6. Cain #2
"They wouldn't leave," he whispers into my chest. His voice is muffled and raw. "They kept talking. All of them at once. I couldn't make it stop. I thought I was going crazy again."
"I know." My hand slides up to the back of his neck, thumb moving once over the sensitive skin behind his ear. "I'm here. Listen to me. Only me."
He tries. I feel the effort in the way his breathing drags itself toward mine.
My pulse is slow under his cheek, steadier than it should be after a day without feeding and a night without rest. He follows it anyway.
His body uses mine because mine's there, because my weight gives him a boundary the dead can't cross, because blood magic was made to anchor what spirit might otherwise pull apart.
It's the most honest thing I've done in years.
It's also another deception, because I'm holding him like comfort while wanting the bond to teach him I'm necessary.
We stay that way until his knees stop threatening to fold.
Eventually, he pulls back just enough to look at me, though he doesn't release my shirt.
His curls are a dark mess around his face, his eyes red-rimmed and hollow.
He looks young in that moment, not because he is, but because fear strips people down to the first language they learned for pain.
"What are you doing to me?" he asks. The sarcasm's gone. That's worse than any insult. "Why does it stop when you're here? Is this magic? Did you put something on me?"
For one second, I almost lie. I almost give him a smaller truth, something with soft edges, something he can sleep beside until morning. But every gentle lie I've ever told has eventually become a cage, and I can't bear to build another around him while he's still holding my shirt like a lifeline.
"It's magic," I say.
His grip tightens.
I lead him to the bed because he's swaying, not because I've got any right to direct him. He sits on the edge, and I lower myself onto the chair near the nightstand, close enough that the quiet holds but far enough that he's got space to bolt if he needs it.
"I don't have clean words for all of it," I say.
"Not words your seminary'd approve of. There are things in this city older than the church that taught you to name them.
Witches. Exorcists. Vampires. Spirits that are only lost, and spirits that've been bound by magic that should never have touched them. "
Aven laughs once, thin and frightened. "Great. Excellent. Love finding out the youth group pamphlets undersold the situation."
"This isn't a joke."
"No, Cain, it's obviously not a joke. Jokes are funnier and usually involve fewer undead men in my bedroom."
I let the sharpness pass because it's the only shield he's managed to lift. "You're not sick. You're not imagining them. What you see is real, and what you are makes the dead come close."
"What I am," he repeats.
I hear the trap close around the words too late.
"You're open to them in a way most living people aren't," I say carefully. "And something in my magic quiets the door they use to reach you."
His eyes move over my face, my pale skin, my stillness, the fangs I'm no longer trying hard enough to hide. "Something in your magic."
"Yes."
"The vampire magic."
"Yes."
The relief in him changes shape. I watch it harden into fear, and guilt presses its hand against my throat.
"There are others," I say, because stopping now'd leave him with only the worst of it. "A witch named Soren. An exorcist named Ira. The bond doesn't end with us."
"Bond." He stands too fast, the quiet flickering around him as distance opens between us. "That's what you're calling this? Like it means something less terrifying if you say it gently?"
"It means connection."
"It means I don't get a choice?"
"No." I rise too, then stop when he flinches. "No, Aven. Not that. It can pull. It can hurt. It can make need feel like truth before either of us has earned trust. But it doesn't make your choices for you."
"You say that like you didn't just break into my apartment."
The words strike cleanly because they're true. "You called me."
"And you opened the lock with magic."
"Yes."
He looks at me, breathing hard, and I hate that I've got no defense that isn't also an excuse.
"I should've knocked," I say.
The admission doesn't calm him. If anything, it makes him look more afraid, because apologies are only useful when the harm's small enough for them to hold.
He backs away until his hip hits the desk.
His hand skims over papers, a book, the empty whiskey glass from the night before, searching without looking.
"What else?" he asks. "What else is real?"
Too much. The church. The bound dead. The source of the stolen power under the prayers he still wants to trust. The tower. Adaro. Ellis. His mother, perhaps, though I don't yet know enough to name that wound without tearing it open.
I choose too much anyway.
"There are people who know what you are," I say. "Institutions that know enough to use men like you while calling it salvation. The church isn't separate from the darkness you fear, Aven. Not all of it. Not at the top."
His face goes still.
I realize then that I've chosen the wrong truth in the wrong order. He didn't need the architecture of the world while the room still smells of panic. He needed one handhold, and I handed him the cliff.
"You're one of them," he whispers. "The darkness. The thing Ezra warned me about."
"No."
"You're not the cure. You're just another kind of ghost." His voice shakes, then sharpens around the only word he can find cruel enough to protect him. "A leech."
The word lands with old accuracy. I've been called worse by people who knew less. It shouldn't hurt. It does.
"I'm alive," I say, and my voice is quieter than I intend. "Not human. Not harmless. But alive."
His hand closes around the silver cross on the desk.