Ellis hears him without me. I know because his expression breaks into something bright and furious. "I know."
I repeat it anyway, because some words deserve the air. "He knows."
The last chain is behind Ellis's left shoulder, hooked through the place the Church tore him thin and Adaro's blood tried to make use of what was left. I reach for it carefully. It hurts the second my fingers close around the binding, cold pushing up my arm, flashes of tower stone and chapel light and Ellis choosing, again and again, not to dissolve while Cain was still caged somewhere below him.
Cain's hand grips my sleeve.
I breathe through it. I don't pull hard. I don't make release another kind of violence. I loosen the knot until the residue begins to fall away in dull, dead sparks, and Ellis straightens as if something heavy has finally slid from his shoulders.
He becomes clearer for one breath.
Dark curls. Tired eyes. Cain's mouth, almost. A smile that was his own.
"Goodbye, brother," Cain says.
Ellis lifts two fingers in a lazy salute that looks nothing like reverence and exactly like mercy. Then he steps backward, into the light waiting behind him, and disappears without a sound.
Cain doesn't break loudly.
His breath leaves him once, hard and uneven. Then he turns into me, forehead against my shoulder, and I hold him with both arms while the place where Ellis stood becomes only dust, morning, and the absence of waiting. Cain's hands clutch the back of my sweater for a few seconds before he makes himself loosen them.
"You don't have to let go that fast," I tell him.
He gives a laugh that barely qualifies as one. "Habit."
"Yeah," I say, pressing my cheek against his hair. "We're all working on being badly trained furniture."
He stays there a little longer.
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 brokencharms 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.
