35. Aven #3
Then Soren's fingers close around mine.
His hand is hot, almost feverish from strained Essren magic, and his grip isn't reverent. Human in the way he refuses to be awed when he's worried. He squeezes once, hard enough to hurt.
I squeeze back.
Cain's thread. Soren's hand. Ira's presence at my side. Ellis kneeling in front of us with his dead fury pointed toward the same tower that swallowed him. The room steadies around those things.
"I know where he is," I say.
Ira's already moving by the time I finish the sentence. He crosses to the counter and drags one of Hugo's maps from beneath a spill of ink and police notes. His fear of me, if that's what it was, folds into function because Ira survives terror by making it tactical. "Show me."
Soren lets go of my hand only long enough to sweep the scattered papers aside.
His magic curls around the edges of the map, pinning it flat to the counter despite the tremor in his fingers.
"If it's Adaro's tower, the wards won't just be vampire work.
There'll be Church contamination in the structure. "
"They used silver-lined brick," I say, and point before I fully understand where my hand is going.
My finger lands northwest of the shop, near the industrial district Hugo circled twice in red and then dismissed in a note that says municipal property records inconsistent.
"Here. Not the mill. Behind it. The road curves, then the gate sits back from the street. "
Ira's eyes sharpen. "That building was supposed to be condemned."
"It eats condemnation notices for breakfast," Soren says, voice rough. "Vera tried to look into it once and spent three days yelling at the walls."
Ellis's head lifts slightly.
Soren sees my reaction and stills. "What?"
"She knew," I say, looking at Ellis.
Ellis doesn't answer in words. He doesn't need to. His grief moves through the room, and every kneeling spirit shivers with it. Vera knew enough to look, though it wasn’t enough to free him. Another failure added to the stack, another almost that won't help Cain now.
Ira puts both hands on the counter, leaning over the map. "We need weapons that won't trip the outer wards. Salt and iron will mark us from half a block away if the structure's tuned for exorcists. Soren, can you mask Essren signatures?"
Soren's laugh is breathless. "On a good day, yes. On today, I can probably make us smell like a haunted compost heap for six minutes and then pass out in a dramatic but inconvenient location."
"Then we don't rely on that," Ira says.
They are already building the plan because panic cannot be allowed to waste the next breath.
I hear them. I understand the words. Part of me even follows the shape of strategy beginning to form around the map.
Under it all, the bond keeps sending me the shape of Cain sitting still when every part of him is trying to fight.
I feel the compliance as a grey film over my own teeth.
My hands close at my sides.
The dead remain kneeling.
"Stand," I say.
The word's soft, but it moves through the shop with enough force to stir the hanging charms. For one heartbeat, no one living moves.
Then the spirits rise. Not all the way into ease.
Nothing about this is ease. They stand because I've told them to stand, and that's not much better, but at least their knees are no longer pressed to the floor in front of me.
Ellis rises last.
I look at him and feel the old fear of myself waiting beneath the light.
I could command him too. I could command all of them, maybe.
The knowledge is a pit opening in the middle of my chest. The seminary would call this proof of something holy.
The Church would call it harvestable. I don't have a word for it yet that doesn't make me want to cut it out.
Soren's shoulder brushes mine. Deliberate. Grounding. Annoying on purpose.
I take the contact like a breath.
Ira looks up from the map. His face is hard now, but the carefulness in his eyes remains. "Aven, I need details. Entrances, wards, numbers if Ellis can give them. We can't walk into a bloodline stronghold on grief alone."
"No," I say, and my voice is still too calm.
Soren's mouth twitches like he wants to approve of that and is too exhausted to manage it.
Ellis leans toward the map, and the image he pushes through me lands in the ink, Hugo's red circle bleeding wider until it surrounds the road I saw through him. Soren inhales sharply. Ira doesn't waste time being impressed. He marks the location with a black pencil and starts listing what we need.
It’s open drawers, scattered files, blood on linen, spirits standing because I told them to stand, and three living men rearranging themselves around the fact that Cain has been taken.
I look at the map, at the place Ellis has given us, at Ira already turning fear into strategy and Soren holding himself upright through spite and love. I answer it with the only thing the tether has not learned how to stop.
Hold.
Then I put my hand on the map. “We’re getting him.”