"I don't know how to stop all at once."
The honesty is ugly. I prefer it to the lie.
I stand. Ira doesn't move toward me. He lets me cross the room or not cross it. He lets me decide what to do with the spacebetween us, and that's the first thing that feels like repair instead of another version of control.
I go to him because I'm still angry and because my body is tired of holding itself away from him. I stop close enough to feel the heat coming off his chest. He smells like antiseptic, blood under clean cloth, cedar, and sleeplessness.
"You can hold me," I say. "You just don't get to keep me."
His eyes close for a second. When they open, there's pain in them and something quieter than pain. "I know."
I climb into his lap only after he sits on the floor with his back against the shelves, moving carefully because his ribs are worse than he admitted and because I'm not so angry that I want to hurt him by accident. His hands hover near my back. Careful. Waiting. The restraint makes my chest ache in a new way.
I take one of his wrists and put his hand against my spine.
His arms close around me slowly, leaving space I could use if I wanted to pull away. That matters. It shouldn't have to matter, and it does. I tuck my face against his throat and feel him breathe under me, each inhale shallow where the bandage pulls. His heart beats strong beneath my cheek. Too fast for sleep. Too steady for peace.
“I’m still angry,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“You have to tell Aven the rest. Not Cain. Not me translating. You.”
“I will.”
“And if something comes for him again, he hears it from us before the walls do.”
“Yes.”
His hand stays open against my back. When I shift, his arm loosens before I ask. The library stays warm around us, and the lie is still there in the walls, but Ira lets me move inside his hold.
31
Aven
Thedeadhavestoppedspeaking to me, and somehow that's worse. All morning, the shop has been full of the places their voices should be. Arthur lingers by the map cabinet without correcting the labels. The woman near the window keeps both hands folded over a brooch she lost before I was born and doesn't ask me to find it. Even the gray woman by the radiator has gone still, her translucent fingers suspended inches from the heat.
Soren sees where I'm looking. He stands behind the counter with a coil of silver-etched lead wire in one hand, sleeves shoved up, hair a mess, exhaustion bruising the skin beneath his eyes. Ira stays near the front window, farther from me than instinct wants him, his hands empty at his sides. Cain waits behind me until I shift back. Only then do his hands settle at my waist, warm and steady through my shirt.
"That," Soren says, lifting the wire slightly, "is why we're doing this now."
"Because the dead are giving me the silent treatment?"
"Because the dead are being careful," he says. "That's different."
The answer takes the joke out of my mouth. I look toward the library entrance, where the shadows have been too smooth since breakfast. "Discernment."
"Discernment," Soren says. "The Seminary gave you two categories because two categories are easier to control. Holy or demonic. Safe or damned. Real spirits are messier. Most linger because something held their attention too long. Grief. Habit. Purpose. Confusion. Sometimes spite, which I respect professionally."
My mouth twitches despite myself.
Soren doesn't smile. "Bound spirits are different. They don't stay because they want to. They're kept."
The air around the word kept goes colder. Cain's hands tighten once at my waist, then loosen before it can feel like restraint. Ira takes half a step forward and stops himself. I see the effort in it. The old Ira would have moved into position without asking the room for permission. This Ira looks like standing still hurts more than the bruises under his shirt.
Soren sets the coil of wire on the counter and reaches for my hand. "I'm going to channel through you, but I'm not taking anything. You tell me if it pulls wrong. You tell me if it feels like the Seminary, or the cross, or anything that makes you want to leave your body."
"You make it sound very relaxing."
