Cain
It’s too quiet.
Again. The shop has been doing that a lot lately, everything in here going quiet or dormant.
And then there’s Soren leaning over the workstation, holding a tracking charm vibrating with a low-frequency hum that sets my teeth on edge, the sound of a transformer just before it blows.
His magic radiates from him in sickeningly hot waves, sharp enough that I can taste copper at the back of my throat.
He's running too hot. It's a specific kind of Essren fever, a shimmer in the air around his fingers that looks like heat rising off asphalt.
He's been trying to tie the charm to the case Hugo brought in, the consumed-souls case, and he's doing it with the desperate, jagged focus of a man trying to outrun his own shadow.
The brittle edge of him presses through the bond from across the room, too bright, too thin, threaded with the kind of exhaustion he's too proud to name.
Guilt coils cold beneath my ribs because years ago, I knew his limits better than he knew them himself.
I knew the exact shade his eyes turned when his essence was nearing the dregs.
Then I was gone, and he was left to calibrate his own destruction in the dark.
"Soren," I say, using the low, smooth tone that once belonged to quieter rooms and easier years. "The silver is starting to smoke. You're pushing too hard."
"I'm pushing exactly as hard as I need to," he snaps without looking up.
His reddish-orange hair stands in wild tufts where he's been dragging his hands through it, and his green eyes are bright in the wrong way, like a fire that's used up all its logs and started on the floorboards.
"If I don't find the residue from whatever sanctified extraction ate through Hugo's case, dead ends will remain tragically fashionable, and the same sanctified bastards who trained Ezra will keep eating people's lives for breakfast. So unless you've suddenly developed a degree in thaumaturgy, Cain, shut up. "
He drops a pinch of crushed ironwood into the center of the charm.
His fingers shake. He thinks distance hides it, but I've spent centuries cataloging the way bodies betray their owners.
I know the tremor that precedes a break.
I know the hard angle of his jaw when he's decided his own safety is less important than spite.
He reaches for a vial of rosemary oil, jerky enough to nearly knock over a jar of salt.
"You're insulting the rosemary," I murmur, closing the book. The heavy thud of the cover echoes through the empty shop. "It's a defensive herb. You're treating it like a blunt force weapon. Vera would have had your head for such a lack of finesse."
"Your face is tacky," he fires back, but the wit lacks its usual surgical precision.
"This rosemary is an elitist prick and it's refusing to bind to the obsidian.
I'm going to set it on fire if it doesn't cooperate in the next ten seconds.
I'll burn the whole shelf. See if the lavender likes being ash. "
The air snaps.
It's not a sound so much as a sudden vacuum of pressure, a localized collapse of the atmosphere around the mahogany desk.
The silver wire on the charm flares toxic white, a scream of metal pushed past its physical and metaphysical limits, and then it cracks.
The sound is like a gunshot in the small room.
Backlash hits Soren square in the chest, a wave of displaced kinetic force that sends his stool skittering backward.
He gasps, air punched out of him, and starts to tilt toward the floor.
I move before he can turn the fall into another lie. My hands close around his wrists, cool and firm, catching him before his knees give out. His skin is hot enough to sting through my palms, his breath short and jagged, his magic clawing outward for an anchor while he still tries to pull away.
"Let go," he huffs, although he's leaning into me so heavily he'd fall if I did. "I had it. I just... the obsidian was temperamental. It's an asshole rock. I need to realign the polarity."
"It's an asshole rock because you tried to drown it in raw essence." I draw him away from the workstation and toward the couch. "You're done for the day. You're vibrating hard enough to rattle the teeth out of your head, and I've got no interest in finding you a magical dentist."
"You're hovering," he says, voice rising into the bratty defensive pitch that has always covered exhaustion badly. "You're hovering and brooding and looking tragic in a way that should require a city permit. I don't need a nurse, Cain. I need a better grade of silver and for you to stop looming."
Argument is for people who aren't currently holding a collapsing witch.
I guide him down onto the velvet cushions, and because he won't stay put otherwise, I draw him into my lap.
He stiffens for one sharp second, a protest gathering behind his teeth, but the fight drains out before he can weaponize it.
He folds against me with a rough exhale, his head landing in the hollow of my shoulder, and the scent of him fills my lungs: smoke, old paper, bad tea, and the bright citrus tang of magic run too close to the bone.
The weight of him is familiar in a way that hurts.
My body remembers the geometry of his, the sharp elbows that always find the soft places between my ribs, the way his knees tuck beside mine, the way his breath catches just before he yields.
This isn't the tentative, exploratory contact we have with Aven, where every inch is a new country and every touch asks what it's allowed to become.
Soren and I are old history. We're a sensory map drawn once, burned, and redrawn from memory with shaking hands.
"You're so annoying," he mutters into my neck, breath hot against my skin. "You think you can swoop in with your vampire brooding and tailored shirts and fix everything with a hug. You're a relic, Cain. A beautiful, arrogant relic."
"I'm not trying to fix everything." My hand slides under the hem of his thin green sweater. "I'm trying to keep you from exploding in the middle of the retail floor. It'd be a nightmare to clean up, and I doubt the insurance covers spontaneous witch combustion."
My palm spreads over the bare skin of his back, and he shudders, a long ripple that passes through him before he can turn it into a joke.
I feed stability through the bond in measured pulses, slow enough not to smother the heat, steady enough to give it somewhere to go.
The jagged edges of his magic tug against me, snarling and bright, then begin to ease toward the center.
"Oh god," he whispers, forehead resting against my collarbone. "Supernatural chiropractic without a consent form. I should sue you. I should call the witch's union. I should tell Aven you're being a bully."
"There's no witch's union, Soren. If there were, they'd have revoked your license for what you just did to that obsidian. You treated it like a common brick."
The sound he makes could become a laugh or a sob. I don't give him the chance to choose the safer one. My fingers tilt his chin up, and I kiss him.
It's not a kiss of discovery. It's apology, memory, and need folded into something slower than either of us deserves.
He tastes like cold tea and spell-fever, like the frantic edge of a man who's been running too long and hates that his body still knows where to stop.
For one heartbeat, he goes still against my mouth.
Then he kisses me back with sudden, angry hunger, hands fisting in my shirt as if he's furious at both of us for how easily his body remembers mine.
The ease is the thing that hurts. Our mouths know the rhythm before we decide what to do with it.
His breathing stutters, then steadies as my blood magic works through him, taking the sharpest parts of his magic and giving them weight.
Heat pools between us, languid and familiar, but I keep it anchored where he needs it.
My mouth moves from his lips to the corner of his jaw, then to the pulse point that's finally beginning to slow.
He burns differently than I do. Fast, bright, reckless with his own wick, as if spite alone can keep the flame fed.
The guilt sits beneath my sternum, old and useless.
I left him to burn alone for years while I sat in a tower made of gold and blood, watching seasons change through a window I couldn't open.
"Was it quiet?" he asks, voice barely more than thread. He doesn't move away. His eyes stay closed, lashes dark against the fever-bright flush in his cheeks. "In the tower. When the ghost wasn't there. Was it just silent? Did you ever forget what the world sounded like?"
Ellis had always been selective with his hauntings, appearing when he wanted to be cruel, kind, or impossible to ignore. His absence had its own weight.
The question is small only in shape. It carries every year we were apart. He's not only asking about the tower. He's asking whether I had peace while he had absence, whether the void I left behind had an echo on my side too.
"No," I say, tracing the line of his spine beneath the sweater.
"It was never quiet. It was full of my own heartbeat and the things I should have said to you before I was taken.
The locks were loud. The third-floor door had a metallic grind I still hear sometimes.
The iron gate made a heavier sound, lower, like the tower itself was swallowing the room.
I learned to count time by the intervals between guards' footsteps. "
His hand tightens in my shirt. "Did Ellis visit often? Or was that a lie to make me feel better?"
"Often enough to keep me from forgetting the sound of a human voice.
" My thumb moves in slow circles against his back.
"He told me the shop was still standing.
He told me you were still bratty and difficult and drinking too much tea and not enough water.
He was a very effective spy. He told me about the time you tried to enchant the kettle and made it scream every time it boiled. "
Soren's mouth twists into a small, crooked smile against my throat. "It didn't scream. It sang. It was an avant-garde choice of key."
"It frightened the neighbors."
"The neighbors lack artistic literacy." His smile fades around the edges, and his fingers curl tighter into the fabric of my shirt.
"I missed him. I missed both of you so much I thought I was going to turn into a ghost myself just to find a way to wherever they’d hidden you.
I used to sit in the library and wait for the air to change.
I thought maybe you'd found a way to send a message through the dust. I thought if I read enough books, one of them would have your handwriting in the margins. "
The image cuts deeper than it should: Soren alone in Vera's library, angry at the shelves, hunting for me in annotations and dust. He'd have pretended it was research.
He'd have called hope a strategy and grief an inefficient use of oxygen.
I know him well enough to know exactly how he survived, which means I know exactly where I failed him.
"I thought of you whenever I smelled smoke," I say, my voice rougher than I intend.
"Old paper. Bad tea. Every time the sun hit the east-facing windows of a room that wasn't this one, I'd track the light across the floor and pretend it was coming through the front window here, hitting the display of tarot decks and that dusty globe you refuse to clean. "
He lets out a shaky breath. "That's the single worst love confession in recorded history, Cain. Truly. You're supposed to be the smooth one. Poetry, dark allure, devastating emotional restraint. Instead, you compare me to a dusty globe."
"I had years to make it elegant and still managed dusty globe," I whisper, kissing his temple.
"You were never human," Soren murmurs, though he burrows closer, tucking himself into the crook of my neck as if the insult requires full-body contact to land properly. "You were just Cain. And that was usually enough."
I wrap both arms around him until there's no space left between us. The promise that rises in me is easy and impossible: never again, never leaving, never another year of locked doors and messages delivered by ghosts.