I'm a man without a floor, falling through a sky full of hungry mouths.
"If you're going to ruin my life," I snap at a grey-faced woman who's weeping directly into my ear, her transparent fingers clawing at my t-shirt, "at least form an orderly line. I'm currently at capacity for existential bullshit. Take a number and wait in the back."
She doesn't listen, of course. They never do. But saying it makes me feel like I still have some power.
I'm alone in the street, bleeding and shaking, barefoot and half-naked in a city that wants to swallow me whole. My skin's cold, my head's a riot of noise, and my heart feels like it's been hollowed out with a spoon. It's a terrible choice, messy and painful and will probably leave me face-down in a gutter before sunrise.
But as I limp away from the shop, every step away from the men who need me feels like a victory. It's a hollow, freezing victory, but it's mine. And right now, in the dark and the noise, that's the only weapon I've got left. I'll bleed out before I let someone else hold the leash again.
11
Aven
BythetimeIgo back to Gabriel's Bar, the drawer with Cain's number and my mother's journals has started to feel louder than the dead. I went back to my apartment, which still smells like dust and the lingering, metallic scent of Cain's presence, a scent that seems to have soaked into the very floorboards like spilled oil. I went back to the seminary, where the silence in the hallways felt less like peace and more like a predator holding its breath, the stone walls sweating with the weight of centuries of secrets. I even went back to my nightstand drawer, staring at the silver cross that burns my skin and the scrap of paper with Cain's phone number, both of them carrying different kinds of weight.
I didn't call him. I didn't pray. I just closed the drawer and went to work, because if I stop moving, the noise might finally finish the job of turning my brain into static.
Gabriel's Bar is exactly as I left it. The only difference is that everything feels like it was rearranged three inches to the left while I was gone. The stools are the same cracked leather, themahogany counter's the same sticky mess, but I feel like a guest in my own skin. I'm swiping a rag over a puddle of Guinness, my movements mechanical and stiff.
I haven't slept in two days. My hands keep moving because the second I stop, the noise will find every crack. It sits heavy on my shoulders, whispering that I'm one bad interaction away from a complete structural collapse.
"Aven," a voice rasps from the corner booth. It's a dry sound, like dead leaves skittering across pavement, and it vibrates straight into my jawbone. I don't have to look to know it's Ellis. He's sitting in his usual spot, looking more solid than a dead guy's got any right to. His eyes are fixed on me with a frantic, translucent urgency, and his spectral edges fray against the backdrop of a neon Budweiser sign.
"If you're here to tell me 'I told you so,' don't," I mutter, not slowing my pace as I move toward the taps. "I'm currently at capacity for spectral commentary. Ghosts can still be banned from bars on principle, Ellis. I'll hire a priest to salt the floorboards if I have to. Or maybe I'll just invite Soren over to rearrange your molecules. He seems like the type to enjoy that."
Ellis doesn't snap back with his usual caustic wit. He just leans forward, his image flickering like a dying lightbulb every time the jukebox hits a bass note. "You're leaking, kid. The static's so thick I can barely see the beer taps. You think running back to this dive's going to hide the smell of what changed on you? You're a beacon in a blackout, and the things in the dark are starting to notice. You think the Church is going to let something like you walk away once they know you're loose?"
I ignore him and focus on a glass that's already clean, scrubbing it until the friction makes my palms hot. The spirits are thicker tonight, a literal crowd of the unacknowledged pressing against the bar top. A man who died of a heart attack in 1994 is trying to tell me about his lost keys, his face a grey blurof suburban grief. A woman in a bloodstained evening gown's weeping silently near the tip jar, her tears vanishing before they hit the wood.
Usually, I'd have a sharp-edged comment for both of them, something to keep the distance between us intact. But tonight, I keep missing the words. The noise is a solid wall of sound, a cacophony of help me and hear me that makes my teeth ache. I can't separate the individual pleas anymore. It's just a roar of human residue, a sea of unfinished business that I'm drowning in.
Gabriel's watching me from the end of the bar, his arms crossed over his chest, his brow furrowed in a way that suggests he's been cataloging my mistakes for the last hour. He's an older, gruffer version of me, with the same amber eyes and the same habit of burying his feelings under a layer of practical concern. He waits until the last customer, a regular named Miller who spends more time talking to his glass than drinking from it, stumbles out into the neon-soaked street before he moves. He flips the sign to Closed and locks the door, the click of the deadbolt sounding like a gavel strike in the sudden quiet. The jukebox hums down to a low, mechanical whir.
"You look like you walked through traffic, Aven," Gabriel says, his voice grounded and heavy. He walks over, picking up a stray napkin and tossing it into the bin. "And not the kind where the cars miss. Your feet were cut to ribbons when you came in the other day. You're shaking so hard the glassware's rattling. What the hell's going on? Is it the seminary? Are those pricks finally doing something besides teaching you new ways to look haunted?"
I try for a smirk, but my face feels like it's made of wet cardboard. My skin feels thin, as if the nerves are too close to the surface. "I joined a support group, Gabe. It's for men making questionable life choices involving vampires and witches. Veryexclusive. Very chic. The snacks are terrible, but the drama's top-tier. We have matching trauma and everything."
The joke falls flat, hitting the floor between us with a dull thud. Gabriel doesn't laugh. He doesn't even roll his eyes. He just stands there, looking at me with a guilt so sharp I can almost smell it. It's the look a person gives you when they've been holding a secret so long it's started to rot. My heart stutters, a frantic, irregular rhythm against my ribs. I lean against the back bar, my fingers gripping the edge of the wood until my knuckles turn white. The wood's cold, but the air around me feels charged, like the moments before a thunderstorm breaks.
"Gabe," I say, and my voice is quieter now, stripped of the sarcasm I use as armor. "Did my mother ever... did she talk to herself? Did she see things that weren't there? Did she ever tell you that the cross hurt her? Tell me the truth. No more heart attack scripts. No more fragile constitution bullshit."
Gabriel goes still. The air in the bar suddenly feels ten degrees colder, the kind of chill that comes from the ground up, bypassing the heater in the corner. He doesn't answer right away. He looks at the rows of whiskey bottles behind me as if the labels might offer an escape. Then, with a sigh that sounds like a collapsing building, he reaches under the counter. He pulls out a box I've never seen before, a battered wooden chest with a tarnished latch, the edges worn smooth by years of being hidden in the dark. He sets it on the mahogany with a weight that makes the wood groan. He looks like he's handing me a bomb with a very short fuse.
"I thought if I kept them, I could keep you safe," he whispers, his voice thick with a regret he's been nursing for decades. "I thought if you didn't know, maybe it wouldn't happen to you. I thought silence was a mercy, Aven. I thought if I didn't give the things you saw a name, they'd eventually give up and leave. I was a damn fool."
He opens the latch with a metallic snap. Inside are journals, dozens of them, bound in mismatched leather and cheap cardboard. I reach out, my fingers trembling as I touch the top one. The paper's old, smelling of cedar and faded lavender, but the energy coming off it's a physical blow. It's a low hum, a vibration that matches the one in my own marrow. I open the first page, and the room falls away. The sound of the refrigerator hum fades. The sight of the bar vanishes. All there is, is her.
The early entries are organized, almost clinical. She describes spirits in the way a botanist describes rare flowers: colors around people's heads, the way the dead look like smoke before they harden into grief, the dreams that felt more like memories of a life she hadn't lived yet. But as I flip through the pages, the handwriting begins to fray. The elegant loops become jagged slashes. The margins are crowded with sketches of eyes, of chains, of faces I recognize from the seminary, the high-cheekboned, cold-eyed men who pretend their greed is piety. She writes about meetings with church officials that left her feeling like she'd been scrubbed raw from the inside out, her skin too tight for her bones. She writes about gathered divinity and priests who looked at her like she was a locked cabinet they wanted to break open with a hammer.
They don't want my prayers,one entry reads, dated six months before she died. The ink's smeared as if she'd been crying when she wrote it, the blue bleeding into the yellowed paper.They want the heat. They talk about divinity like it's something they can harvest, like wheat in a field. They call it a blessing, a holy burden, but every time they touch me, I feel smaller. I'm a vessel they're emptying. I'm a candle they're burning at both ends just to see if the light's pure enough for their rituals. Today, Father Brennan asked if I could "invite" the light. I felt like he was asking me to bleed into a cup for him.
I feel a wave of nausea roll through me, cold and greasy. She wasn't crazy. Whatever I am, whatever name Cain and Ira and the Church keep circling without saying cleanly, she had it too. The woman the Church said died of a heart attack brought on by a fragile spirit was seeing the same things I see, hearing the same dead, feeling the same wrongness around the same holy hands. They watched her. They monitored her. They let the world call her insane so they could keep her in the dark, isolated and dependent. They used her until there was nothing left for the world to bury but the story they preferred.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I ask, and I hate how small my voice sounds. It's the voice of the ten-year-old who cried at her funeral because he didn't understand why the box was so small. "You let me think I was losing my mind. You let me go to that seminary, Gabe. You let Ezra... you let them take me right back to the place that killed her."
I stop, the name Ezra tasting like copper and betrayal in my mouth. Gabriel reaches across the bar, his hand covering mine. His palm's calloused and warm, the only solid thing in a world that's suddenly turned to smoke and shifting shadows. He looks like he's aged ten years in the last five minutes, the lines around his eyes deepening into canyons.
"I didn't know how much was real, Aven," he says, and I can hear the heartbreak in the cracks of his voice. "I wanted to believe the doctors. I wanted to believe she was just sick, because if she was sick, I could understand it. If it was magic, if it was the Church, I couldn't protect her from that. I'm just a man with a bar, kid. I thought if I stayed quiet, the world'd leave you alone. I thought if you became a priest, you'd be on the inside, safe from the things that hunted her. I was wrong. I was so wrong. I handed you to the wolves because I thought they were the shepherds."
