the home button and trying to ignore the stack of message notifications from Killian.

Sorry, man, I thought to myself, pretending Killian could hear me. I’ll explain this to you later, promise.

I tapped in the phone’s passcode and handed the phone back to Magnus.

“Go ahead. Delete it and breathe, man,” I smiled, ignoring the pressing dissatisfaction that I would never know why the hell a grown man would eat a raw rat, or what the hell could change a person’s eyes from oceans to brimstone. “But you better still be paying for breakfast before you go.”