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.
