8. Aven
Aven
The first thing I regret is the way my body crumples to the floor, my head against the tiles. Not the running barefoot through the city. Not being still in my underwear. Not the very public breakdown that may or may not have involved me yelling at air in front of a taxi driver.
Those regrets are still forming a line somewhere behind my ribs, waiting for a number to be called. The floor's immediate because my knees are on it, my hands are braced against it, and my feet are bleeding across polished wood that looks expensive enough to have its own insurance policy.
The shop smells like beeswax, dried lavender, old paper, and something sharper beneath it, something green and metallic that makes the inside of my mouth taste like a storm.
The wards in the walls hum against my skin.
They don't give me Cain's silence. They don't erase the dead or pull me under dark water until the whole world stops clawing at me.
This quiet's different. It's got texture.
It presses back. It makes the spirits outside the glass look like a frantic silent film, all open mouths and grey hands and grief with nowhere to land.
Every jar on the shelf seems to have a pulse. Every bundle of dried herbs hanging from the rafters feels awake. The floor beneath my palms is warm in a way wood shouldn't be warm at four in the morning, and the air's so full of old power that breathing feels like swallowing someone else's memory.
A shadow stretches across the floorboards. The sound of someone’s boots come next, each step controlled enough to be worse than a rush. I lift my head, and for a second all my thoughts empty out except one.
That's the largest man I've ever seen wearing a cross. He’s at the end of the aisle like he was built there, broad shoulders filling the narrow space between shelves crowded with bottles and books.
His shirt's dark, his arms are inked, and the silver cross at his chest catches the low shoplight with a clean, hard gleam.
It's not like my cross. It doesn't have that antiseptic burn, that church-clean bite of judgment.
It still makes my stomach turn because my body has apparently decided all religious imagery is now a threat until proven otherwise.
His eyes are green, sharp enough to cut through the dark, and they don't look at me the way strangers look at half-naked men bleeding on their floor.
He clocks my hands first. Then my feet. Then the tremor in my shoulders.
Then the glass behind me, where the spirits crowd the windows in a pale, furious press.
"Are you going to bleed to death on the mahogany," someone says from my left, "or do we need to call a priest?"
The voice is rough with sleep and irritation, though sleep seems like a loose rumor on him.
A gorgeous man steps into view wearing a thin sweater, messy red-orange hair, and the expression of a man who's opened his shop before dawn to find not a customer but a liability.
His green eyes narrow on me, then my bare legs, then the blood on his floor.
Magic flickers around his fingers, throwing brief sparks against the nearest shelf.
"I'm technically a seminarian," I rasp.
The redhead just stares at me.
My throat works around a laugh that doesn't make it out whole. "So the priest thing might be redundant."
"Fantastic." Soren drags a hand over his face, leaving a faint smear of soot near his cheekbone. "A bleeding seminarian in his underwear. That's exactly what this morning was missing."
The large man doesn't move, though the cross at his chest shifts once with his breathing.
"I didn't mean to come here," I say, though that's not true in any useful sense.
I came here because the street became impossible.
Because the dead were behind me. Because every turn that didn't feel like dying led to this door.
My teeth start to chatter, and I clamp them shut hard enough that my jaw aches.
"I saw something. Maybe him. Maybe I'm losing it. I don't know."
The redhead’s expression changes on the word him.
"Him," Soren repeats.
"I don't know," I repeat, because the alternative is saying Cain and feeling the whole room sharpen around the name.
"A shadow. On a roof. In an alley. Or maybe I wanted it to be him, which is somehow worse, so if we could all pretend I didn't say that while I'm actively freezing to death on your floor, I'd appreciate it. "
The redhead takes a step closer. The magic around his hands flares brighter, then gutters. "What did you say your name was?"
"I didn't."
The large man's gaze cuts briefly to the redhead. Warning, maybe. Or question.
He ignores it, looking at me now the way the shop's looking at me, like something under his skin has recognized a sound before his brain can place the song.
His irritation's still there, sharp at the edges, but something else has pushed beneath it.
Confusion. Hunger. Grief he hasn't given permission to enter the room.
"Don't touch me," I say, too late.
The redhead reaches for my hand. his fingers closing around mine, and the second bond opens.
Unlike with Cain, it’s a completely different feeling. Heat rushes through my palm and up my arm, not the dark, drowning quiet of Cain's magic but a golden warmth threaded with smoke, sap, old ink, and grief so old it's worn grooves into the bones of this place.
The shop unfolds around me. I feel the wards sunk deep into the threshold, braided through wood and glass and iron nails.
I feel the shelves holding their breath.
I feel the ceramic jars packed with dried things that remember sun, rain, cutting, binding.
I feel the floorboards beneath us, all the footsteps they've carried, all the blood they've taken, all the magic spilled into their grain.
Soren's hand tightens around mine and his grief hits next.
It slams into me with enough force that my shoulders curl and my forehead nearly drops against his chest. A woman's name presses against the inside of my skull, not spoken but written everywhere.
In the wards. In the beams. In the dusty jars high on the shelves.
In the way the shop leans toward Soren when he shakes.
A pale shimmer gathers behind me.
I don't turn right away because I already know it's a spirit, and I'm so tired of spirits. But this one doesn't claw. This one doesn't plead. Her presence settles over the shop like a hand smoothing hair back from a fevered brow.
Soren stops breathing.
"No," he whispers.
The large man steps forward. "Soren."
"No." The redhead—Soren’s—voice breaks around the word, and his fingers clamp harder around mine. "No, that's not possible."
I look over my shoulder to see the woman's near the threshold, translucent and silvered at the edges, her form unsteady but clearer than the hungry dead outside the glass.
She's got Soren's sharp features softened by age and sadness, the same fine bones, the same intensity around the eyes.
She's woven through the room. I can feel her in every ward and every warm board beneath my knees, even though I don't know her name.
Soren does.
"She's here," he says, his voice raw with hurt. "She's here. Ira, she's right there."
"Soren, let go."
The large man's voice is low, but there's command in it. Soren doesn't let go. His eyes are fixed on the spirit behind me, like he might hate her for being there as much as he loves her for it. "She never left."
"I can't—" I start, but the sentence breaks when another wave of Soren's grief rolls through my hand and into my chest. It's too much.
Too warm. Too crowded. I can feel the spirits outside scraping at the wards, Soren's magic rushing toward the woman, and the shop answering, my body becoming the open door none of them should be using.
The large man moves fast. For someone his size, he shouldn't be able to cross the space that quickly, but he's suddenly beside us, one hand closing around Soren's shoulder hard enough to make him flinch. The other hovers near me without touching.
"Soren." This time the name's sharper. "Look at him."
Soren blinks, but his gaze doesn't leave the spirit.
"He's shaking," the man says. "He's bleeding on your floor. Let go before you pull him apart."
Soren's face twists. "I can feel her."
"I know."
"Ira, you don't know. You don't know what it—"
"I know enough." The man's voice drops lower. "Let go."
Soren looks at me then, and some of the grief clears enough for horror to get through. I must look worse than I feel, which is a difficult achievement because I feel like the city dragged me here by my ankles and then left the rest to the witch shop. His fingers loosen by a fraction.
The bond warmth doesn't vanish. It thins into something bearable, a line of heat between our palms instead of a flood. I drag in a breath that smells like lavender, iron, and my own blood.
"Thank you," I whisper, though I'm not sure which one of them I'm thanking. Soren for letting go enough that I can breathe. The large man for noticing. The dead woman for not screaming.
Soren swallows hard. "What are you?"
I laugh, because apparently that reflex survived the barefoot apocalypse. It's not a good laugh. "A question people keep asking before ruining my night."
The large man crouches slightly, bringing himself closer to my eye level without pretending he's less dangerous. His focus lands on my face, then flicks once to the spirits outside, then back to me. The third pull stirs under my ribs.
It's not Cain's silence. It's not Soren's warmth.
It's weight.
A terrifying, protective gravity that makes some feral part of me want to crawl behind him and another part want to run before he decides protection and imprisonment are the same shape.
"The exorcist," I whisper, because Cain gave me the information and my mouth remembers it before my mind can stop it.
His eyes narrow.
Soren looks sharply at me. "Who told you that?"
Before I can answer, the bell above the door rings. Every piece of magic in the shop shifts at once as Cain steps through the door.
The room changes around him.
He looks nothing like the man who held me in my apartment until the dead went quiet. His long hair's damp from the night, his torn shirt dark at the shoulder, his face carved into something controlled and exhausted. But guilt's the first thing I see.
"You were there," I say.
Cain opens his eyes. "Aven."
"No." My voice comes out thin but steady enough to hurt. "Don't say it like that."
He takes one step into the shop and stops when the exorcist looks up at him.
One second Ira's beside me, one hand still on Soren's shoulder.
The next, he's got Cain against the doorframe hard enough that the wood groans.
His hand closes around Cain's throat, massive fingers stark against pale skin, and he lifts him until Cain's boots scrape the floor and then lose most of their weight.
Cain doesn't fight him which may be worse.
He doesn't claw at Ira's wrist. He doesn't bare his fangs.
He hangs there with one hand resting loosely against Ira's forearm, his eyes fixed somewhere near my face, and the guilt in him is so quiet and heavy that I can feel it even through the chaos of the room.
Soren's fingers tighten around mine again and the woman behind me flickers.
Outside, the spirits press harder against the glass, grey hands sliding over the wards, mouths open around screams I can't hear. The shop holds them back, but the pressure of them shudders through every pane.
Ira leans close to Cain, his voice dropping low enough to make the shelves go still. "What the fuck did you bring into our shop?"