Too much. The church. The bound dead. The source of the stolen power under the prayers he still wants to trust. The tower. Adaro. Ellis. His mother, perhaps, though I don't yet know enough to name that wound without tearing it open.
I choose too much anyway.
"There are people who know what you are," I say. "Institutions that know enough to use men like you while calling it salvation. The church isn't separate from the darkness you fear, Aven. Not all of it. Not at the top."
His face goes still.
I realize then that I've chosen the wrong truth in the wrong order. He didn't need the architecture of the world while the room still smells of panic. He needed one handhold, and I handed him the cliff.
"You're one of them," he whispers. "The darkness. The thing Ezra warned me about."
"No."
"You're not the cure. You're just another kind of ghost." His voice shakes, then sharpens around the only word he can find cruel enough to protect him. "A leech."
The word lands with old accuracy. I've been called worse by people who knew less. It shouldn't hurt. It does.
"I'm alive," I say, and my voice is quieter than I intend. "Not human. Not harmless. But alive."
His hand closes around the silver cross on the desk.
He must've taken it from the drawer after I left, or perhaps he never put it away. The metal glints between us, small and bright and useless. His knuckles blanch as he holds it out, arm shaking. His lips begin to move, and the Latin comes out in a rush, the familiar cadence of seminary prayers sharpened by terror.
"Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii…"
I stand still as the words pass over me like air through a dead house. The cross doesn't blaze. The walls don't tremble. I don't recoil, don't hiss, don't become simple enough for his fear to survive intact. I watch him realize, syllable by syllable, that the weapon in his hand can't make me into the monster he knows how to defeat.
"Aven," I say when the prayer breaks on his tongue. "I'm not what they taught you to name me."
"Stop."
"I'm not a demon."
"Stop."
"And you're not damned because touching me made the world quiet."
The cross lowers by an inch. His hand's shaking so badly that the chain rattles against his fingers. He looks at the metal, then at me, and the realization moves through him like ice water. His prayers aren't enough. The cross isn't enough. The thing thatmakes the world quiet isn't holy in any way his teachers would bless.
"Get out," he says.
I don't move. Not because I intend to disobey him, but because everything in me refuses the first shape of the command.
His face crumples around the effort it takes to harden again. "Get out."
"Aven, I can go. But I need you to understand that leaving won't make this untrue."
"Get out!" he screams.
The force of his voice sends a ripple through the room. Spirit energy snaps outward, wild and bright, knocking a stack of books from the shelf and making the light overhead flicker hard enough to die. For half a second, the room's dark except for the grey press of spirits gathering again at the edges, waiting for the space I occupy to empty.
I want to tell him that the silence won't hold once I step through the door. I want to tell him I'm afraid of what the dead'll do to him when I leave. I want to tell him that I'm afraid of what I'll do if I stay.
Only one of those truths matters.
He told me to go.
I turn and walk out.
