The shop smells like beeswax, dried lavender, old paper, and something sharper beneath it, something green and metallic that makes the inside of my mouth taste like a storm.
The wards in the walls hum against my skin. They don't give me Cain's silence. They don't erase the dead or pull me under dark water until the whole world stops clawing at me. This quiet's different. It's got texture. It presses back. It makes thespirits outside the glass look like a frantic silent film, all open mouths and grey hands and grief with nowhere to land.
Every jar on the shelf seems to have a pulse. Every bundle of dried herbs hanging from the rafters feels awake. The floor beneath my palms is warm in a way wood shouldn't be warm at four in the morning, and the air's so full of old power that breathing feels like swallowing someone else's memory.
A shadow stretches across the floorboards. The sound of someone’s boots come next, each step controlled enough to be worse than a rush. I lift my head, and for a second all my thoughts empty out except one.
That's the largest man I've ever seen wearing a cross. He’s at the end of the aisle like he was built there, broad shoulders filling the narrow space between shelves crowded with bottles and books. His shirt's dark, his arms are inked, and the silver cross at his chest catches the low shoplight with a clean, hard gleam. It's not like my cross. It doesn't have that antiseptic burn, that church-clean bite of judgment. It still makes my stomach turn because my body has apparently decided all religious imagery is now a threat until proven otherwise.
His eyes are green, sharp enough to cut through the dark, and they don't look at me the way strangers look at half-naked men bleeding on their floor. He clocks my hands first. Then my feet. Then the tremor in my shoulders. Then the glass behind me, where the spirits crowd the windows in a pale, furious press.
"Are you going to bleed to death on the mahogany," someone says from my left, "or do we need to call a priest?"
The voice is rough with sleep and irritation, though sleep seems like a loose rumor on him. A gorgeous man steps into view wearing a thin sweater, messy red-orange hair, and the expression of a man who's opened his shop before dawn to find not a customer but a liability. His green eyes narrow on me, thenmy bare legs, then the blood on his floor. Magic flickers around his fingers, throwing brief sparks against the nearest shelf.
"I'm technically a seminarian," I rasp.
The redhead just stares at me.
My throat works around a laugh that doesn't make it out whole. "So the priest thing might be redundant."
"Fantastic." Soren drags a hand over his face, leaving a faint smear of soot near his cheekbone. "A bleeding seminarian in his underwear. That's exactly what this morning was missing."
The large man doesn't move, though the cross at his chest shifts once with his breathing.
"I didn't mean to come here," I say, though that's not true in any useful sense. I came here because the street became impossible. Because the dead were behind me. Because every turn that didn't feel like dying led to this door. My teeth start to chatter, and I clamp them shut hard enough that my jaw aches. "I saw something. Maybe him. Maybe I'm losing it. I don't know."
The redhead’s expression changes on the wordhim.
"Him," Soren repeats.
"I don't know," I repeat, because the alternative is saying Cain and feeling the whole room sharpen around the name. "A shadow. On a roof. In an alley. Or maybe I wanted it to be him, which is somehow worse, so if we could all pretend I didn't say that while I'm actively freezing to death on your floor, I'd appreciate it."
The redhead takes a step closer. The magic around his hands flares brighter, then gutters. "What did you say your name was?"
"I didn't."
The large man's gaze cuts briefly to the redhead. Warning, maybe. Or question.
He ignores it, looking at me now the way the shop's looking at me, like something under his skin has recognized a sound beforehis brain can place the song. His irritation's still there, sharp at the edges, but something else has pushed beneath it. Confusion. Hunger. Grief he hasn't given permission to enter the room.
"Don't touch me," I say, too late.
The redhead reaches for my hand. his fingers closing around mine, and the second bond opens.
Unlike with Cain, it’s a completely different feeling. Heat rushes through my palm and up my arm, not the dark, drowning quiet of Cain's magic but a golden warmth threaded with smoke, sap, old ink, and grief so old it's worn grooves into the bones of this place.
The shop unfolds around me. I feel the wards sunk deep into the threshold, braided through wood and glass and iron nails. I feel the shelves holding their breath. I feel the ceramic jars packed with dried things that remember sun, rain, cutting, binding. I feel the floorboards beneath us, all the footsteps they've carried, all the blood they've taken, all the magic spilled into their grain.
Soren's hand tightens around mine and his grief hits next. It slams into me with enough force that my shoulders curl and my forehead nearly drops against his chest. A woman's name presses against the inside of my skull, not spoken but written everywhere. In the wards. In the beams. In the dusty jars high on the shelves. In the way the shop leans toward Soren when he shakes.
A pale shimmer gathers behind me.
I don't turn right away because I already know it's a spirit, and I'm so tired of spirits. But this one doesn't claw. This one doesn't plead. Her presence settles over the shop like a hand smoothing hair back from a fevered brow.
Soren stops breathing.
"No," he whispers.
