"Often enough to keep me from forgetting the sound of a human voice." My thumb moves in slow circles against his back. "He told me the shop was still standing. He told me you were still bratty and difficult and drinking too much tea and not enough water. He was a very effective spy. He told me about the time you tried to enchant the kettle and made it scream every time it boiled."
Soren's mouth twists into a small, crooked smile against my throat. "It didn't scream. It sang. It was an avant-garde choice of key."
"It frightened the neighbors."
"The neighbors lack artistic literacy." His smile fades around the edges, and his fingers curl tighter into the fabric of my shirt. "I missed him. I missed both of you so much I thought I was going to turn into a ghost myself just to find a way to wherever they’d hidden you. I used to sit in the library and wait for the air to change. I thought maybe you'd found a way to send a messagethrough the dust. I thought if I read enough books, one of them would have your handwriting in the margins."
The image cuts deeper than it should: Soren alone in Vera's library, angry at the shelves, hunting for me in annotations and dust. He'd have pretended it was research. He'd have called hope a strategy and grief an inefficient use of oxygen. I know him well enough to know exactly how he survived, which means I know exactly where I failed him.
"I thought of you whenever I smelled smoke," I say, my voice rougher than I intend. "Old paper. Bad tea. Every time the sun hit the east-facing windows of a room that wasn't this one, I'd track the light across the floor and pretend it was coming through the front window here, hitting the display of tarot decks and that dusty globe you refuse to clean."
He lets out a shaky breath. "That's the single worst love confession in recorded history, Cain. Truly. You're supposed to be the smooth one. Poetry, dark allure, devastating emotional restraint. Instead, you compare me to a dusty globe."
"I had years to make it elegant and still managed dusty globe," I whisper, kissing his temple.
"You were never human," Soren murmurs, though he burrows closer, tucking himself into the crook of my neck as if the insult requires full-body contact to land properly. "You were just Cain. And that was usually enough."
I wrap both arms around him until there's no space left between us. The promise that rises in me is easy and impossible: never again, never leaving, never another year of locked doors and messages delivered by ghosts.
23
Aven
Haroldhasbeendeadsince 1973, and somehow he still thinks he outranks the inventory system.
He hovers near the botanical section with the stubborn indignation of a man who once owned a cardigan for every day of the week and alphabetized his spice rack by moral failing. I know this because he's spent the last twenty minutes telling me exactly how Vera used to keep the lavender on the left, the mugwort in ceramic jars, and the hibiscus "somewhere with dignity," as if dried flowers can feel shame.
"Harold," I mutter, sliding another bundle of lavender into the wooden crate, "with all the professional respect I can muster for a man who hasn't had a pulse since Nixon, the inventory has boundaries."
His translucent mouth pinches. "It was more orderly before."
"It was fifty years ago. That's not order. That's unresolved shelving trauma."
Behind the counter, Ira turns a page in the stack of invoices he's been punishing all morning with his attention. He's wearing a black henley that looks one deep breath away from surrendering at the seams, and his expression belongs on a battlefield, not beside a register full of receipts and loyalty cards. He can't hear Harold, but he can hear me, which means he's probably updating whatever mental chart he keeps for my stability. Columns include sarcasm, tremor severity, visible distress, ghost density, and whether I've threatened furniture in the last hour.
"Aven," he says without looking up. "The customer in aisle four is staring."
I glance over.
The customer is a woman in a very expensive yoga outfit, the kind of soft neutral fabric that suggests enlightenment is available in monthly installments. She's clutching a bottle of protection oil like it might bite her and looking at me with the quiet terror of someone who wanted witchy ambiance, not a shop clerk arguing with the air beside the sleep-aid sachets.
"Freshness check," I tell her, lifting the lavender with what I hope is a normal retail smile and not the grimace of a man being haunted by an elderly filing cabinet in human form. "The herbs get difficult if you don't respect their process."
She doesn't look reassured.
Fair. Neither am I.
The library doors are closed at the back of the shop, but the spellwork behind them has been pressing against my spine for the last hour. Soren and Cain are working through the case Hugo brought us, the one with bodies left emptied in a way that looked less like murder and more like something had eaten through the soul first.
Institutional, Soren called it before disappearing into the library with three coils of silver wire, a vial of something thatsmoked when he shook it, and Cain following behind him with that quiet, sharpened look he gets when old violence starts sounding familiar.
Institutional. Old. Wrong.
I can feel pieces of it through the bond every few minutes, not enough to understand the spell but enough to make my teeth ache. Soren's magic moves bright and restless, a feverish line of heat. Cain's magic sits under it like dark wine, cold iron, old blood. They shouldn't fit together as well as they do. Nothing about them should be clean, but every time their power overlaps, the bond hums low in my body, too deep to ignore.
I shove another bundle of lavender into place and tell myself I'm not paying attention to it.
This is difficult because my nervous system has apparently become a communal hallway.
