Aven #2
"I'm here," I say, though I'm not sure whether I mean it for Cain, Ira, or myself.
My light is thin after the rescue, after the dead, after holding too many impossible things open with hands that were never meant to be doors, but it answers when I call it.
It comes pale and sharp, gathering around my fingers as I reach for the tether residue and make myself dissolve instead of pull.
Soren makes a sound from the cot.
Everyone freezes except Cain, who can't afford to.
Soren's eyes are open to slits, unfocused at first and then suddenly sharp in that horrible way he has when his body is nearly gone but his magic still insists on being clever.
He looks at Cain, then at Ira's hands, then at me, and I can feel him seeing the structure in a way the rest of us are only feeling around.
"Don't yank it," Soren whispers.
Cain makes a broken sound at the first syllable of his voice. Ira's hand stays firm on his chest. I step toward Soren, but he gives the smallest shake of his head and looks back to the air around Cain.
"Left side," Soren breathes. "It's looped through the old blood path. Dissolve the outer rot first. If you pull the knot before the shell breaks, you'll take pieces of him with it."
"Go back to sleep," I tell him, because terror has made me bossy and also because he looks like a Victorian orphan.
His mouth twitches. It's almost a smile, and it's terrible. "Bad tea," he whispers, then his eyes slip closed again as if insulting my work was the last rope keeping him conscious.
I almost laugh. It comes out, so I turn it into breath and get back to Cain.
The residue doesn't want to dissolve. It's survived Adaro's death by pretending it's Cain, by hiding inside the body's memory of what obedience felt like.
I thread my light into the outer layer, slow, careful, following Soren's instruction as if it's the only map we have because it is.
The rot softens under the touch but releases memories as it breaks, and every one of them passes through me on its way out.
I feel the tower room. I feel the bed. I feel Cain's hand lowering from the door before his fingers reach the handle.
I feel the smooth horror of a body correcting itself into stillness while the mind remains awake.
My stomach lurches, and for one second the recovery room disappears under grey stone and old silk.
Ira's voice cuts through it. "Aven, breathe."
I breathe.
Cain trembles under Ira's hands. His knees jerk once, trying to fold, and Ira lowers his voice further. "Do you want to go down before it forces you?"
The room holds still around the question before Cain's lips part, and for a heartbeat I think the residue will steal the answer before he can make it.
Then he nods. Ira moves with him, one hand still at his jaw and the other at his chest as Cain lowers himself from the cot to the floor.
He kneels because he chooses it before the command can take it from him.
Ira treats the posture as sacred. There's no satisfaction in his face, no victory, no flicker of power enjoyed at Cain's expense.
He goes down with him, one knee on the floor despite the injury that makes his breath catch.
Cain grips Ira's forearms, shaking so hard the fabric bunches under his fingers, and Ira lets him hold.
"Good," Ira says. "That was yours. Keep that. In. Hold. Out. Let the echo pass."
I dissolve the next layer as Cain sobs.
It rips out of him when the knot finally loosens, and the sound nearly brings every spirit at the windows through the wards by force of grief alone.
I feel the false commands break apart inside the bond, separated from the places where Cain's self had been forced to grow around them.
It hurts. God, it hurts. It feels like pulling rusted wire from living tissue one millimeter at a time.
Ira stays with him. He doesn't let the sound change his hands. One remains at the back of Cain's neck now, the other spread wide over his spine as Cain folds forward into him. Cain's forehead presses into Ira's shoulder, and his whole body shakes with the absence of what we've pulled out.
"It's out," I whisper, though the words feel too small and too certain. "The active residue is out."
Cain doesn't lift his head. "I don't know how to stand."
Ira's fingers flex at the back of his neck. "Then don't yet."
Cain stays against Ira for a long time, breathing like each breath has to be negotiated with a body that no longer knows who is allowed to ask for it.
I sit on the floor as my hands shake in my lap, pale light still flickering around the knuckles, and for a moment all I can do is watch them, each of them holding each other.
Then Cain reaches for me, his hand lifting blindly from Ira's vest, searching behind him.
I crawl into the space beside them and wrap myself around his back, pressing my chest between his shoulder blades, my arms around his waist, my face against the torn fabric of his shirt.
He makes a sound when I touch him, and one of his hands covers mine hard enough to hurt.
"Thank you," he whispers.
It costs him. I hear it. Ira hears it. The bond hears it and carries the ache around the room until even the biting plant outside the door stops hissing. Cain turns his head enough to press his mouth against my hair, not a kiss with shape, only contact. It's still enough to make my eyes burn.
We stay there until the floor becomes uncomfortable and Ira's bleeding becomes impossible to ignore.
I'm the one who notices first because his breath starts catching on the inhale, and because I can feel pain leaking through the bond beneath his impressive commitment to being a structural support with unresolved rib trauma.
"Ira is bleeding," I mutter against Cain's back.
Ira's laugh is one rough exhale. "I hate you."
"No, you don't."
Cain shifts then, not away from Ira, not away from me, but enough to look at Soren. The witch is still asleep. His breathing has settled into a fragile rhythm, and some of the translucent quality has gone from his skin. He looks terrible, but he looks alive.
I try to stand and discover that my body refuses.
The room tilts as Cain's hand snaps to my wrist, Ira's to my elbow, both of them catching me before I can make an artistic collapse onto the floorboards.
The bond surges around us, suddenly loud with the cost I've been ignoring.
Rescue. Spirits. Cain's cleansing. Holding the wards.
Keeping the dead outside the glass. All of it has been spending me down, and now that Cain is no longer actively being eaten by a dead man's leftovers, my body has decided to present the bill.
"Aven," Cain says.
Ira studies my face with the deeply annoying focus of someone who's found a new crisis to manage. "You're empty."
"You're going upstairs," Cain says.
The fact that Cain can sound like that ten minutes after sobbing into Ira's shoulder would be impressive if I had enough spare energy to resent him properly.
I open my mouth to argue, and the spirits at the window press closer, their cold attention sliding over my skin.
The room dips again. Cain's grip tightens, not commanding, but steady.
Soren stirs on the cot. His eyes don't open, but his voice drifts up rough and thin. "Recharge him before the ghosts start chewing on his edges."
"Soren," I say, alarmed enough to sound almost sober. "Stop participating."
"Bad tea," he murmurs again, and slips back under.
That settles it for everyone except me. Cain lifts me carefully, which is unfair because he should be the patient, and Ira gathers Soren with a wince he thinks no one sees.
We make it upstairs in a slow, damaged procession that would be embarrassing if any of us had energy to care.
The spirits remain outside the wards, quieter now, their pressure a dim ache against the windows instead of a demand.
The bedroom is dark except for the small lamp near the bed and the ward-glow under the sill.
Cain sets me down first, then immediately checks Soren when Ira lowers him against the pillows.
Soren barely wakes, but his hand finds Cain's sleeve and holds.
Ira sits on the edge of the mattress with one hand pressed to his bandaged ribs, breathing through pain.
"You need to be on this bed too," I tell him.
"I am on the bed."
"You're perched on the edge."
Cain looks between us, then at me. His face is still drawn from the cleansing, but there's something steadier in his eyes now. "Aven."
There it is again. My name.
"I know," I say.
I do know. The bond is all of us with missing pieces and fresh wounds. Soren has spent too much. Cain has been hollowed in a different direction. Ira is bleeding through gauze. I've been pulled thin by the dead until my own body feels more like a room I'm haunting than a place I live.
Recharge isn't a pretty word for what we need.
It sounds neat, like something Vera would label in a notebook and then fail to mention might involve everyone crying.
What we need is heat, skin, breath, want chosen carefully enough to become safe.
What we need is the bond closed around the living instead of the dead.
Ira reaches for me, then stops with his hand halfway there. His eyes meet mine. "Do you want touch?"
The question almost knocks me flatter than the exhaustion. The Church never asked. Ezra never asked. The dead don't ask so much as need loudly in my direction. But Ira, bruised and bleeding and made of every protective instinct currently behaving itself by force, waits.
"Yes," I say.
Cain sits behind me, close but not touching until I lean back. "From all of us?"