Safehouse

The safehouse turned out to be a narrow shotgun house at the dead end of a street with no other houses on it. Its paint was peeling, its porch light busted, it was exactly the kind of place you'd walk past twice without registering it existed.

            Cillian didn't knock. He just pressed his palm flat against the door and murmured something I didn't catch, and the door simply opened, I looked on with wide eyes at the magic he just performed.

"After you," he said, and I was too stunned to ask how a door worked like that, so I just kept it for later.

Inside smelled like sage and old books and the front room was nothing like I expected from the outside. The shelves ran from floor to ceiling, crowded with things that looked older than the house itself. A fire was already lit in a hearth that shouldn't have had time to be lit, like the house had known we were coming even if the man in it hadn't quite believed it. The man who rose from the armchair by the window looked like he'd been expecting us for longer than made any sense.

"You’re late," he said, to Cillian, mild as weather. Then his eyes moved to me, and whatever he’d been about to say next died somewhere behind his teeth. His eyes seemed to bore into my soul.

"Orion," Cillian said. "This is—"

"I know who she is." Orion’s voice had gone strange, careful, and he crossed the room slowly, like I was something that might startle if he moved too fast, which was fair. "Aurora. Are you hurt?"

"Not physically." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "My parents are dead. There were things in my house that weren’t human, and one of them called me an ember, and I’ve been informed, secondhand, via my own dying mother, that I’m apparently not what I thought I was for twenty-five years. So. No. Not physically." I rambled on.

Orion's jaw tightened. He looked, for one unguarded second, like a man absorbing a blow he'd been braced for a long time and still hadn't gotten used to.

"Sit," he said, quieter now. "Please, both of you. I’ll get tea, and then someone is going to explain several things to you, and I am so sorry, I know you’re beat but it has to be tonight."

"You know something." I didn’t sit. "You already know what’s happening to me."

"I know some of it." He didn’t lie, which I appreciated even as it terrified me. "Not all of it. Please. Sit."

I sat and placed the book I was carrying on a foot table close to me. Cillian sat beside me, close enough that our knees touched, and didn't move away, and I let myself lean, just slightly, into that one small point of warmth in a night that had otherwise gone entirely to ash.

"Your hands are shaking," Orion observed, gentler than anything he’d said yet, setting a cup down in front of me like it might help. "That’s allowed, for the record. Nobody in this house is grading you on composure tonight."

"Good," I said, "because I think I used up my whole composure budget in that alley."

"She cried on me," Cillian offered, unhelpfully.

"I was going to leave that part out." I snapped at him.

"I thought it was sweet."

"Oh please, Ashthorne”, I rolled my eyes at him.

Orion watched this exchange with the specific, delighted attention of a man filing memories away for future use.

"So," I said, into the silence after a while because silence felt worse than talking. "Do you two live together, or is this a very intense weekly book club?"

Something that might have been a laugh escaped Orion before he could stop it, quickly smoothed back into gravity. Cillian, beside me, made a sound like he'd been personally betrayed.

"We’ve known each other a long time," Orion said. "Longer than he’d probably like me to say in front of you."

"Orion."

"What? I’m being discreet. I didn’t mention the dance recital."

“A dance recital?” I was genuinely invested because I didn’t pin Cillian as that kind of man.

"There was no dance recital."

"There absolutely was a dance recital." Orion looked at me, entirely too pleased with himself for a man mid-crisis. "He was seven. It was tragic. I have no photographic evidence, which is the greatest regret of my very long life."

Somehow, I could imagine little Cillian dancing and I almost laughed.

"How long have you two known each other, actually?"

"Long enough that I stopped counting somewhere around ‘too long,’" Orion said, and something crossed his face that didn’t match the joke, warmth, and underneath the warmth, something heavier he didn’t let surface. "He was young. I was younger than I look, which admittedly isn’t saying much. We’ve been finding our way back to each other ever since."

"That’s almost sweet."

"Don’t tell him I said it out loud." Orion’s eyes flicked to Cillian, and something passed between them, quick and old and entirely unreadable to me. "He gets insufferable."

"I’m sitting right here," Cillian said.

"We’re aware," Orion and I said in unison, and that was finally what cracked something loose in my chest and I let out a laugh. It was not a big laugh, just a small one, but it was real. The first thing that had felt entirely mine since I’d watched my parents die.

It was such a small, ridiculous thing to laugh about, twelve feet from a book that might explain why my parents were dead but I let myself have it anyway. I caught Cillian watching me do it with an expression I didn't have a name for yet, something unguarded, something that looked almost like relief.

It was somewhere in the second cup of tea I didn't remember pouring that I remembered the book.

I took the book and set it on the low table between us, both men went completely, utterly silent.

"Aurora." Cillian, carefully. "Where did you get that?"

"It was in a box with some antiques we got at the shop sometimes yesterday. I looked between their faces, and something cold slid down my spine at what I found there. Cillian looked like he’d seen a ghost, and Orion looked conflicted. "What? What is it?"

Orion didn't answer right away. He reached out, one finger hovering just above the sigil without quite touching it, the way you'd reach toward something you already knew would burn you.

"Where," he said, very quietly, very evenly, in a voice that had gone flat with the effort of staying that way, "exactly, did this book come from?"

"I told you. The estate sale." Something in his tone had unsettled me more than the last two hours combined. "Orion. You’re scaring me."

"That’s not my intention." He didn’t look up from the book. "I need you to think very carefully. Was there anything unusual about the box it came in? Any marking, any name, anything at all?"

"It didn’t have dust on it," I said slowly. "Everything else in that box was filthy. That book looked like it had been wiped clean an hour before I opened it."

Orion went very, very still.