I taste blood because I've bitten my tongue. My palm burns where an old cross once marked me. For one second, I'm not in Soren's shop. I'm kneeling on a chapel floor with my hands open and my head bowed because if I don't look at the dead, maybe God will stop showing them to me. I'm reading my mother's journal by flashlight, watching her fear become symptoms, her symptoms become instability, her instability become the Church's proof that she should never have been left alone.
A spirit beside me whispers my name. My name from a dead man who used to sit in the bar and complain about the sugar. My name from a girl with a ritual cord still glowing around her throat. My name from Ellis, standing near the broken display shelf with his eyes on Cain and grief folded into every transparent line of him.
Ira opens the door before the first wave hits, not to welcome them but to make the threshold honest. Suppression light slams into the rites he painted there and bursts outward in a crack of white pressure. Ira meets the agents who rush the step with brutal precision, silver and exorcist prayer cutting through the wards they carry. One cross catches his forearm, and the burn itleaves isn't holy. It's grey at the edges, full of dead voices trying to crawl under his skin.
Cain moves beside him. His blood magic doesn't flare dramatically. It threads into the seams where the Church has woven binding into flesh and fabric, finding pulse, finding command, unraveling knots before they tighten. He's still pale. He's still not healed. When the woman shouts vessel again, his hand jerks once at his side as if his own body remembers being named a resource, and then he cuts a binding spell so cleanly the agent holding it drops to his knees in shock.
Soren turns the shop into teeth as the shelves slam forward to block a side window. A drawer full of iron charms spills itself into a priest's path like caltrops. The biting plant lunges through a broken pane and wraps thorned vines around a suppression ward, crushing the glass until the light inside it dies with a pop. Soren laughs once from the shelves, thin and dangerous, and then coughs hard enough that red touches his lip.
"Soren," Ira snaps without looking away from the threshold.
"Busy," Soren rasps, and the floorboards under the nearest agent tilt sharply enough to send him sprawling into a stack of cursed music boxes that begin playing funeral songs in three different keys.
The battle wants to become noise. It wants me to follow every movement, every impact, every spell, every line of blood on the floor. I can't. The center isn't the agents or the wards or the woman still standing in the street with stolen light in her hands.
The center is the screaming inside the crosses.
I see it clearly when the first priest lifts his cross toward me and the light turns my vision white at the edges. There's a soul compressed inside the silver, folded and flattened until personhood has become power. An old woman, maybe. A singer, maybe. Memory comes through in fragments: hands kneading bread, rain on a porch roof, a hymn she loved before men withclean collars taught her the melody could be used to hold her down.
The Church uses her like a battery.
She sees me seeing her.
I don't grab. I don't command. I open the part of myself they tried to make into a conduit and turn it into a door instead.
"You can leave," I tell her.
The words are swallowed by the fight, but she hears them. The chain between her and the cross trembles. The priest holding it gasps as the light flickers, confused by consent because it's been so long since anyone offered it.
"You can stay if you want," I say, my hands shaking as I reach toward the chain. "You can cross if you want. You can turn around and bite him if you want, frankly, because I'm not your supervisor."
That last part comes out ragged and terrified, but the old woman smiles.
The chain snaps.
The cross goes dull in the priest's hand, and he stares at it like I've killed something. I haven't. That's the point. The woman inside the light unfolds into herself, not whole maybe, not untouched, but no longer forced into shine. She looks at the priest who carried her, then past him to the sky beginning to pale behind the rooftops, and she chooses the door I open.
When she goes, every dead thing in the street feels it.
The next chain shivers before I touch it. Then another. The gathered divinity inside the Church's weapons begins to realize there's another voice in the room, and mine isn't telling them to serve.
The woman from the delegation sees the shift. Her polished composure cracks at the mouth first, one tight line of calculation becoming anger. "Reinforce containment."
The agents lift their wards.
I reach into the next cross and find a child.
My stomach turns so hard I almost lose the toast Ira threatened me into eating. The child isn't whole enough for age to mean much, but there's a memory of small fingers sticky with jam and someone laughing in a kitchen before a ritual room stole the shape of home. I ask. I ask even though my voice breaks. The child's chain snaps with a sound like ice splitting underfoot, and the suppression ward nearest the window blows apart in the agent's hands.
The dead press forward.
They're witnesses, furious and free enough to choose fury. Some cross immediately, vanishing in soft breaks of light that don't hurt to look at. Some remain and turn on the instruments that held them, hands passing through silver and glass, draining the stolen shine from every ward they touch. The Church line staggers as its own power refuses the shape it's been forced to hold.
At the edge of the formation, I see Ezra.
He's half-hidden behind an agent with a suppression pane, wearing the same dark suit, the same collar, the same face he used when he told me my visions could be managed if I would only trust him. His hands shake around a small cross. It glows faintly, and the spirit inside it pushes against the metal like a moth trapped under glass.
For a second, the fight thins between us.
