I don't look back when the door slams behind me. The lock clicks into place, small and final. I stand in the hallway for one breath, then another, listening because I'm not good enough to stop myself. The first sob breaks through the wood, and the bond twists in my chest until it feels as if something inside me has split open.
Cold night air meets me at the entrance as I rush down the stairs. The bond's screaming now, every step away from him pulling like skin torn from bone. I can feel him behind me, the spirits rushing back into the space I left. He's moving, notphysically yet, but inside himself, the frantic recoil of a man searching for any direction that isn't me.
Above me, something crashes. I look up before I can stop myself. The bond jerks hard enough to make my hand close around the iron railing beside the stairs. Aven's moving now, not only inside himself but through the apartment, the panic in him breaking loose from the room I left behind. I hear the scrape of a drawer, the thud of something hitting the floor, the ragged edge of his breathing through wood and brick and distance.
Then his apartment door opens. For one impossible second, I think he's coming after me. He comes down the stairs barefoot and half-dressed, moving too fast, one hand braced against the wall as if the building itself has tilted beneath him. He doesn't see me in the shadow near the entrance. His eyes are wide and unfocused, fixed on something I can't see, the spirits following him in a grey, restless press that makes the air around him tremble.
"Aven," I say, too quietly for him to hear.
He hits the sidewalk and keeps going but every instinct in me lunges after him. The bond pulls hard enough to hurt, demanding I catch him, hold him, drag the quiet around him until he stops shaking. I don't. Not yet. If I step in front of him now, he'll only see the monster he tried to pray away. If I touch him without permission, I'll become every warning he's ever been given.
So, instead, I follow from the dark.
I keep enough distance that he can't feel my hand on the back of his life, close enough that I can turn him away from roads, from alleys, from anything waiting with teeth. He runs toward the older district without knowing why. Or perhaps he knows and refuses to name it. Somewhere across the city, old magic hums, the shape of a door I haven't earned the right to open for him.
Soren's shop waits in that direction.
I don't know whether Aven will find it because of the bond, because of fear, because of the spirits pressing him forward, or because some older mercy has finally chosen to move. I only know that the pieces are moving without my permission now.
7
Aven
Myfeethitthepavement before I remember I'm not wearing shoes. Cold shoots through my soles, sharp enough to drag a sound out of me that might be a prayer if prayer hadn't started coming apart in my mouth three blocks ago. Asphalt grit bites into my skin. The air's wet and metallic, full of exhaust, old rain, and the sour breath of dumpsters waiting for morning pickup. I run anyway, one hand pressed to my ribs, the other curled tight around nothing because I left the cross behind, left the apartment behind, left Cain standing in the wreckage of everything I'd been stupid enough to want.
"Our Father, who art in heaven," I breathe, and then the words splinter before they can become anything useful. "Fuck. No. Not that. Shut up, just shut up."
The dead don't shut up. They come back the moment I get distance between myself and Cain, not gradually, not kindly, not in the familiar low-pressure way I've learned to survive. They slam into me. Every voice that his body pushed out of reachrushes back through the opened door of my head, louder and angrier for having been kept outside. A woman cries behind my left ear. A man whispers numbers against the back of my neck. Something with a child's voice keeps asking where its hands went.
The shock nearly drops me in the middle of the street.
I catch myself on the hood of a parked car, leaving a smear of blood from my palm where I scraped it on brick without noticing. My chest burns. My lungs can't decide whether they want air or punishment. Behind my eyes, the spirits layer over each other until the city becomes two cities: the living one, all traffic lights and locked storefronts, and the dead one, crowded shoulder to shoulder in the places no one alive knows how to look.
For one night, I knew what quiet felt like.
That's the worst part. If I'd never known it, maybe I could've kept pretending this was normal. Maybe I could've gone on calling myself dramatic, sleep-deprived, spiritually defective, whatever word made the day smaller. But now my body remembers Cain's arms. It remembers the weight of him wrapped around me, his hand at the back of my neck, the impossible absence of all that screaming.
I hate myself for missing it.
I hate myself more because I keep running as if distance can make wanting him less true.
A horn blares. I jerk back from the car and stumble toward the sidewalk as a taxi swerves past, its tires hissing over wet pavement. The driver shouts something through the window. I don't catch all of it, but the words barefoot, underwear, and hospital arrive with humiliating clarity.
Rock bottom has a basement, apparently, and the basement has traffic.
I look down at myself for the first time and almost laugh, except the sound comes out too close to a sob. Grey boxers. Thin t-shirt. Bare legs, bare feet, city grime already blackening my skin. A theological student sprinting through the urban sprawl like an escaped sacrifice with sleep hair and a working knowledge of Latin exorcisms that have so far accomplished exactly nothing.
The Victorian woman appears near a closed bakery, floating three inches above the sidewalk. Her mourning dress ripples in a wind that doesn't touch me. She's screaming about a lost locket, her milky eyes fixed on some point past my shoulder, but her grief isn't the voice that makes me slow.
He planned it,something whispers into my left ear.
I turn so fast my ankle twists, pain flashing up my leg. The voice is cold and slick, too clean around my name. It doesn't loop like the local dead. It doesn't sound trapped inside its own last moment. It sounds as if it's been waiting for the precise place to put the knife.
The vampire knew you were weak. The silence was never peace. It was a leash.
"No," I say, then realize I've said it out loud on a sidewalk where there are living people across the street and at least three spirits staring directly through my ribs. My voice shakes badly enough that the denial barely counts. "No. That's not what happened."
The lie finds no place to stand.
