Ellis looks at them, then at me.
His voice is quieter than I've ever heard it. "They'll help."
I nod because speaking would hurt too much.
Soren appears at my side with the glass of water and the expression of a man pretending he ended up there by accident. He crouches, holds it out, and looks anywhere but my face. "You looked like you were about to pass out or accidentally become a civic organizer for the dead. I object to both on logistical grounds."
The joke is weak. Mine comes out weaker. "Do ghost unions get dental?"
His mouth trembles once. "Only if they have teeth."
I take the glass. My hands shake hard enough that water laps against the rim, and Soren's fingers close over mine for a second to steady it. His magic hums under his skin, the lie in him wound tighter than before. I look at him over the glass. He looks back, daring me to ask with Cain still gone.
I drink instead.
Ira moves behind me while I lower the glass. He kneels, not crowding, not trapping, just setting one hand between my shoulder blades and the other on the floor near my hip. The contact grounds the room more than it grounds me. The spirits nearest us settle. The white heat in my chest narrows. Ira smells like iron, gun oil, and the rain he brought in from the back door.
"Hold here," he murmurs. "Not wider. Let them come to the map, not into you."
I follow the instruction because it's good and because it gives me somewhere to put the edges of myself. The dead gather around the table now, not me. Soren pins the map flat with magic and silver clips. Ellis gives them the tower. The woman with the silver throat shows us a corridor where the air tastes of bells. The river-cold spirit knows a drainage route under the service road. The antler-smoke thing recoils from the chapel level and shows me, in one violent flash, a root of impure magic buried beneath stone like a black vein.
I relay until my voice goes thin.
Ira turns every fragment into marks. Routes. Hazards. Timings. Wards that respond to heat. Rooms that eat sound. Spirits willing to scout. Spirits willing to distract. Spirits who want only to find the chains and scream until someone living hears them.
At some point, Ira's phone buzzes.
He looks at it, then at me. The hesitation is small, but it carries weight. "Gabriel."
The name lands under my ribs. My uncle, who let Cain into the bar, who kept me fed when I thought sarcasm and cheap whiskey counted as self-care, who doesn't know the full shape of what's coming and will still blame himself if we don't return.
"Take it," I say.
Ira steps into the hall, but not far enough that I can't hear pieces. He's never been good at making himself harmless in small spaces. His voice stays low, controlled, stripped to essentials. "It's starting," he says. A pause. "If you don't hear from us by dawn, leave the city. Don't go to the bar. Don't go home. Use the car."
I close my eyes.
Gabriel's voice doesn't carry clearly, only the rough shape of it through the phone, but I know his cadence well enough to recognize the question even before Ira goes silent. The silence stretches too long.
“Will he be okay?”
Ira doesn't answer fast enough to lie. I open my eyes and find Ellis watching me. The dead do that too often. Watch the exact place where pain tries to hide. I look away first.
When Ira returns, he shuts down his expression going straight to the map and folding the phone into his pocket like the call is one more weapon checked and stored. He crosses to Soren without the old sharpness I've seen in him before, stopping closeenough to block some of the room from him and says something too low for me to catch.
Soren looks up ready for a fight. It's there in his face, the chin lifted like a dare. Ira doesn't give him one. He waits. Whatever he asks next lands differently. Soren's expression shifts, confusion cutting through the performance so quickly it leaves him younger for half a breath.
Then Soren reaches for Ira's wrist and places Ira's hand flat over his own chest.
The gesture empties the library of sound. The spirits still shift. The map still rustles. Cain's forced calm still pulses like a bruise through the bond. But the center of my attention narrows to Soren's fingers wrapped around Ira's wrist and Ira's hand spread over the place where Soren's heart beats too fast beneath his sweater.
Ira bows his head toward him. Soren kisses him first, hard and scared and brief enough that it belongs to desperation more than desire. Ira lets him take it without turning it into something else. One hand stays over Soren's heart. The other settles at his waist as Soren's shoulders shake once and Ira absorbs it, the bond warming.
I look down because whatever's happening feels private and sacred in the ordinary way, not the dead way, not the Church way. Then Soren's hand catches my sleeve.
He doesn't tug hard. He doesn't have to. I could refuse. That's the point. I stand there for one useless second with every instinct telling me not to intrude on a thing that already looks whole without me. Then Cain's absence pulses through the bond, and the thought breaks apart.
It's not whole without him.
