Cain
Aven has been asleep for forty-three minutes when I find the empty gauze drawer, a shallow wooden drawer behind Soren's counter, crowded with old receipts, half-labeled tincture bottles, two bent silver clips, and a cracked tin of burn salve that smells strongly enough of rosemary to sting the back of my throat.
The gauze should be there because Ira used the last roll on Aven's hand after I finally convinced him to stop bleeding on Vera's notes.
Instead, there's only the flattened paper sleeve, a few stray threads, and the faint brown smear of dried blood along the drawer's inner edge where someone put suppliei s away in haste and never came back to clean up.
I hold the empty sleeve between two fingers and look toward the breakroom.
Aven is curled on the narrow sofa beneath my coat, sleeping too deeply to notice the bandage around his knuckles has stained through again.
Soren is awake in the library, though he has ordered all of us to pretend otherwise, surrounded by open journals and a cup of tea gone cold beside his elbow.
Ira has been at the back door since sunrise, filing sigils into iron with the grim rhythm of a man who has not said he is worried because his body is already doing it loudly enough.
The house needs food, tea, gauze, salt, replacement chalk, and synthetic blood.
Still, the list settles in my mind with a strange, necessary weight.
Apples because Aven will forget to eat unless fruit appears in his hand already washed and cut.
Bitter tea because Soren drinks it when his stomach turns from spellwork, even while claiming it tastes like boiled weeds and spite.
Bandages because Ira uses supplies as if replenishment is a luxury only other people deserve.
Synthetic blood because I refuse to let hunger make me careless when every instinct in me is already sharpened toward violence.
I fold the empty gauze sleeve and set it on the counter.
"I'm going to the market," I say.
The file stops against the iron.
Soren doesn't look up from his journal, but the page in front of him blackens slightly at one corner. "Terrible idea."
"You're supposed to be resting," I remind him.
"I'm resting aggressively." He dips his pen again with too much force, splattering ink near the margin. "It's different."
Ira turns from the door. His gaze moves from my face to the canvas bag in my hand, then to the front windows, where the wards tremble faintly in the morning light. "The perimeter isn't finished."
"It won't finish faster because I stare at it."
"It'll finish safer if no one opens the door while I'm reinforcing it."
His voice is level. That's how I know he's closer to anger than argument.
I cross to the shelf near the counter and take the list Soren abandoned beneath a jar of dried chamomile, adding gauze in the blank space at the bottom.
The ordinary motion keeps my hands from curling.
It would be easy to accept Ira's refusal.
It would be easy to sit in the library until grief becomes another room I'm kept inside. I've had enough rooms.
"We're out of half the things needed to make the next emergency survivable," I say, keeping my voice quiet enough not to reach Aven.
"Aven needs food he won't argue with while unconscious.
Soren needs tea and something with sugar before his essence burns through what remains of his temper.
You need gauze, whether you admit it or not, and I need blood that doesn't come from a living vein. "
Ira's jaw flexes.
"I know how to move unseen," I add. "And I know the difference between useful caution and hiding."
Soren's pen stills. He looks up then, eyes red-rimmed and narrowed, his mouth already forming something sharp.
The words don't come. His gaze shifts past me to the breakroom doorway, to the dark spill of my coat over Aven's sleeping body, and whatever he sees there changes the shape of his objection.
"Get the bitter blend," he says at last, rough with exhaustion. "The one with the ugly blue tin. Not the green one. The green one tastes like grass that died angry."
"I wouldn't dream of insulting your refined suffering with the wrong tea."
His glare lacks its usual heat, but he manages the shape of it.
Ira doesn't move from the back door. "Fast. No detours. No conversations you don't need. If the bond spikes, I'm coming through whatever wall is closest, and I won't stop to explain the damage to civilians."
"I'd be disappointed by anything less." I take my coat from the hook near the door, leaving the heavier one over Aven.
The canvas bag folds against my side, printed with the faded black cat Soren claims once belonged to Vera and hated every man who entered the shop on principle.
Its handles are fraying. Someone stitched them twice and badly.
I slide them over my wrist with a care that feels absurd until I realize I'm proud to carry it.
Ira notices. Of course he does. His expression shifts by less than a breath, but the bond gives him away. He wants to forbid me. He won't. Last night taught him again what cages sound like when they're built out of protection, and he's trying.
He steps aside from the door.
The street outside is damp from overnight rain, the pavement holding the grey shine of morning beneath passing tires.
Air moves cold against my face, carrying coffee steam, wet concrete, engine exhaust, and the yeast-warm scent of a bakery opening two doors down.
For a moment, I stand on the threshold with the shop's wards brushing the back of my coat and the city moving in front of me as if no one beneath its roofs has ever been sold, bound, or used to power a gate.
A woman hurries past with a paper cup in one hand and a phone caught between shoulder and ear.
A cyclist swears at a taxi. Two children in matching yellow raincoats drag their guardian toward the bakery window, leaving boot prints in a shallow puddle.
No one looks at me twice. They see a pale man with a canvas bag, dressed too well for errands and too early for anything interesting.
They don't see the family name pressed into my blood.
They don't smell the tower under my skin.
They don't know that being overlooked can feel more intimate than being touched.
The market is three blocks over, tucked beneath a stretch of old brick awnings and striped canvas that collect rainwater in sagging pockets.
Vendors call over one another as they set up for the day, voices rising through the steam from coffee carts and the metallic clatter of crates.
A fishmonger slides a bed of ice into place.
Someone tears brown paper from a roll. A dog strains at a leash near a stand of oranges, nose working furiously while its owner apologizes to everyone within reach.
Humanity presses close here without ownership.
Shoulders brush mine and move on. A man bumps my elbow near the first stall and mutters a distracted apology without fear, and the small carelessness of it lodges under my ribs.
I buy apples first. Not the perfect ones in the front, waxed and polished until they look decorative, but the heavier ones in the crate beside them.
Aven will ignore fruit if it looks like an assignment.
He'll eat slices if someone leaves them near his hand while he's reading or pretending not to listen to the dead.
I choose six, turning each one in my palm, checking for bruises with the concentration once demanded of me for bloodlines and treaties.
The vendor weighs them, names the price, and hands the bag over without lowering his eyes. Ordinary exchange.
At the tea stall, I find the ugly blue tin Soren requested tucked behind three prettier blends the vendor clearly wants to sell first. It smells medicinal beneath the dried leaves that'll likely settle his stomach and offend him on principle.
I buy two. Then honey sticks because he'll claim not to want them and use them anyway when he thinks no one's looking.
A jar of apricot preserves catches my eye, and I add it before I can talk myself out of the unnecessary softness of it.
The pharmacy stall is little more than a narrow booth between a spice seller and a woman repairing watches, but the shelves are clean and the supplies sealed.
I buy gauze, adhesive wraps, burn salve, and the small curved scissors Ira prefers because his old pair vanished into one of Soren's emergency warding boxes.
The vendor's card reader chirps. She gives me a receipt and asks whether I need a bag.
I almost tell her I have one. Instead, I take the paper bag she offers because the act of being asked feels luxurious in a way I can't explain without sounding mad.
By the time I reach the flower stall, the canvas bag has a proper weight.
Fruit against tea tins, bandages against jars, the dull knock of ordinary things settling together.
I pause because the stall is crowded with white roses, marigolds, dark red carnations, and buckets of greenery that smell of cut stems and cold water.
The shop still smells like blood, paper, and grief.
Aven won't care about flowers, except he will look at them when he thinks no one sees.
Soren will complain they're an obvious emotional manipulation, then rearrange them three times.
Ira will pretend not to notice and move them away from any ward line where spilled water might interfere.
The vendor watches me consider the buckets with open curiosity. She's older than the flower stall by the look of her hands, brown skin creased around the knuckles, a pencil tucked into the scarf around her hair. "For an apology?" she asks.
"For a house that's had a difficult night."