45. Aven
Aven
Morning light finds every broken shelf, every scorch mark, every glittering tooth of glass still scattered across Soren's shop.
The front window is cracked from corner to corner.
The register hangs open with one drawer bent sideways.
Vera's library is worse: books everywhere, pages bent, charms burned thin, one lamp hanging crooked above the couch.
I stand in the middle of it with blood dried under my nails, a headache behind my eyes, and a crowd of dead people waiting quietly around the walls.
Quietly is the part that keeps catching me.
They're not screaming. They're not shoving grief into my mouth until I choke on it.
They're watching me the way people watch a door they're not sure they're allowed to use.
"Everyone alive?" I ask, because starting with the impossible seems efficient.
Soren answers from the floor behind the counter, wrapped in a blanket and offended by the concept of standing. "I'm accepting alive as a temporary classification," he says, rough-voiced but present. "Subject to revision if anyone asks me to move."
Cain stands near the broken doorway. His eyes flick once toward the street, once toward the back hall, and then he stops himself before the check can become a ritual. He looks at me because he knows I saw it, and I don't make him explain.
The biting plant snaps at his boot.
"Traitor," Ira mutters.
"It has medical instincts," Soren says, then points one shaky finger at the floor beside him. "Sit down before it escalates to amputation."
Ira looks at Cain, which is a mistake. Cain is near the broken doorway, still pale from everything Adaro left in him, his dark hair loose around his face and one hand resting against the frame.
His eyes flick once toward the street, once toward the back hall, and then he catches himself before the second check becomes a third.
He looks at me because he knows I saw it.
I don't say anything.
Cain leaves the doorframe and crosses to Ira with the calm of a man who's decided that if everyone must be handled, he'll at least make it elegant.
"Sit," he says, and then pauses because the word still has edges in this house.
His expression tightens for half a second before he adds, softer, "Please. Before Soren makes good on the plant."
That does what my glaring and Soren's threats fail to do.
Ira lowers himself to the floor with a controlled breath that turns into a wince at the very end.
Soren immediately shifts closer, which is a mistake because he sways, and Cain catches his shoulder before he can tip sideways into a pile of shattered spell jars.
"Fantastic," I say. "The injured are tending the injured. Very sustainable. Very professional."
"You're also injured," Ira says. Soren's mouth twitches. Cain gives me the kind of look that says he's both grateful I'm speaking and deeply unimpressed by the words I've chosen.
I turn back to them to see the living are bandaged badly, breathing stubbornly, and likely to bite me if I hover too much.
The dead have no blood left to lose, but some of them still carry the Church on their skin, grey-gold residue clinging to throats, wrists, ribs, places where crosses and wards used them until personhood became fuel.
I pick up a notebook from behind the counter.
The cover is cracked, and half the pages smell like smoke, but it opens when I ask it to and doesn't immediately burst into flame, which makes it one of the more cooperative things in the shop.
I find a pen under a broken jar of protection salt and walk to the first spirit waiting near the damaged register.
She's older than she looked inside the light. Or maybe death has finally returned the age the Church flattened out of her. Her hair is braided over one shoulder, and her hands are clasped in front of her like she's trying very hard not to ask for anything.
"What's your name?" I ask.
For a moment, she only stares. Names are hard when someone has spent years sanding yours down into a function. Then her mouth moves, and I hear it behind my teeth.
"Mara Voss," I say aloud, and write it down.
I don't reach for command. I don't push her toward a door because I can feel where one opens. I write her name and wait while the last of the Church's residue peels from her shoulders in dull flakes of light.
"You can go," I tell her. "You can stay for a while. No one here is counting you."
Mara looks toward the broken window where morning has started to brighten the rain on the street. She smiles once, small and startled, then thins into the pale, clean bright of a person finally leaving a room where she was never meant to be kept.
I write the next name.
Jon Bell. Priya Shah. Thomas Eddle. A boy who only remembers "Mikey" and the smell of his father's coat, so I write Mikey and don't ask him to be more complete for my records.
Some cross as soon as I say their names back to them.
Some linger, touching shelves, looking at the ceiling, standing in the wreckage with the cautious suspicion of people who've learned that open doors can still be traps.
One ghost in a varsity jacket hovers by the register and gives the bent drawer a look of severe judgment.
"If you're staying, you need to stop looking at the damage," I tell him. "Adjust your expectations."
Soren huffs from the floor. It isn't quite a laugh, but I take it and put it somewhere safe inside my ribs.
The ghost gives me a two-finger salute and drifts toward the front shelves, where he settles with the air of someone prepared to haunt retail for a while.
I let him. That's the difference now, or part of it.
The dead aren't a crowd I survive by drowning them out.
They're people. Annoying people sometimes, but people.
Ellis waits until the others have thinned.
He stands at the entrance to Vera's library, clearer than I've ever seen him, the last residue of the tower hanging from him in thin, dark threads.
Adaro is dead. The tower network is broken.
The Church's gathered light has gone quiet.
Whatever held Ellis here is no longer a wall.
It's a knot, and I finally have enough of myself awake to see where to loosen it.
Cain feels the change before I say his name.
He looks up from where he's wrapping a bandage around Ira's arm with the focused gentleness of someone refusing to think too hard about anyone else leaving.
His gaze catches on the space beside the library door, and grief moves through the bond so quietly I almost miss it.
"He's there," Cain says.
"Yes."
Cain stands. He doesn't check the exits this time. He only crosses the room until his shoulder touches mine, not leaning yet, not asking for anything, just close enough that grief doesn't have to happen alone.
Ellis looks at him, then at me. "Tell him he looks terrible."
My throat tightens so fast it hurts. "He says you look terrible."
Cain's mouth moves around the smallest almost-smile. "He's always been rude when frightened."
Ellis snorts, and for one second he looks less like a ghost and more like a younger brother. "Tell him the hair is still a mistake."
"He says the hair is still a mistake," I say.
Cain closes his eyes. The almost-smile stays, but it trembles at the edge. "Tell him I'm sorry."
Ellis's face changes.
The sharpness thins enough that I can see the love underneath, stubborn and exhausted and still standing after everything that tried to grind it down.
"He says to stop making guilt a hobby," I say, because Ellis doesn't make me soften the message and Cain doesn't deserve a cleaned-up ghost. My voice catches, and I force the rest through.
"He says if you spend the next century apologizing, he'll come back and haunt every pair of shoes you own.
He says live, Cain. That's the point. You got out, so live. "
Cain bends a little, as if the words have weight and he's taken them into his body. His shoulder presses harder into mine. I wrap one arm around his back before he can decide whether he needs permission for that too.
"I tried to find you," Cain whispers.
Ellis hears him without me. I know because his expression breaks into something bright and furious. "I know."
I repeat it anyway, because some words deserve the air. "He knows."
The last chain is behind Ellis's left shoulder, hooked through the place the Church tore him thin and Adaro's blood tried to make use of what was left.
I reach for it carefully. It hurts the second my fingers close around the binding, cold pushing up my arm, flashes of tower stone and chapel light and Ellis choosing, again and again, not to dissolve while Cain was still caged somewhere below him.
Cain's hand grips my sleeve.
I breathe through it. I don't pull hard. I don't make release another kind of violence. I loosen the knot until the residue begins to fall away in dull, dead sparks, and Ellis straightens as if something heavy has finally slid from his shoulders.
He becomes clearer for one breath.
Dark curls. Tired eyes. Cain's mouth, almost. A smile that was his own.
"Goodbye, brother," Cain says.
Ellis lifts two fingers in a lazy salute that looks nothing like reverence and exactly like mercy. Then he steps backward, into the light waiting behind him, and disappears without a sound.
Cain doesn't break loudly.
His breath leaves him once, hard and uneven.
Then he turns into me, forehead against my shoulder, and I hold him with both arms while the place where Ellis stood becomes only dust, morning, and the absence of waiting.
Cain's hands clutch the back of my sweater for a few seconds before he makes himself loosen them.
"You don't have to let go that fast," I tell him.
He gives a laugh that barely qualifies as one. "Habit."
"Yeah," I say, pressing my cheek against his hair. "We're all working on being badly trained furniture."
He stays there a little longer.