Ezra looks at me standing in the broken mouth of Soren's shop, spirits around me, light at my hands, blood on my tongue. He doesn't look relieved. He doesn't look proud. He looks like a man who's finally understood that the cage he called guidance had bars all along.
I don't move toward him.
Forgiveness would be another job, and I'm already busy opening graves the Church turned into weapons. Ezra looksdown at the cross in his hand, then back at me. Whatever he sees makes him step away from the line. No one notices at first. Then he turns and runs.
I let him.
The woman doesn't.
"Coward," she snaps, and the word is too sharp for her polished voice. Then she lifts her cross higher, both hands around it, and the light inside answers with a pain so compressed that every window in the shop cracks at once.
This isn't one spirit. It's many.
The cross is heavy with gathered divinity, packed layer over layer until individual voices have been forced into one obedient blaze. It hits me in the chest before I can open a door. My knees buckle, and this time one hits the floor.
The impact is small. The memory is not.
Seminary stone. Ezra's hand. The old cross. My mother's journal. Failed priest. Conduit. Vessel. Resource. Every word comes down with the light, each one trying to put my body back where the Church says it belongs.
Cain says my name behind me.
Ira says it from the threshold, rough with pain.
Soren says it from the shelves, almost a snarl.
None of them pull. None of them command. They only put my name back in the room where the Church has buried it under titles.
The woman steps onto the threshold line, face pale with effort and fury. "Aven, kneel. Don't make us break what we're trying to preserve."
Something in me goes very still.
The Church would like that too much. It's a human thing. It's the part of me that heard the dead as a child and survived being told that every voice was a sin. It's the part that kept listening.
I put one hand on the floor.
The floor is Soren's, warded and alive under my palm. Cain's silence brushes the bond, not empty but chosen. Ira's protection holds the threshold. The dead wait around me without asking me to spend what I don't consent to give.
I stand.
The cross in the woman's hands flares brighter, but now I can hear the souls inside it as separate voices. A man who died praying because he thought prayer would make the knife kinder. A woman whose last memory is a white ceiling and the smell of antiseptic incense. A priest who learned too late what the warm light in his own cross had cost. They're tangled, frightened, furious, and tired.
I open the door inside myself and don't make them walk through it.
"You're not light," I tell them. My voice isn't loud, but the stolen divinity shudders. "You're people."
The first voice answers.
Then the next.
Then all of them.
The cross goes silent in the woman's hands.
The light simply stops obeying. Silver dulls to grey. The pressure leaves the street so suddenly that several agents stumble, hands flying to their throats as if the air has changed shape.
The woman stares at the dead metal in her grip. For the first time since she stepped into my shop, she looks afraid.
I step to the threshold. Ira is still there, bleeding from a burn on his arm, chest heaving. Cain is at my side a heartbeat later, not in front of me, not behind me, close enough that I can lean if I choose and far enough that I'm still standing on my own. Soren is braced against the counter.
