35. Aven
Aven
Soren has three of Hugo's files spread across the counter, two more open on the floor, and one wedged under his elbow.
He hasn't slept enough to earn the amount of authority in his voice.
His hair is flattened on one side, sticking up on the other, and there's still a faint red mark on his cheek from whatever book he used as a pillow before.
I sit across from him with a pen in my hand, a mug of coffee I keep forgetting to drink, and a page of Hugo's notes that's stopped being English.
The words are technically arranged into sentences.
I can see that much. Reported anomaly. Witness inconsistency.
Unidentified religious affiliate. Probable containment site.
My eyes move over them, collect nothing, and start again at the top.
I'd complain, except Soren looks like one wrong noise might make him set the cabinet on fire.
Ellis is pacing near the occult history shelves.
He's been doing it for nearly an hour, back and forth along the same narrow strip of floorboards, wearing the air thin with each turn.
He doesn't touch the wood, exactly, but something about the repetition makes the room feel scraped.
His edges keep fraying and pulling back together.
Every time he reaches the end of the shelf, his head turns toward the front door before his body follows, like some part of him is listening down streets none of us can hear.
I try not to watch him.
"Ellis," I say, lowering Hugo's report because pretending to read it has become embarrassing for everyone involved. "You're making the shelves nervous."
Soren doesn't look up. "They can manage one anxious ghost."
"They're creaking."
"Their owner's dead, their current caretaker's a disaster, and the man who keeps touching the rare books with bloody hands is you.
Maybe they have range." Soren drags one file closer and squints at the top page, but his fingers tremble when he turns it.
He notices me noticing and bares his teeth at the paper instead of at me.
The words are sharp enough to pass for normal if I don't look too closely.
That's what all of us are doing this morning.
Soren's pretending grief can be sorted into file folders.
Ira's in the back room reinforcing wards with enough iron to make the shop groan.
Cain went to the market because somebody had to buy gauze, bitter tea, and synthetic blood, and because none of us knew how to stop him without turning concern into a leash.
I let him go. I keep touching that fact in my mind like a bruise, pressing until it hurts, because pain feels more honest than admitting I liked that he could walk out the door because he chose to.
Ellis stops pacing.
That gets my attention faster than any sound could've.
He stands with one hand hovering near the shelf, his face angled toward the front windows.
Morning has slipped into early afternoon without asking permission, the light thin and grey through the old glass.
Outside, a truck rattles past. Someone laughs on the sidewalk.
The shop remains sealed in Soren's wards and Ira's iron, but Ellis looks at the door as if he can see straight through the city to wherever Cain's walking with our stupid canvas bag and his careful list of things we need.
The air cools by a degree, and Ellis’s worry presses through me before the words arrive. “He should be back,” I relay.
Soren's pen pauses over the page. "He's been gone less than an hour."
"Longer than he should be."
"You've been dead for an unreasonable amount of time," Soren says, but there's no bite under it. "Your sense of errands may need calibration."
Ellis turns on him, and for one second he looks so much like Cain that my chest tightens before I can stop it.
Same eyes. Same set to the mouth when patience gives way to fear.
Less substance, less warmth, but the resemblance cuts through the room with miserable precision.
"Cain doesn't linger when someone he loves is hurt. "
The files on the counter suddenly look like clutter left behind in a house where the family has fled.
I put my pen down because my fingers have started to ache around it.
The bond's still there behind my ribs, the golden-hot thread that ties me to Cain, steady but stretched with distance.
I've been trying not to tug on it, trying not to become the kind of person who flinches every time someone steps outside my reach.
Cain's allowed to buy apples without my panic standing in the doorway like a priest with a rulebook.
I touch the bond anyway.
For one second, there's nothing unusual. Cain's presence is faint with distance, cool and restrained, brushed with the ordinary pressure of movement and city noise. Then the thread pulls taut so hard it feels like a wire driven through my sternum.
My hand slams flat against the counter.
Soren's head snaps up. "Aven?"
Panic hits first.
It's not mine, though my body takes it like an order.
The terror is old and immediate, full of wet pavement, blood in the mouth, and the brutal certainty of recognizing danger too late.
It punches the air from my lungs. I feel Cain's magic flare, not smooth or elegant, but furious, red-black pressure rising through him as if something finally found a target he could break.
For half a breath, I almost feel relief inside the panic because Cain's fighting. Cain's moving. Cain's still himself.
Then something closes around him.
The resistance doesn't fade. It's cut off.
My chair tips backward as I go down, but I don't feel the impact properly.
My knees hit the floor, one hip striking the cabinet, and the pain arrives from far away, drowned beneath the horror pouring through the bond.
Cain's hand opens against his will. I feel it as if my own fingers have been peeled apart.
His magic pulls back from his skin, not extinguished, recalled.
His jaw locks around words he can't say.
His legs turn toward something he's trying to resist with every part of himself that still belongs to him.
It slides over him like oil over water. His breathing evens. His body obeys. Somewhere, Cain's screaming so hard the bond shakes with it, but the surface of him smooths out under someone else's command.
My own muscles try to answer it. My fingers loosen against the floorboards. My spine wants to straighten into stillness. For one sick second, I feel the shape of compliance as if it's been poured into my bones too, and the violation of it tears something open in me that prayer never reached.
Soren's beside me before I understand he's moved.
Papers skid across the counter in his wake, a jar of ink tipping and spilling black over Hugo's notes.
He catches my shoulders, not shaking me, just holding hard enough to keep me from folding inward.
His magic flares against my skin. "Aven, stay with me. What is it? Where's Cain?"
I try to answer. The bond gives me a black car, leather seats, the smell of old stone, Silas, a name that arrives wrapped in Cain's hatred, and the taste of synthetic blood gone wrong.
I get flowers in the gutter, yellow petals darkening in rainwater.
Apples rolling under a tire. Then the calm presses harder, and my mouth fills with the phantom taste of dust.
The dead erupt.
They don't whisper or drift or crowd the ceiling the way they usually do when my attention cracks open.
They surge from every cold pocket of the shop in a wave of panic that rattles the bottles behind the counter and sends the hanging charms clashing together.
The woman in the torn evening gown wails without sound, her grief pressing through my skull until the lights flicker.
The old man who smells like cheap gin covers his ears and drops to his knees near the umbrella stand.
Three child-spirits bolt through the cabinet and back out again, screaming in voices that never quite become air.
Ellis is the worst of them.
He's no longer pacing. He's breaking apart in the center of the room, fury and terror blowing through him so hard his outline shreds at the shoulders.
He knows before I can say it. Maybe he knew the moment Cain's blood answered that old command.
Maybe Cain's family magic still hooks through him deep enough that the leash pulling tight around his brother drags him too.
Soren's magic misfires. The files on the counter lift in a sudden spiral, pages whipping through the room, Hugo's notes slapping against shelves and scattering across the floor.
One of Vera's journals snaps shut with a crack like bone.
The biting plant in the corner curls its serrated leaves inward and strikes at empty air, pot rocking hard enough to spill dirt over the rug.
Ira comes through the back doorway with a warding blade in one hand and iron filings dusted across his forearm.
He takes in the room in a single sweep: me on the floor, Soren gripping my shoulders, papers in the air, spirits wailing, the empty space everyone is reacting to coming apart.
His body's already braced for an attack.
He looks for the intruder first, then the breach, then the blood.
When he finds none of those, his eyes land on me, and whatever he sees makes his face go still in a way that frightens me almost as much as the bond.
"Cain," I manage.
The name barely leaves my throat, but it's enough.
Ira's grip tightens on the blade. Soren makes a small sound beside me, all the color leaving his face. The bond convulses again, and this time I feel Cain trying to send something steady back, trying to protect us from his terror even while his body walks into captivity. Whatever he sends twists before it reaches me, smoothed by the same force that has hold of him, and something inside me recoils so violently the shop’s lights flare white.