Aven
I'm lying on my back in my apartment, staring at a crack in the ceiling that looks suspiciously like a question mark, while the air in the room curdles around me. Soren's been gone for exactly two hours, and the silence he left behind didn't stick.
The dead are currently holding a board meeting in the corners of my bedroom.
They aren't doing anything dramatic, no blood on the walls, no rattling chains, but the pressure of them is a physical weight.
It's the feeling of a crowded subway car where everyone's looking at you, except they don't have eyes and they've been dead since the nineties.
One particularly translucent woman in a sensible beige cardigan's hovering near my closet, her mouth moving in a silent, frantic loop that I'm trying very hard not to translate into English.
"If you're here to offer a critique of my sex life, there's a line forming outside the ruins of my dignity," I mutter to the ceiling. "Take a number. We're currently experiencing a high volume of uninvited opinions."
The spirit doesn't blink. She just flickers, her image trembling like a bad television signal.
I roll onto my side, my cheek pressing against the cold pillow, and try to find the thread of a prayer.
I was good at this once. I spent years in the seminary learning how to talk to God like He was a distant but reachable landlord.
Now, the words feel like wet tissue paper. Our Father, who art in—
I stop. I don't know who I'm talking to anymore.
Am I asking for help, or am I asking for the strength to not need the three men who are currently dismantling my sense of self piece by piece?
The journals my mother left behind are sitting on the kitchen table, a silent accusation in ink and grief.
They tell a story I'm not ready to finish.
Next to them, in the junk drawer, the silver cross I spent a decade clinging to feels like it's breathing.
Or maybe that's just the residual burn on my palm imagining a heartbeat in the metal.
By midnight, the apartment isn't just small; it's a cage.
The memory of Soren's warmth, that bright, manic, essence-stained heat, is making the actual temperature of the room feel like a meat locker.
I can still taste him, a lingering note of honey and something sharper, like ozone before a strike.
It's unbearable. It's a neon sign in the dark, pointing toward a door I told myself I wouldn't walk through again tonight.
Apparently, I'm a deeply committed idiot who requires multiple failed experiments before accepting that the lab's currently on fire.
I get up. I don't pack a bag. I don't even grab a jacket.
I just pull on a pair of boots and a sweater that smells faintly of Gabriel's Bar and walk out.
Surrender's a bitter pill, but it turns out that standing in the middle of a haunted studio apartment while your mother's ghost-stories watch you is worse.
I'm going back to the shop, and I'm going to be annoyed about it.
If I'm angry enough, maybe it won't feel like I'm crawling back.
The streets of the city are different tonight.
The spirits are still there, huddled in the doorways and clinging to the lamp posts, but the static's changed frequency.
They aren't just screaming into the void anymore.
As I pass a narrow alley, a man in a tattered trench coat leans out, his jaw unhinging to let out a sound like a rusted hinge.
Light, he hisses. Door.
I don't look at him. I don't look at any of them.
I keep my eyes on the pavement, counting the cracks, until the air finally shifts.
The shop's wards hit me like a wall of fresh oxygen.
The screaming in my head doesn't stop, but it muffles, the sharp edges rounded off by Soren's protective magic.
I push the door open, the bell chiming a low, silver note that sounds like a homecoming I didn't ask for.
The shop's bathed in shadows, the only light coming from a stray streetlamp filtering through the enchanted glass of the front window.
Ira's there. He's sitting in a high-backed chair near the back of the showroom, his massive frame perfectly still.
He isn't sleeping. He's waiting. His silver cross glints against the dark cotton of his shirt, and his posture's that of a man who's spent his entire life guarding doors that most people don't even know existed
"You're late," he says. His voice is a low, grounded rumble that bypasses my ears and vibrates directly into my chest. "I thought you'd be here earlier"
"I had a very busy schedule of staring at my ceiling and regretting my birth," I say, the sarcasm coming out thinner than I intended.
I'm shaking. I didn't realize it until I stopped moving, but my hands are vibrating with a fine, frantic tremor that I can't shut off.
"Also, the ghosts are starting to use nicknames. It's very unprofessional."
Ira doesn't tease me. He doesn't offer a witty comeback or ask for a confession.
He just looks at me, his green eyes steady and unblinking, and opens his arms. It's a simple gesture, completely devoid of the theatricality Soren uses or the predatory grace Cain favors.
It's just an invitation. A place to put the weight down.
I cross the room before I can talk myself out of it before crawling into his lap, and burying my face in the crook of his neck.
His arms wrap around me, pulling me flush against his chest, and for the first time in four hours, the world stops spinning.
His magic isn't a silence or a warmth; it's a wall.
It's a thick, impenetrable barrier between me and everything that wants to use me as a conduit.
"Easy," he murmurs, his hand settling at the back of my neck. His palm's broad and warm, his fingers fisting slightly in my hair to hold me steady. "I've got you. The static can't get through me."
I hate that he's right. I hate that he knows exactly how to hold me so that the shaking slows.
I hate that being handled like this, like something precious and fragile that needs to be protected from impact, feels like the only thing keeping me from shattering.
I stay there for a long time, listening to the slow, rhythmic beat of his heart until my breathing finally hitches and levels out.
I'm not crying, but it's a close thing. It's the kind of relief that feels like a bruise.
"You're exhausted," Ira says, his voice vibrating against my temple. "And you're not sleeping in that apartment again. Not tonight at least."
He shifts under me, giving me enough time to move if I want to.
I don't. My fingers curl tighter in his shirt instead, which is apparently all the answer he needs.
He stands with me in his arms as if I weigh nothing and carries me toward the back of the shop.
My feet still ache from the run I took days ago, a lingering throb in the arches that Ira seems to sense without being told.
He kicks open the door to the small living quarters behind the library and sets me down on the edge of a bed that smells like cedar and clean linen.
The room's dim, lit only by a small amber lamp in the corner.
Ira stands between me and the door, his presence filling the space until there's no room left for ghosts or memories.
He reaches out, his fingers catching the hem of my sweater, and pauses.
It's the first time he's hesitated, his eyes searching mine for a rejection I'm too tired to give.
"Let me," he says. It's a command disguised as a request, and I nod because the alternative's being alone with the noise again.
I can't do alone anymore. It's a terrifying realization, a crack in the armor I've spent twenty-six years building, but as Ira pulls the sweater over my head, I find I don't care.
He undresses me slowly, taking inventory of me, his hands tracing the lines of my ribs, the dip of my stomach, the healing scrapes on my knees. Every time his skin meets mine, a fresh layer of that heavy, protective magic settles over me, muffling the world outside this room.
"You're so thin," he mutters, his thumb circling the bone of my hip. He says it like it's a problem he intends to solve with enough steak and silence. He brushes a stray curl back from my forehead, his touch lingering. "You spend so much energy holding the door shut that you're hollowed out, Aven."
"It's a very popular aesthetic in the seminary," I whisper, though I'm leaning into his hand. "The starving for the Lord look. Very chic."
Ira doesn't laugh. He moves closer, his body a looming shadow of heat and intent.
He captures my jaw in one hand, forcing me to look up at him.
His face is inches from mine, his breath warm on my lips.
He smells like iron and woodsmoke, a grounding, masculine scent that makes my head swim.
When he finally kisses me, it isn't the desperate, soul-deep hunger of Cain or Soren's frantic heat.
It's a siege. It's slow, possessive, and utterly overwhelming.
He kisses like he can hold the air still long enough for me to breathe it.
His tongue slides against mine with a restrained power that makes my toes curl into the rug.
I reach for him, my fingers tangling in the front of his shirt, pulling him closer because I need the weight of him to crush the last of the static out of me.
He groans low in his throat, a sound of pure, unadulterated want that sends a shiver straight down my spine.
"Bed," he says against my mouth. He pushes me back into the pillows, his weight following me down until I'm pinned beneath him.
It's exactly what I wanted. I want to stop holding myself upright.
I want to be contained. I want to be the only thing in his world so that the rest of the world stops mattering.