Another voice slides in, lower, rougher, vibrating in my teeth.Vampires only keep what feeds them. You felt useful and called it love.
"I didn't call it love," I snap, too loud, too fast. A man sleeping in the recessed doorway of a closed pharmacy stirs under his blanket and mutters something I probably deserve. I press bothhands against my mouth for one second, breathing through my fingers until the world stops tilting. "I didn't call it anything."
Little priest,the voice says, almost tenderly.They all want what's in your marrow. The witch. The exorcist. The beast behind you. They'll call it a bond because cages sound better when the bars have names.
The wrongness of it crawls over my skin. Spirits are usually selfish. They repeat their own pain, their own deaths, their own unfinished errands. They don't know how to hurt you with surgical accuracy unless you hand them the knife first. These voices know too much. They say Cain like they were in the room. They say witch and exorcist like the words belong to me now, though Cain only gave me the names Soren and Ira in the cramped dark of my apartment while I was too terrified to decide where to put them.
A witch. An exorcist.
Two more impossible things waiting somewhere in the city, attached to me by magic I never asked for.
I need a church.
No. I absolutely don't need a church.
The last time I touched a cross, it burned my palm badly enough to leave a mark. Ezra's face flashes in my mind, calm and warm and terrifyingly certain, his hand covering mine across a coffee-shop table as if concern could become authority if it stayed gentle enough. The cross is for grounding, Aven. The church provides tools for a reason. You're drifting.
I'm drifting now. I'm barefoot and half-dressed and bleeding on a street corner while dead things argue theology in my skull. If this is drifting, I'd like to file a complaint with whatever department handles spiritual buoyancy.
My mother had seen things too.
The thought hits so hard I stop moving.
She'd stared into corners. She'd gone still in the middle of rooms as if listening to someone on the other side of a wall. Gabriel used to lower his voice when he talked about her after she died, used to say heart attack like the words were a blanket he could pull over a body and make the shape underneath less frightening. The church said grief did strange things to memory. Ezra said some people were more open than others, as if open was a gift and not another word for unprotected.
Was this how it started for her?
A step. Another. My feet move because my mind can't.
Did she hear them first as whispers, then prayers, then commands? Did she wake one morning and realize every room had teeth? Did Gabriel know? Did he lie because he was afraid, or because the truth was worse than anything a child should have to inherit?
She burned out,the cold voice murmurs.So will you.
"Shut up."
They called it illness because harvest sounds ugly in a chapel.
"Shut up!"
A car honks again, longer this time. I blink and realize I'm standing halfway into a crosswalk with the light against me. The taxi driver from before hasn't escaped my personal apocalypse after all. He leans out his window, eyes wide as he takes in my bare legs, my bloody feet, and whatever expression is currently failing to pass as sanity.
"You okay, kid?" he calls. "You need a hospital?"
I laugh once, breathless and cracked. "Probably."
He reaches for his door handle like he's actually going to get out, and the thought of one more living person touching me makes panic surge hot and sharp through my chest. I shake my head hard and back toward the curb. "No. Don't. I'm fine."
He doesn't believe me. I don't believe me either.
A shadow moves on the roofline across the street.
I catch only the edge of it, dark hair or dark coat, a stillness that doesn't belong to any ordinary person out this late. By the time I look fully, there's nothing there but brick, a rusted fire escape, and the faint blue pulse of a broken sign. My heart kicks hard enough to hurt.
Cain.
No. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know if I'm feeling the bond or the fear or the part of me still reaching backward because his absence left teeth marks in my chest. I turn away before I can decide whether I want him to be there.
The streets begin to narrow.
