His mouth softens, and I hate how much I need it.
"We'll look for ways to slow it," Cain says. "Carefully. Without pretending caution is a cure."
"We'll figure out what sharing safely means," Ira adds. "And when we don't know, we say we don't know."
Aven looks at the letter again, then folds it along Vera's old crease. He doesn't tuck it away. He places it on the table where all of us can see it, where it can't go back inside a ledger or behind a wall or into the kind of hiding place love uses when it wants to excuse itself.
"No more hidden pages," Aven says.
"No more hidden pages," I echo.
The promise sits heavy in my mouth. I don't know if I can keep it perfectly. That's the frightening part. I've had years of practicing secrecy as care, years of turning fear into a locked drawer and calling it strategy. But Ira's lap is still under me, Cain's warmth is still pressed to my side, and Aven's hand is still holding mine while Vera's letter lies exposed on the table.
I'm so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. The hollowing is still there. The shelf-life is still there. Nothing in this room has rewritten the cost or found a clever loophole in the margins. My magic still eats at the edges of me, and now they know that, not as an emergency or a theory but as a future none of us gets to hide in a pocket again.
Ira shifts the blanket higher over my chest. Cain's hand follows the movement, settling carefully at my ribs over the place that feels thinnest as Aven leans forward until his forehead rests against our joined hands, and his breath warms my fingers.
I fall asleep before I mean to. It happens in pieces: the weight of Ira's arm, the press of Cain behind me, Aven's thumb slowing over my knuckles, and Vera's letter lying open on the table where everyone can see it.
44
Aven
Thedoorbellrings.
Cracked glass waits in lazy piles behind the counter. The wards hum too loudly under the floorboards, raw from everything we dragged back through them. One display shelf leans at an angle Soren keeps glaring at whenever he wakes, but the ghost at the front window is the thing that has most of my attention. She has both hands pressed to the warded glass, waiting with the patient misery of someone who has already learned that time does not end just because breathing does.
I lift a finger before she can push her face through the barrier again. “Not yet,” I tell her. “I see you. I just can’t open another door right now.”
She looks past me, which is how I know the doorbell wasn't another customer ignoring the closed sign. The dead don't usually go quiet for late shoppers, delivery people, or Gabriel dropping off food. They go quiet for predators. They go quiet for cages.
Ira crosses the front room with one hand near his weapon and the other loose at his side, which is somehow more frightening than if he were openly armed. His ribs are still wrapped under his shirt. His shoulder is stiff from the compound fight. None of that changes the way he steps between the door and the rest of us.
Cain's hand settles at the small of my back. He doesn't pull me behind him. The touch is only there, cool through my sweater, a reminder that I have a body even though every dead thing near the windows has begun to lean away from the door.
Soren is on the stool behind the counter because standing too long still makes him go pale. He has one hand on the shelf beside him, fingers curled around a carved ward-stone Vera hid under the trim. The shop's magic prickles awake under his touch, subtle enough that a normal person would miss it and sharp enough that I see both biting plants turn their tiny carnivorous faces toward the entrance.
"I hate visitors," Soren says. His voice is weak enough to make the words scrape, but the shelves answer him with a quiet creak.
Ira checks the street through the side monitor before opening the door. Three people stand on the sidewalk in the late evening rain, arranged with the patient confidence of people who believe they are owed entry. The woman in front wears a charcoal coat and carries no visible weapon. The two priests behind her wear silver crosses that make every spirit in the shop pull inward.
Not Ira's kind of cross.
Ira's cross feels like iron, family, boundary, the blunt edge of protection held by a man who knows power should answer to his hand and not the other way around. The crosses outside feel warm in the wrong direction. Polished. Pressurized. Like a scream forced into the shape of light.
My palm burns with a memory I hate.
Ira opens the door only as far as his body allows. He fills the gap, broad and still, and the rain-dark street beyond him looks suddenly farther away than it should. "Shop's closed."
The woman smiles like she expected that answer and filed the appropriate form for it before arriving. "Mr. Thorne. I'm here on behalf of the Seminary's Oversight Committee. This will be easier if we speak inside."
"No," Ira says.
The smile doesn't move. "This concerns Aven."
"My name sounds much worse when you people say it," I mutter, and Cain's fingers press once against my back. It's a check.
The woman's eyes shift past Ira and find me with awful precision. She doesn't look surprised by the broken wards, the damaged floor, the pale vampire behind me, or the witch sitting because his body is still negotiating whether existing is worth the paperwork. She looks at the shop like a room someone else has cluttered before inspection.
