45. Aven #2
Gabriel arrives before noon with coffee, food, a broom, and a face that suggests he's spent the walk over preparing to be furious and terrified in equal measure.
He takes in Ira on the floor, Soren under a blanket, Cain's red-rimmed eyes, me holding a smoke-stained notebook, and the shop looking like a religious war lost a fight with a flea market.
He sets the coffee down first.
Then he hugs me so hard I make a sound like a stepped-on accordion. "Ow," I say into his apron.
"Good," Gabriel mutters. "You're alive enough to complain."
"Mostly."
He pulls back, grips my face in both hands for one second, then turns the full force of his glare on the other three men in the room. "If any of you hurt him in a way he didn't ask for, I own a shotgun, a shovel, and a bar with a very forgiving basement."
Cain inclines his head. "Understood."
Ira says, "Fair."
Soren, from the floor, raises one weak hand. "I'd like to be excluded from the threat on medical grounds."
Gabriel looks at him. "You look like a haunted broom."
Gabriel stays long enough to sweep the worst glass away from the main path and force coffee into everyone's hands. Hugo's message comes while we're sitting among the ruins.
The official story is already a gas leak.
I read it, hate it, and put the phone facedown beside the notebook of names.
Later, we end up at the table in Vera's library because the kitchen table has a crack through one leg and Soren refuses to risk dying under cheap furniture.
The library table is scarred but standing.
Someone has cleared enough books and broken charms from it to make room for coffee, bandages, the notebook, and a plate of toast no one wants but everyone keeps moving closer to.
I sit with the notebook open in front of me.
Cain is beside me, his knee touching mine under the table, his hand resting over my wrist whenever I stop writing for too long.
Soren is slouched in the chair across from us with a blanket around his shoulders and one foot hooked around Ira's ankle like he can keep the exorcist seated by spite and lower-body contact.
Ira lets him, which is how I know the world has changed at least a little.
The biting plant has followed us and settled under Ira's chair. Every time he shifts like he might stand, it snaps.
"I'm being held hostage by shrubbery," Ira says.
"You need supervision," Soren says without opening his eyes.
Cain reaches across the table and sets two fingers briefly in Soren's hair. It's a small touch, almost absent, but Soren leans into it before he remembers he's supposed to be unbearable. Cain notices and says nothing, which is one of the nicer things about him.
The dead are quieter around the library walls.
Not gone. Quiet. Mikey is near the window, watching rainwater gather on the cracked sill.
The varsity jacket ghost has decided the register is less interesting than Vera's locked cabinet, which will become a problem.
A woman whose name I wrote down as Helena stands near the shelves with one hand resting on a book she hasn't chosen to leave yet.
No one rushes them.
"What now?" Soren asks. His voice is almost asleep.
I look at the notebook. Names fill two pages already, some neat, some shaky where my hand gave out.
There will be more. The Church will bury the story under gas leaks and bad wiring, but these names exist now in ink on Vera's table, which feels like a small revenge and a promise I can actually keep.
"Windows," Ira says.
"Wards," Cain adds.
"Breakfast," Soren says. "A real one. If anyone says toast, I’ll haunt you preemptively."
"Names," I say, and my thumb brushes the edge of the page. "I need to finish the names."
Ira's hand finds the back of my neck. He's still sitting. That matters. His touch is warm, heavy, and not a cage. Cain's hand shifts over mine on the table. Soren's breathing evens out, his foot still hooked around Ira's ankle.
"And no one decides alone," Cain says.
I open the notebook again as the next spirit waits near Vera's locked cabinet, one hand resting on the wood as if she's asking permission from the furniture.
She's young, maybe twenty, with a torn ribbon at her throat and Church residue still caught in her hair like dull gold dust. I lift the pen and wait until she looks at me instead of the doorway.
"Name?" I ask.
Her mouth moves once with no sound. I don't rush her. The rain ticks against the cracked window, and somewhere downstairs Gabriel's abandoned broom falls over with a clatter that makes Ira twitch before he remembers he's being held hostage by shrubbery. Soren opens one eye.
"If that broom is haunted now, I'm charging rent," he mutters.
The ghost smiles. It's small. Barely there. But it's hers.
"Evelyn Hart," she says, and I write it carefully, one letter at a time.
Soren squints at the page. "Your H is a crime."
"My H survived a holy war," I tell him. "Show some respect."
Cain reaches for the coffee pot without looking away from the table and refills my mug. The sound is ordinary enough to hurt. Coffee into a chipped cup. Pen scratching over paper. Ira's rough breath when he shifts, and three of us immediately glare at him.
The shop is wrecked. The Church will call it a gas leak by noon. There's blood on the floorboards, broken glass under the rugs, ghosts by the shelves, and breakfast going cold beside a list of names no one gets to erase again.
I finish Evelyn's name and look up. "Next?" I ask as a man near the rain-bright window lifts his head and tells me.