"Aven?" Gabriel asks, his eyes staying on the man in the torn shirt as if he's already deciding where to hit him first. "You okay?"
"Fine," I lie, my voice shaking badly enough to make the word useless. "Just the Jameson hitting harder than usual. I'm going to start closing up. It's been a long night."
The closing ritual becomes a way to keep moving. I wipe down tables, stack chairs, and chase the last of the living regulars toward the door with a sharpness that borders on hostile. Through it all, the stranger stays at the bar, nursing the eighteen-year-old scotch and watching me with dark, ancient eyes. The injury at his shoulder seems to have slowed, but thered aura still moves around him, pulsing softly under the dim glow of the neon Budweiser sign.
The silence isn't there anymore, not fully, but the memory of it follows me. Every time I pass him, the static dips enough to make my skin itch. I drink too much because I'm too tired to be responsible with the only thing keeping my hands steady. A sip of gin behind the service station. Another swallow while I pretend to check inventory. Gabriel watches me from the office door once and says nothing, which is how I know he's worried.
By the time the door's locked and the lights are dimmed, the bar sits in a haze of amber and shadow. Gabriel's in the back office, counting the till with the door half-open because subtlety's never been his strongest personality trait. It isn't just me and the stranger, not really. The room's still crowded with the shades of everyone who's died close enough to find me, but the man at the bar's become the only presence I can feel without flinching.
I stop in front of him with the mahogany between us. I'm buzzed enough to be reckless, tired enough to be dangerous, and the noise is pressing so hard behind my eyes that I can taste it. "You're still here," I say, because apparently my best survival strategy is stating the obvious to monsters from textbooks I haven't finished reading.
"I've got nowhere else to be," he replies. He doesn't move closer. He doesn't reach for me. He only sets the glass down with careful precision, as if sudden movement might break whatever fragile thing's stretched between us. "And I think leaving would hurt you."
"That's an impressive amount of arrogance from a man bleeding on furniture he hasn't paid to replace."
"It isn't arrogance," he says quietly. "It's observation."
I look down at his hand where it rests on the bar, long fingers relaxed beside the glass. Close enough that touching him'd beeasy. Far enough away that the choice'd have to be mine. The dead press against my skull. The jukebox woman flickers at the edge of my vision, her grief dragging nails down the inside of my teeth, and I hate him for being the only quiet thing in the room.
"You're a complication I don't have the theological footnotes for," I say, my voice lower now. "I should be throwing holy water or calling someone with a better understanding of exorcism."
"Would that make you feel safer?"
"No," I admit before I can make the answer ugly enough to hide behind. "But it'd be on brand."
His mouth softens faintly. He reaches across the bar slowly, stopping with his hand open on the wood between us. He gives me time to step back. Time to laugh in his face. Time to choose the screaming dead, the cross in my drawer, the life that's been grinding me down one spirit at a time because at least that misery's familiar.
I touch him first.
The silence returns with a depth that makes my knees weaken. It doesn't explode this time. It settles over me, thick and absolute, swallowing the dead until the bar becomes only wood, amber light, the hum of the refrigerator, and the cool pressure of his fingers curling carefully around mine. My eyes close before I can stop them. A sound catches in my throat, too soft and broken to turn into a joke.
He says my name then, because Gabriel gave it to him without meaning to. "Aven."
Hearing it in his voice should scare me. It does scare me, but fear's smaller inside the quiet. Smaller than relief. Smaller than the way my body leans over the bar, pulled toward him by something I don't understand and already want too badly.
"Tell me no," he says.
I grip the front of his ruined shirt with my free hand, the expensive fabric bunching under my fingers. The movementdrags him closer across the narrow stretch of bar between us, close enough that I can feel his breath against my mouth and smell the scotch on it. He waits there, still giving me the space to ruin the moment, and I hate him a little for that too.
I don't tell him no.
When he kisses me, it's soft enough to be mistaken for mercy if I were stupid enough to trust mercy from something with fangs. His mouth brushes mine once, and the silence deepens until my fingers tighten in his shirt. For one dangerous second, I forget the ghosts, the cross, the church, and every reason I should be afraid of the beautiful wounded thing on the other side of the bar.
For one dangerous second, I kiss him back.
“Cain,” he says against my mouth, like the name costs him something.
I blink at him, too dazed to make it useful. “What?”
“My name.” His thumb brushes once over my knuckles, and the silence holds. “Cain.”
Of course it is. Of course the vampire who walks into my bar and turns off the dead is named like a theological warning label.
5
Aven
I'mholdingthekeysto my apartment like they're a live grenade. My hands are doing this fine, vibrating tremor thing that has less to do with the gin I knocked back before closing the bar and more to do with the man standing close enough behind me that I can feel the shape of him in the hallway air.
