7. Aven
Aven
My feet hit the pavement before I remember I'm not wearing shoes.
Cold shoots through my soles, sharp enough to drag a sound out of me that might be a prayer if prayer hadn't started coming apart in my mouth three blocks ago.
Asphalt grit bites into my skin. The air's wet and metallic, full of exhaust, old rain, and the sour breath of dumpsters waiting for morning pickup.
I run anyway, one hand pressed to my ribs, the other curled tight around nothing because I left the cross behind, left the apartment behind, left Cain standing in the wreckage of everything I'd been stupid enough to want.
"Our Father, who art in heaven," I breathe, and then the words splinter before they can become anything useful. "Fuck. No. Not that. Shut up, just shut up."
The dead don't shut up. They come back the moment I get distance between myself and Cain, not gradually, not kindly, not in the familiar low-pressure way I've learned to survive.
They slam into me. Every voice that his body pushed out of reach rushes back through the opened door of my head, louder and angrier for having been kept outside.
A woman cries behind my left ear. A man whispers numbers against the back of my neck.
Something with a child's voice keeps asking where its hands went.
The shock nearly drops me in the middle of the street.
I catch myself on the hood of a parked car, leaving a smear of blood from my palm where I scraped it on brick without noticing.
My chest burns. My lungs can't decide whether they want air or punishment.
Behind my eyes, the spirits layer over each other until the city becomes two cities: the living one, all traffic lights and locked storefronts, and the dead one, crowded shoulder to shoulder in the places no one alive knows how to look.
For one night, I knew what quiet felt like.
That's the worst part. If I'd never known it, maybe I could've kept pretending this was normal.
Maybe I could've gone on calling myself dramatic, sleep-deprived, spiritually defective, whatever word made the day smaller.
But now my body remembers Cain's arms. It remembers the weight of him wrapped around me, his hand at the back of my neck, the impossible absence of all that screaming.
I hate myself for missing it.
I hate myself more because I keep running as if distance can make wanting him less true.
A horn blares. I jerk back from the car and stumble toward the sidewalk as a taxi swerves past, its tires hissing over wet pavement. The driver shouts something through the window. I don't catch all of it, but the words barefoot, underwear, and hospital arrive with humiliating clarity.
Rock bottom has a basement, apparently, and the basement has traffic.
I look down at myself for the first time and almost laugh, except the sound comes out too close to a sob.
Grey boxers. Thin t-shirt. Bare legs, bare feet, city grime already blackening my skin.
A theological student sprinting through the urban sprawl like an escaped sacrifice with sleep hair and a working knowledge of Latin exorcisms that have so far accomplished exactly nothing.
The Victorian woman appears near a closed bakery, floating three inches above the sidewalk. Her mourning dress ripples in a wind that doesn't touch me. She's screaming about a lost locket, her milky eyes fixed on some point past my shoulder, but her grief isn't the voice that makes me slow.
He planned it, something whispers into my left ear.
I turn so fast my ankle twists, pain flashing up my leg. The voice is cold and slick, too clean around my name. It doesn't loop like the local dead. It doesn't sound trapped inside its own last moment. It sounds as if it's been waiting for the precise place to put the knife.
The vampire knew you were weak. The silence was never peace. It was a leash.
"No," I say, then realize I've said it out loud on a sidewalk where there are living people across the street and at least three spirits staring directly through my ribs. My voice shakes badly enough that the denial barely counts. "No. That's not what happened."
The lie finds no place to stand.
Another voice slides in, lower, rougher, vibrating in my teeth. Vampires only keep what feeds them. You felt useful and called it love.
"I didn't call it love," I snap, too loud, too fast. A man sleeping in the recessed doorway of a closed pharmacy stirs under his blanket and mutters something I probably deserve.
I press both hands against my mouth for one second, breathing through my fingers until the world stops tilting. "I didn't call it anything."
Little priest, the voice says, almost tenderly. They all want what's in your marrow. The witch. The exorcist. The beast behind you. They'll call it a bond because cages sound better when the bars have names.
The wrongness of it crawls over my skin.
Spirits are usually selfish. They repeat their own pain, their own deaths, their own unfinished errands.
They don't know how to hurt you with surgical accuracy unless you hand them the knife first. These voices know too much.
They say Cain like they were in the room.
They say witch and exorcist like the words belong to me now, though Cain only gave me the names Soren and Ira in the cramped dark of my apartment while I was too terrified to decide where to put them.
A witch. An exorcist.
Two more impossible things waiting somewhere in the city, attached to me by magic I never asked for.
I need a church.
No. I absolutely don't need a church.
The last time I touched a cross, it burned my palm badly enough to leave a mark.
Ezra's face flashes in my mind, calm and warm and terrifyingly certain, his hand covering mine across a coffee-shop table as if concern could become authority if it stayed gentle enough.
The cross is for grounding, Aven. The church provides tools for a reason. You're drifting.
I'm drifting now. I'm barefoot and half-dressed and bleeding on a street corner while dead things argue theology in my skull. If this is drifting, I'd like to file a complaint with whatever department handles spiritual buoyancy.
My mother had seen things too.
The thought hits so hard I stop moving.
She'd stared into corners. She'd gone still in the middle of rooms as if listening to someone on the other side of a wall.
Gabriel used to lower his voice when he talked about her after she died, used to say heart attack like the words were a blanket he could pull over a body and make the shape underneath less frightening.
The church said grief did strange things to memory.
Ezra said some people were more open than others, as if open was a gift and not another word for unprotected.
Was this how it started for her?
A step. Another. My feet move because my mind can't.
Did she hear them first as whispers, then prayers, then commands? Did she wake one morning and realize every room had teeth? Did Gabriel know? Did he lie because he was afraid, or because the truth was worse than anything a child should have to inherit?
She burned out, the cold voice murmurs. So will you.
"Shut up."
They called it illness because harvest sounds ugly in a chapel.
"Shut up!"
A car honks again, longer this time. I blink and realize I'm standing halfway into a crosswalk with the light against me.
The taxi driver from before hasn't escaped my personal apocalypse after all.
He leans out his window, eyes wide as he takes in my bare legs, my bloody feet, and whatever expression is currently failing to pass as sanity.
"You okay, kid?" he calls. "You need a hospital?"
I laugh once, breathless and cracked. "Probably."
He reaches for his door handle like he's actually going to get out, and the thought of one more living person touching me makes panic surge hot and sharp through my chest. I shake my head hard and back toward the curb. "No. Don't. I'm fine."
He doesn't believe me. I don't believe me either.
A shadow moves on the roofline across the street.
I catch only the edge of it, dark hair or dark coat, a stillness that doesn't belong to any ordinary person out this late. By the time I look fully, there's nothing there but brick, a rusted fire escape, and the faint blue pulse of a broken sign. My heart kicks hard enough to hurt.
Cain.
No. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know if I'm feeling the bond or the fear or the part of me still reaching backward because his absence left teeth marks in my chest. I turn away before I can decide whether I want him to be there.
The streets begin to narrow.
I don't notice it at first. I only notice that the main road feels wrong, too bright, too exposed, packed with spirits clustered beneath the orange pools of streetlight.
I turn down a side street to avoid them.
Then another. A construction barrier blocks an alley I could've sworn was open when I passed it last week.
A crowd of dead men in work coats spills across the sidewalk ahead, shoulder to shoulder, their mouths open in silent accusation.
I veer left, then right, chased less by one thing than by the impossible pressure of everything being too much.
The city isn't guiding me. That'd be insane.
The city doesn't care enough to guide anyone.
Still, every turn that feels survivable leads me deeper into the older district, where the brick rowhouses lean close and the pavement holds the day's rain in black, shining seams. My legs shake.
The soles of my feet burn, then sting, then go strangely warm where the skin has split.
I look back once and see dark spots on the pavement behind me.
Blood.
Mine, apparently, because the night hadn't collected enough evidence.
Turn, little priest, the cold voice whispers.
I press my palms hard against my ears, which does nothing because the dead aren't sound. "I swear to God, if one more thing calls me little tonight, I'm committing a sin with intent."
My voice sounds thin and strange between the buildings. No one answers from the living side of the street. The dead crowd closer, their forms flickering in windows and doorways, faces stretched by hunger, grief, or whatever magic has sharpened some of them into weapons.
Toward the fire, the voice says. Toward the thing that'll write its survival on your skin.
A witch's shop.
Soren's shop.
I shouldn't know that, not with certainty, but the name has weight now. Cain said it in my apartment. Soren. Ira. Witch. Exorcist. Bond. The words have been moving under my thoughts ever since, rearranging the floorboards of my life while I run barefoot over the surface.
Another shadow crosses the far end of the street.
This one's lower, closer, gone before I can decide whether it was a person or a trick of the light.
I turn away from it and find myself on a narrower road lined with dark storefronts.
A CLOSED sign hangs crooked in a tailor's window.
A cat watches me from beneath a parked car, eyes green and unimpressed.
Somewhere nearby, magic changes the air.
I feel it before I understand it.
The screaming doesn't stop, but it shifts.
It moves back by inches, as if I've stepped beneath a roof in the middle of a storm.
The voices are still there, still furious, still pressing their cold hands through the edges of me, but they're no longer rooted directly inside my skull.
Something hums under the pavement, low and warm, nothing like Cain's devastating silence and nothing like the sharp, burning pressure of the church's crosses.
This is older. Earthier. It smells, somehow, like dried herbs, old paper, iron, and wood that's absorbed too many secrets to burn cleanly. The air tastes like the moment before lightning, not the strike itself.
Possibility, I think, and hate myself for the hope in it.
Up ahead, one shop window glows amber against the dark street.
The sign's painted in gold, half-shadowed by hanging bundles of herbs pressed against the inside of the glass.
The building looks narrow and crooked, the kind of place that should've been crushed between newer structures decades ago but refused out of spite.
Warmth leaks through the seams around the door.
The spirits trailing me recoil from it and surge harder at my back, their voices rising into a single jagged note.
Don't go in.
The words come from too many mouths at once.
He'll hollow you. He'll turn your essence into ink. He'll use you until your skin's only paper for someone else's spell.
My knees nearly give. I catch myself on the brick beside the door, leaving a smear of blood where my hand lands.
The brass handle's warm beneath my palm, impossibly warm for the hour and the weather.
Behind me, the street's full of smoke-shaped grief and voices that know my name too clearly.
Somewhere above or behind or inside the bond, something moves at the edge of perception, but I don't look for it this time.
I'm too tired to decide whether this door's a rescue or a trap. It's simply the only door that feels less dangerous than the street.
A ghostly hand closes around my throat. Cold floods my skin, smelling of wet earth and forgotten names. I can't breathe for one horrible second, and then my body chooses for me. I turn the handle and throw myself inside.