Archive of Our Own

The ghost of hands clings to him still, scratched into the flesh of his arms, burying into the very depth his soul. He can feel the phantom memory of his own grip slackening, the unforgivable slip, the final release.

Kevin Day wakes up screaming. His chest protests at the suddenness. His throat spasms with choking sounds. He barters for breath in a darkness that feels alive, the only light a pale sliver of moonlight cutting across his bed, catching the tremor of his hands.

He has woken up screaming before. He does not doubt that he will again. But the pain flaring across his body is tells him this time is different. A deep, pulsating burst of magic carves the insides of his chest and it aches, aches, aches…

He feels the hands again—pleading, clutching, slipping away. He had tried so hard to hold on. To hold him. To keep him from falling.

And then clarity, brutal and immediate: he has felt this before. Years ago, a fratricide spell-bound with no remorse in the upper floors of a castle he once called home. He had fallen then too, felled by sheer violence. A revelation had filled him, the world itself cracked open and spilled its terrible truth into his lap. The name then was Riko.

His father had tried to explain the rupture of soulmate bonds, but explanations mattered little when Kevin was broken by grief. He had not understood then, but he understands now. His chest burns with the finality of it, with the simple and devastating fact that fractures his heart all over again.

He doesn’t know which hurts more—the distressing impossibility of it or the unbearable truth, a truth loud and unrelenting: across the country, Jean Moreau’s heart has stopped.

Nausea lurches in his stomach, fast and bitter, but he forces it down. His body shakes, his mind spinning. His gaze, unfocused, begs for something real, something solid, some thread of reality to ground him. Of course, Pearl appears. His constant. His tether. His light. His familiar.

The cat is still, poised in her grace for a few seconds, her next movement an elegant disruption as she leaps from the windowsill, brushing against the soft moonlight, scattering the dark with her own brand of quiet, unknowable magic. She knocks over a selenite wand, tangles her tail around an unlit black candle, weaves around potion vials and salt bowls, leaps using a tarot deck that once belonged to Allison as a springboard, and finds her way to his side with a quiet meow that carries all the weight of the universe. Pearl has always been the thread that pulls him back from the edge.

It’s been like this since he met her—her heart inside his, his grief inside hers. She climbs onto his lap, presses her face against him, and purrs her reassurance: I know. I know. It will be all right.

Kevin’s hands cup her small, soft body as she curls up against him. Her warmth is a balm.

She sits back, and looks up—her worried eyes on him, the perfectly round patch of white on her neck starker than ever.

It will be okay.

But that promise is a fragile thing, and Kevin knows it.

Kevin has spent his whole life losing Jean.

Not this time, he thinks. Not again.

For Jean, Kevin will change fate. He will turn the wheels of time back. He will crawl his way out of hell with Jean behind him and he will not look back.

He pulls himself together, piece by fragile piece, and takes a moment—a lifetime, compressed into the span of a breath. Grief is something Kevin knows well, an old friend, familiar in its weight. He can work with it. He can wield it like a weapon. He will do this.

“No time to lose,” he murmurs to Pearl and to himself, the words a sharpened promise. His resolve hardens in his chest.

The practical part of him takes over—he doesn't hesitate. Kevin Day isn’t someone who likes to rely on mundane magic, not for something like this, but for once, he welcomes it. A quick, efficient summoning spell here, a flick of his wrist to gather the things he needs. The chaos of his mind is always methodical, and he moves through the tasks with a quiet, precise frenzy. He packs what’s necessary—clothes, toiletries, the essentials, and then, onto the more precious relics: his late mother’s grimoire, a postcard he’d written and never sent, a lock of hair he’s kept in a little silk pouch since the night he fled the Nest, all things that hold a past together like worn stitching.

He knows what he’s missing. He knows there are gaps: things he doesn’t have, things he doesn’t understand. But Kevin has always known where to find what he needs.

His hands shake as he pulls his clothes on. He’ll need help. There’s a phone call to make, a text to send. It’s early. Too early. But there’s someone (two someones, for where one goes the other always follows) he knows might be up. A hand trembling over the screen, he types: On my way to yours right now. @Neil, does your uncle still have contacts in California?

The words feel heavy on his fingertips, but he can’t ignore it. He’s hoping not to need Stuart Hatford, but better safe than sorry.

Replies come within minutes. The first: it’s 4 in the fucking morning wtf

Then: are u okay, quickly followed by, i think so. need me to call him?

Finally, from the third number in the group chat, terse and full of its own brand of tired affection: Door’s unlocked. Bring coffee, asshole.

But the nausea doesn’t lift. Neither does the ache in his chest. There’s someone else he has to reach out to. Someone who has to know. The longer he waits, the worse it gets, but he can’t bring himself to make that call yet. To speak it aloud is to make it real. And he’s not ready for that. Not yet.

Kevin had spent the first two decades of his life unaware of the currents in his blood, unaware of the strange dual inheritance that made him both the child of a woman who understood death like few others, and of a man whose magic could rival the stars themselves.

Kayleigh Day had understood life because she understood death—its rules, its rhythms, its irrevocable finality. And Kevin, as a child, had accepted the world as black and white. He hadn’t understood grief then. Not truly. But he’d learned it, had learned to feel it deep inside, to let it simmer until it was a familiar thing.

Her absence left an ache in the spaces of his chest, the hollow that remained a constant, as much a part of him as the magic she had taught him to control. He had absorbed the rituals, the way of the dead. Even now, years later, he clings to the strange comfort of it, the unspoken language of loss that she had bestowed unto him.

But then, somewhere between his lessons and the years he’d spent trying to improve his skills under Tetsuji’s tutelage and his deep dislike for Kevin’s natural abilities, Kevin had discovered something else, something far more dangerous. The forbidden side of the magic of the dead, wild and untameable. And with it, the realisation that there was so much more to his magic than he could have ever imagined.

Not only was his magic rare and requiring of a resilient, sensitive heart, but it was also dangerous, powerful, unpredictable.

David Wymack’s magic—the other half of Kevin’s magic—couldn’t be more different.

It was only right that a heart capable of death magic was also capable of soulmate magic. Kevin’s love was a perennial thing, a creature of infinite growth, deep roots and a strong sense of survival. His heart was cursed with twin burdens, loss and attachment, both equally as sacred, equally as dark.

The thing about soulmate magic was that it was finicky, as predictable as death magic—which is to say not much. Now that he knew, Kevin could have guessed Jean was one of his. But death was one of the only ways to know for sure. He hadn’t known about Riko, either. He hadn’t believed it until he felt it.

Ever since then, he’d kept a few other names in his mind—a couple of possibilities, a couple of strong maybes. He never wants to know for sure.

The question of the nature of his magic keeps him company as he and Pearl drive all the way to the coffee shop to get three coffees—a skinny vanilla latte, a black coffee with no sugar, and a decaf peppermint mocha. It’s still with it in his mind that he makes it up the steps of the Josten-Minyard household.

He doesn’t question whether Andrew used his Sight or whether he heard the car on the driveway, but the door opens before he has a chance to put Pearl’s carrier on the porch to free his hand to knock.

Seeing Andrew makes his stomach twist.

It could have been you, Kevin thinks. I think I’d know, too.

Andrew watches him intently, both of them in complete silence. Kevin is standing on the porch, cat carrier in his right hand, drinks on his left. He lets Andrew study his face for a few seconds. He thinks Andrew is about to open his mouth, when the realisation dawns on him.

“You knew,” he says—an accusation and a plea all in one.

Andrew’s expression turns sour.

“Thea?” he asks, after some hesitation.

The thought alone makes the coffees wobble in his hand. Andrew’s reflexes save them when he steps forward and grabs the tray.

Kevin shakes his head in a clear negative, but doesn’t elaborate. He can’t say the name again.

“You knew.” He doesn’t know what else to say.

“I didn’t. I didn’t know—I thought… I thought it might be him.” Andrew nods towards the inside of the house.

It’s both terrifying and reassuring that Andrew himself recognises Thea and Neil as possible soulmates of Kevin’s. Kevin wonders if Andrew has been smart enough to put himself on the list, too.

He knows better than to ask Andrew anything regarding his powers, his Sight. Andrew could only get a full picture when together with Aaron—a practice that took so much from them they were often sick for days after.

A drunken-out-of-his-mind Aaron had once confessed to Kevin that he was convinced their powers had been broken because they were kept apart for so much of their lives, that it wasn’t meant to be like this. Not the worst, but one of the most impactful decisions Tilda Hemmick made had potentially broken the twins’ powers beyond repair. Now they were both capable of Sight—but it never came in the form of a full, accurate vision.

Kevin feels anger roil in his gut. But exhaustion triumphs. He cannot fight this battle tonight.

Once in the house, with the door shut, he lets Pearl out of the carrier, knowing she’ll immediately race out of sight and towards Aurora, Neil’s service dog, wherever she is.

Andrew places the tray of coffee on the kitchen island and passes Kevin’s over to him.

“You’re going to California.” A guess, a fact.

Kevin’s first sip of his coffee is life-giving.

“Yes.”

“You want us to look after her?”

Kevin would rather do this with Neil present but, very suddenly, he feels his walls crumbling, his strength falling apart all at once.

“I’m going to bring him back.”

Andrew doesn’t blink for a very long time.

“Moreau, then.”

Three things happen in very quick succession. Kevin knows that he’s not keeping whatever is brewing in his gut inside his body this time around. Sickness overtakes him. He only has the time to place his coffee cup on the counter and run to the toilet, where he vomits everything that’s left in his stomach, though his body very much wants him to keep going even after there’s nothing else to throw up.

His head swims.

Kevin loses track of time. He doesn’t know how long he’s collapsed on the cold tile of that bathroom, but he ends up curled around Andrew’s much smaller body, trembling against his shoulder.

It’s strange, and so familiar at the same time. Kevin can’t remember the last time they hugged. Their friendship is shapeless now, molded by time and distance, but it was once that of a sheep dog and an abandoned lamb.

“Please,” he hears himself saying and knows deep inside that’s wrong and he doesn’t remember why. “Please, help me. I can’t… Andrew. I can’t let him go.”

He hears Andrew call for Neil, and then he feels hands in his hair, soft and gentle, and quiet, murmured words of comfort.

Kevin wakes up on the couch to the whispered tailend of a conversation he’s unlikely to forget anytime soon.

“You said we wouldn’t again.” Neil. “After Tilda, after my father.”

“When was I ever able to say no to him?”

Andrew drives Kevin to the airport, anxious fingers tapping the steering wheel to a rhythm only he knows.

Kevin is still shaken by Neil’s piercing stare as he talked him through all the ingredients he’d packed. Bringing Neil with him was a task more impossible than the one he’s trying to achieve, but he has the closest thing to Neil’s own bone and blood magic, which would be the perfect match to Kevin’s powers. He has all he needs: incantations handwritten in Neil’s messy scrawl, vials of blood, and a pair of dice carved out of bone he’s pretty sure is human, a bundle of herbs, a gold box full of rosemary ash and black salt.

“I called Jeremy,” Neil had said, after watching Kevin pack all the new items alongside his own sweaters, jeans, and socks. Kevin’s breath had caught. “It was him or my uncle. Jeremy would wake up soon and call the police.”

“And you convinced him…?”

“To not call the police. The rest is on you.”

He can’t do this without Jeremy. He won’t, and he physically can’t.

No matter how much Jeremy doesn’t want magic, he is Kevin’s (Jean’s) only hope. Jeremy is the way forward.

Kevin stumbles out of the plane sour with sweat and catatonic with grief. Andrew had urged him to sleep, but Kevin had carefully studied his mother’s grimoire instead. There’s no time to waste, there’s no point clearing his head. He has to face this. Hell is literally going to have to break loose before he can pull himself together enough to perform this feat.

He has to be brave. He has to see him first. He must.

He surprises himself at how he puts the address into his ride share app without having to look it up. All those postcards, the yearly visits… He knows now they’d meant the world to him. The only scraps of this life he could allow himself to have, like sun shining between his self-built prison bars.

He steps out of the car, dragging his case out with him. The house looks the same, but he knows it won’t be. Nothing will ever be the same again, even if he succeeds.

A memory of his mother burns all the way from his heart, up his throat, making him look away as the car speeds up again and drives away, leaving only silence behind. Kevin blinks tears away as fast as he can. He knows there’s a chance he won’t succeed. His mother would not be proud of him for trying this, but if he fails, if… he’ll make his mother proud, then. He’ll put Jean to rest with dignity, and ensure his safe passage onwards.

Another wave of nausea hits him before he can make it to their front door. It opens half a second after Kevin’s first knock, his fist still raised up in the air, frozen in time just like the rest of him once he spots the devastation and fury across Jeremy Knox’s face.

“You’re a self-centred cretin, a disgustingly uncaring villain, and an unbelievable grade of asshole,” he says, before wrapping a fist around the collar of Kevin’s sweater and pulling him into the house, suitcase knocking against the door frame and then clanging loudly as Kevin lets go instinctively.

Once he’s seized Kevin and kicked the door closed, Jeremy Knox breaks against him, the sudden sobs muffled against Kevin’s shoulder.

Oh. Fuck.

The flood of grief shakes him to his core. His mind goes blank. He can’t remember the last time he’d felt the effect of Jeremy’s skin on his.

Jeremy is always so careful with his touch, with his magic. But the thrall—raw and overwhelming—takes Kevin under, mellows him, brings his emotions level to Jeremy’s own, binds them together. Kevin couldn’t have known this was coming.

“Jeremy…” It comes out broken by the wave of emotion that overtakes him. Jeremy had always been everything he needed and nothing like Kevin had imagined him.

All this time, he’d been picturing a Jeremy who would anchor him with his power, a Jeremy who would be a rock to Kevin’s plans. Kevin had expected an unmovable foundation but found him undone, a mirror of Kevin’s own despair. But of course—Jeremy had been everything Kevin was not: Jean’s everything, Jean’s forever, Jean’s person.

Not only that, but it had been Jeremy to find him.

A very unhelpful array of images cross his mind, like in a flip book. Kevin’s stomach twists again. He’ll have to ask, he’ll have to see, he’ll have to know what dragged the powerhouse that is Jean Moreau away into the other side.

Another flood of feelings crashes against him and he finally remembers the vial Neil had pressed into his hand back in their house. This is for Knox, as soon as you see him.

“Wait,” Kevin says. Jeremy is unsteady on his feet but steps back. Kevin sinks to his knees, unzips his case and finds what he wants.

“Neil sent this for y—” Before Kevin can finish his sentence, Jeremy has uncorked the small glass vial and downed the thing all in one, grimacing as he swallows.

“Oh my stars. Minyard.” He pulls a disgusted face but stands straight, as if a weight has been lifted. “I’ll have to thank him for that.”

Kevin should have known the concoction was one of Andrew’s, though it had been Neil handing it over. Andrew was good at potions, Andrew would have remembered how Jeremy’s powers worked and figured out they’d be out of control, under the circumstances. His mind echoes the sentiment, I’ll have to thank him for that.

Jeremy shivers and, as if remembering Kevin’s presence he manages the saddest smile Kevin has ever seen on his face.

“Kevin.” It’s a soft lilting word. Kevin barely recognises it as his own name, it sounds so beautiful. He’s never heard it pronounced with such gentle devastation.

“Jeremy.”

“I don’t think what you’re planning is… I told Josten. It’s dangerous. It’s—” His voice catches. “... terrible idea.”

Neil hadn’t told Kevin much, other than that he had called Jeremy to buy him some time.

“Is he…”

Jeremy steps back, eyes red. “He looks like he’s sleeping,” he says. The words are so quiet, delivered with such care, but they detonate inside Kevin. What Jeremy says next reaches him as if through a veil, as if he’s under water. Found in the garden. An attempt at a diagnosis. Probably heart failure. Jeremy admits he could not look too deeply. His magic faltered. His power, long neglected, refused him.

Relief comes like a knife, sharp and dangerous. Kevin had braced for something grotesque, some unspeakable accident that would make resurrection impossible. But a heart attack—sleep he can work with.

“You can’t, Kevin. He’s gone.”

Not gone, Kevin’s heart replies. Not entirely. Not yet.

You just have to walk him out of hell, you just have to not look back.

Kevin’s heart clenches. He knows Jeremy is right. He also knows it doesn’t matter. “I have to,” he says. The words feel like deception even as he speaks them. Desecration of his mother’s teachings. Hubris.

Kevin’s own survival hinges on this. He knows he had a life before he ever met Jean Moreau, and yet he can’t picture himself going forward without him.

Jeremy looks away. “He’s still warm,” he says finally, and Kevin’s knees nearly give out.

Warm. The boundary between death and life is thinner than most would like to admit. All he has to do is stop Jean from crossing fully.

The room falls quiet. Kevin can feel the enormity of what he is about to attempt pressing down on him, but he clings to it all the same. Loss, affection, wrath—they calcify into purpose.

Kevin stares at Jeremy for a long moment, unmoored. The air between them is thick with everything unspoken: the what-ifs, the what-could-have-beens. No point wondering. Jean is upstairs, and every wasted breath feels like betrayal.

“Show me,” Kevin says, bending again to close his suitcase and pick it up. His voice sounds foreign to his own ears.

Jeremy hesitates, then nods. He leads Kevin down the hallway, bare feet quiet against rugs and wooden floors alike, as if noise itself might shatter the fragile link holding Jean to this world. Kevin follows, each step filled with the discomfiting mixture of dread and inevitability.

The stairway smells of herbs, of ash, of melting wax. The scents thicken as they ascend. Upstairs, Kevin stops in the doorway, bracing himself, and then he sees.

In his weird imaginings of how this would play out, Jean had been on a table. Cold, clinical, Frankensteinian.

But Jean lies on the bed. Not grotesque, not ruined—simply still. His face is too calm, almost peaceful, and that serenity is what undoes Kevin. Because Jean was never calm. Jean was fire suppressed into silence, rage tempered into survival.

Jean’s elemental magic was always reflected in his personality: Jean was a torrent, a blaze, a tornado, a landslide. To see him like this, composed into stillness, is unbearable.

Kevin grips the doorframe until his knuckles ache. His chest contracts as if his ribs might snap under the pressure.

Jeremy watches, waiting for him to collapse. But Kevin doesn't. He cannot. Instead he steps forward, every movement deliberate, solemn. He sits at Jean’s side and reaches for his hand. It is cool, but not cold. Warmth lingers at the pulse points. That is enough.

French falls from his lips, words more confession than promise, throat burning as he tells Jean he won’t stand for this. He can’t bear to be left behind.

The hypocrisy is not lost on him. He tells Jean so. He tells him everything, a dam of feelings he’s not dared think of, let alone speak in all these years. His regrets, his shame, his love.

Jeremy shifts, uneasy. “Kevin—”

“I know,” Kevin interrupts. His voice sharpens. “I know what this risks. I don’t care. I’ll do it without you if I have to.”

Truth is stubborn. Truth is unrelenting. Kevin has always been haunted by absence, he can’t let Jean be another on his list. Not when Kevin still feels the echo of his soul beating against his own, the phantom hands grabbing for him as Kevin let him fall into the abyss.

He kneels by his case again, unsure how he was ever strong enough to drag it across the country with him. He gathers all he needs: tools of sacrilege, tools of salvation. His mother would have told him it was madness. His father would understand, though. Kevin cannot afford second-thoughts so he clings onto that for dear life, Wymack’s voice saying he would have done anything to bring her back, to hear her say this is Kevin, he is yours.

Jeremy watches, silent in discomfort, but does not stop him. Perhaps he knows that nothing could.

Kevin closes his eyes, inhaling the magic and the death, the weight of it pressing against his lungs. He thinks of his mother’s voice, teaching him the rhythms of grief. He thinks of his father’s magic, unruly, boundless, tethering soul to soul. He thinks of Jean, always slipping, always half-gone, and of the promise Kevin makes now: never again.

He must start. Before the ritual proper, he must speak his intentions aloud—he must tell whoever, whatever, is keeping Jean on the other side that he isn’t theirs yet. He is Kevin’s, he is Jeremy’s, he is still of this world.

Kevin’s trembling hand tightens on Jean’s. He closes his eyes. His heartbeat steadies. The first words of the incantation rise to his lips, ancient syllables tasting of salt and blood, and his lips part on an exhale.

Outside the room, the world holds its breath.

“Wait.”

Kevin’s heart thunders in his chest.

“Teach me.”

He lets go of Jean’s hand and turns to look at Jeremy, who’s now holding an assortment of items retrieved out of Kevin’s suitcase.

“I’ll help. Tell me what to do.”

Jeremy and Jean’s kitchen has always been the heart of the house. Kevin has known this from the very first time he stepped through the arched doorway, crossing the boundary into this sacred space, as warmth and fragrance spilled over him. Here, memory becomes indistinguishable from presence: Jean at the table, eyelids heavy, nursing a coffee; Jean at the counter, folding dough with impatient precision; Jean through the bay window, bent over the garden like a supplicant to the soil. Each vision overlays the present until Kevin can’t take it anymore, shaking his head to disperse the nostalgia that clings to him.

The brick feels warm under his feet, and the afternoon sun comes in through the terracotta bay window. And yet the place feels haunted. Each memory thrums against him until he shivers, the hurt crawling up his spine vertebra by vertebra.

The kettle clicks. Jeremy turns.

“How long have we got?”

“The earlier the better,” Kevin says. His chest flutters with dread—flesh is mortal, flesh decays. He cannot keep the mathematics of decomposition from his mind. Time is death’s biggest rival and her closest friend.

Jeremy does not ask what Kevin wants to drink. He never has. This kitchen has always decided for him. Whatever is placed before him is always what he needs, as though the house itself conspires in his care. Kevin watches Jeremy’s hands move with ritualistic efficiency: tins opening, spoons scraping, porcelain thudding on wood. The thread of mundanity is unbearable. Upstairs Jean lies motionless, tended only by silence and candlelight, the air perfumed with Palo Santo.

Kevin wonders whether he’s waiting in limbo, in Asphodel; or who’s guiding him through the other side. The grim reaper, Azrael, la muerte, Charon, King Yama, Gwyn ap Nudd, St. Peter… Whoever waits, they cannot have him yet. I’m coming.

“Jeremy.” His tongue fumbles before thought can catch it. “Can you… can you keep him—can you stop—?” The words collapse. He cannot say decay.

You must name it, his mother’s voice scolds from memory. Death is not shameful, darling. It is inevitable. To speak around it is cowardice.

The kettle sighs. Tea is poured, a musical trickle filling the room. Jeremy places a bright yellow mug before him, then rests a hand over his. The touch lingers, but the thrall does not follow. Jeremy’s magic feels dormant, disciplined.

“I have,” he says simply.

Kevin blinks. “Uh?”

“I have, Kevin.” Jeremy sighs, lifts his own mug—a shimmering dark blue dotted with gold stars. “I think I’m nearly depleted. But as long as I’m alive, he stays as he is. Untouched. Forever.”

Not forever, Kevin thinks. Not for long.

He exhales through his nose; the tea’s floral sweetness rushes back up his throat.

“What is in this?”

“Cat’s fortifying brew. Chamomile, lavender, honey, rose… errr, something berry, and maybe lemon verbena. She’s never clear with me.”

Catalina Alvarez weaves love into food as deftly as others weave spells onto parchment. To be fed by her is to be cherished. He has eaten her enchantments before; he knows the affection in every cup. He knows, just as well, that she can work a drink into an elixir just as easily a soup into a hex. But the food that enters this house is always like this—infused with the care and love that she has for Jean and Jeremy.

“Thank you,” Kevin murmurs. Not for the tea. For everything.

Jeremy only nods, eyes lowered. Between them on the table lie the instruments Kevin has carried here, his artefacts and notes scattered across the deeply worn mahogany.

Weariness drags at him, a yawn splits him before he can stifle it.

“Did you sleep on the plane?” Jeremy asks, fingers cupping his mug. His expression mirrors Kevin’s own exhaustion and grief.

“I couldn’t.”

Jeremy hesitates. Silence stretches thin, taut, before he speaks. Kevin gives him time. “You know I’m not good at this, right? My m—” He swallows hard. “—my magic isn’t like yours. They didn’t teach me, my mother didn’t want me to have it in the first place. It was shameful. It’s not lack of power, it’s lack of control. I do things without thinking, and it has a price. Things happen without my consent, and they cost me. Three months ago, Laila cut her thumb badly during a basic spell. Her dagger slid, a simple accident. And I just… one moment the cut was there, and there was blood all over and the next it was gone. Not just the cut but her headache, her sore legs from the hike we’d gone on, her bladder was suddenly empty, the pimples on her chin gone. All of it. Healed. I was in bed for a week.”

Jeremy’s eyes flick up to his and Kevin meets his gaze, his own breath shallow.

“And you know about my brother,” Jeremy adds. “I can’t be trusted.”

Of course. This is Jeremy, as familiar with loss as Kevin himself. Kevin bites back the urge to argue: That was different. Together we can—

“I still wanna try,” Jeremy says, interrupting his spiral. “With you.”

Another yawn betrays Kevin.

“But first,” Jeremy says, “sleep.”

“No—”

“Yes. Because Cat’s tea will see to it, whether you will or not.”

Kevin stares, horrified. “Jeremy. You poisoned me.”

Jeremy grins, unrepentant. “Poison? Never. Sedation, maybe.”

“I can’t just leave him there.”

The grin fades. Jeremy’s voice hardens. “We won’t. He feeds off me. He won't change. But we can't do this wrung dry. You’ll tell me about all this—” he gestures to the array of ritual tools, “—then you’re going to use that clever magic of yours to help me drag the spare mattress into that room and we'll rest. Non-negotiable. And if I understand correctly, this kind of magic prefers cycles. The twelfth hour’s already gone. Twenty-four will do. The full turn of the earth. The worst day of our lives.”

He’s not wrong. Kevin almost hates him for it, and would say so, if his heart wasn’t overflowing with the love and affection he rarely lets himself feel, with unbidden gratitude and the sharp ache of adoration.

Jeremy’s eyes still haven’t left his, and Kevin notices the subtle tilting of his lips, the flicker of amusement among the hurt in his eyes.

“Tell me about this,” Jeremy says, placing the gentlest hand on the grimoire that once belonged to Kayleigh Day, and to Kieran Day before her, and to Days immemorial.

And Kevin does. He unspools it all—his mother’s teachings, the tenuous boundary between life and death, the cords that tether a soul, the gaps where necromancy slips its hooks. The words rush out until he hardly recognises his own voice. Jeremy listens intently, nodding, absorbing, trusting. It’s more than Kevin could have asked for, more than he dared hope.

The sudden grating scratch of Jeremy’s chair legs against the floor makes Kevin jump. “Wait. I’ll be right back,” Jeremy says, leaving Kevin alone with a handful of ripped out notebook paper, sticky notes, napkins, and parchment pieces.

Neil’s notes rustle beneath his fingers. One particular message, underlined twice, catches his attention:

KEVIN.

Orange velvet pouch.

He saved me once. This is my repayment.

Kevin finds the pouch among everything else, looks into it and recoils, before he feels brave enough to pull the item out. A scrap of a Raven cloak, dark and stiff with dried blood. He knows its provenance instantly. Many years back, Riko would have forced Neil into it. Later, Jean would have used it to staunch Neil’s wounds first, then to keep him warm while he stitched him up. Neil had preserved it, kept it all this time.

Neil, in his clumsy, fractured way, loved Jean too.

He brings his attention back to the note, desperate to look at anything that isn’t that Raven cloak. On the back of the paper: Andrew’s cramped all-capitals.

Use his magic as an anchor.

Kevin’s chest tightens. Of course. Jean’s magic was one of the oldest kinds in the world. His lifeline was everywhere.

Andrew and Neil. What would he be without them?

When Jeremy returns from wherever he slipped away, Kevin is already outside, kneeling in the garden. He gathers dew drops in one jar, soil in another, air in a third. Elements, bottled. Too simple, perhaps. Silly, even. But right.

Jeremy’s voice trembles from the edge of the garden. “Kevin. Come back.”

Kevin looks at Jeremy, and then back at his dirt-marked socks.

“Was it here?” Kevin whispers. The thought is unbearable. That this ground witnessed Jean’s last breath.

Did he fight? Did he yield? Did he know?

Tears burn his eyes.

Jeremy only says, “Come inside.”

On the table lie two new objects. One Kevin recognises immediately: he’d seen the silver chain around Renee’s neck every day, all those years ago. He’d seen it after, around Jean’s own neck. And beside it, a small ring box.

“You said tethers helped. Physical things that linked him back to this plane, to people here.”

Kevin’s throat closes as he picks up the box and flicks it open, looking at the shiny band inside. “Did he know?”

Jeremy nods. “It’s old now. He said no.” His smile wavers, grief and love indistinguishable. “He said… there was always something missing.”

Hope is like a bruise that refuses to heal. Kevin presses into it until he can’t take the hurt anymore.

“Let’s go to bed,” Jeremy says softly, after Kevin cannot answer. “Come on.”

It should not feel so ordinary. That is what bothers Kevin most. The act of carrying every item off the kitchen table up the stairs, of moving a mattress into place, of setting sheets and pillows as if they’re not making a guest bed inside a death chamber—there is something obscene in how easily it mirrors routine. Jeremy smooths the duvet. Kevin sits beside Jean and pretends his lungs still work.

Jean looks like he is sleeping. That is the danger, the cruelty. Kevin could deceive himself forever like this, could clasp Jean’s hand until flesh gave way to bone and still imagine that one day he would stir. He swallows the sob rising in his throat. He could drive himself mad like this, in the pretending. In his head, the words spill out in ill-practiced French.

Then he remembers the fourth jar.

“Jeremy,” he says, not looking away from Jean’s face. “Do you have a candle—one he lit himself, with his magic? That you never touched after?”

Jeremy disappears into the hall, returns with a black holder carrying a half-burnt stub of golden wax. “Here.”

Kevin takes it, scrapes wick and ash into glass. The set is whole now.

Water. Earth. Air. Fire.

They wash, one after the other. In the bathroom Kevin sees a stranger in the mirror—eyes hollow, face ravaged, twenty years older than the day before. At some point, tears overwhelm him. They burn, unstoppable, carving hot tracks down his face. His fists curl until the nails slice skin.

He does not notice Jeremy until he's already there, warm hands prising his own open.

“Don’t break now, Day. I need you.” Jeremy murmurs. “Come to bed.”

Kevin follows. He does not remark on the strangeness of lying down in Jean and Jeremy’s room, in their sheets. Exhaustion makes a mockery of every other feeling wreaking havoc inside him.

“Come on, Kevin. Rest.”

Kevin ignores the gnawing in the pit of his stomach, the big black hole that’s opening and taking his sanity away.

The mattress is cool, the pillows faintly scented of sandalwood, the whole house soaked in its habitual warmth. Jeremy lies down beside him, close but not touching, his eyes sharp in the dimness.

“Thank you,” he says softly. “For coming. For doing this for him.”

Kevin cannot speak. Sleep drags at his eyelids, heavy with tea and grief.

“He loves you, you know that?”

Kevin almost answers. And I him. And you. I am sorry I never said it. But sleep claims him first.

When he wakes, it is to absence. Jeremy gone. Jean still. Reality strikes like a slap.

He rises slowly, body aching with rest it did not deserve. The grief returns at once, cold and familiar, biting at the edges of his chest. Still, he approaches the bed. Touches Jean’s cheek.

Warm. Still warm. Relief nearly knocks him to his knees. Hope unfurls, trembling, in his ribs.

À bientôt, mon cœur.

He moves the spare mattress into the hall with a flick of his hand, then goes about the motions of the living—peeing, showering, brushing his teeth. The fear festers, patient, as if waiting for him downstairs.

But downstairs is only another slice of heartbreaking normality.

Jeremy is at the stove. The scent of butter and egg saturates the kitchen.

“Lost bread?” he asks, without turning away from the stove.

“I know you can say it properly,” Kevin says back. And then, “Good morning. Or….” He looks at his watch. “Night, I guess?”

There’s an unreadable expression on Jeremy’s face when he turns, pan in hand. “Morning. There’s coffee in there,” he tips his head towards the counter, “I’ll serve these up in a second. We need strength.”

Kevin fills the same yellow mug from earlier with coffee, and is reaching for the sugar when Jeremy says, “We have vanilla syrup.”

The use of we lingers in the air like smoke of a just-blown candle.

Kevin finds the syrup. He finishes making his coffee.

They sit. Two plates of French toast between them, fruit and honey set out as if this were any ordinary morning. Jeremy cuts his first bite in silence. When he speaks, it is low, shame-laced.

“I had a dream we were digging him. Like, out of an actual grave. You had dirt on your face.” He brings his thumb to his own face, touching his cheek just below his eye. “And I wanted—” He breaks off, breath shuddering. “I wanted to kiss you.”

Kevin’s fork crashes against porcelain. His voice is a rasp: “Jeremy.” The name is everything at once—plea, scold, surrender.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“It’s complicated.” Jeremy shakes his head. “It’s always been too complicated. And now…”

Kevin fights his nausea, forces another bite of pain perdu down. The sweetness turns to ash in his mouth.

They eat the rest in silence.

Gravity grows crueler as Kevin drags himself towards the hallway, every step upstairs thick with the threat of failure. With the certainty of loss. Jeremy is stone beside him—stone-faced, stone-hearted, the only way to survive this.

He’s rehearsed this a hundred times. The incantation. The gestures. The chalk and the circles and the words. He knows it all. He practiced it with Jeremy just last night. But knowing is nothing. His understanding of this ancient magic means nothing when the risk is this absolute.

“Wait,” Jeremy says, catching Kevin’s wrist before he can cross the threshold. His grip burns. “You’ll stay.”

“Uh?”

“No matter what happens. If it fails, don’t leave me alone. The… everything, after. If it works…” His throat flexes around the words. “If it works, we don’t know what he’ll… be. Or what I’ll be like. Promise me you’ll stay”

Panic nearly suffocates Kevin in his rush to reply. “Of course. I promise, I do, I will. As long as you need me.”

Forever, he doesn’t say.

Jeremy’s voice breaks, a whisper: “We always need you.” He looks away at once, as if ashamed.

Kevin doesn’t press. He only checks his watch. “Midnight, then.”

“Let’s do this.”

They’ve always been like this. Jeremy’s sheer power and enthusiasm to Kevin’s methodical well-honed practice.

Preparing for a ritual of this magnitude is its own rite. They get into a rhythm. Kevin rolls up the rug. Jeremy sketches circles, runes, pentagrams onto bare wood. Candles everywhere—seven here, thirteen there, the air thick with wax and smoke before they’re even lit. Kevin lays out Jean’s tethers, hands trembling as he sets a postcard opposite the blood-soaked scrap of cloak. He wipes his tears away with the back of his hand and looks before him at the map of Jean’s life—the love, the hatred, the domestic and the violent, side by side.

“Okay,” Kevin says, admitting everything is in its place. He takes a step back, careful feet avoiding any damage to the fragile setup, any disturbance to the life-bringing array. “Okay.”

He pulls Andrew’s dagger from its hidden compartment in his case. The blade gleams as though it remembers every wound it has ever made. Sharp as ever in the candlelight.

Jeremy’s voice is low. “What is that?”

“I’ll need blood,” Kevin admits. “Runes on myself. So his soul has something to follow. If… if his soul happens to recognise mine, this will make a thread easier to follow.”

“You didn’t tell me that yesterday.”

Jeremy steps close, his voice raw. “Please. No more secrets.” The faintest brush of thrall against Kevin’s skin, and he’s unraveling.

“Just because he is my soulmate it doesn’t mean I’m his,” Kevin blurts. “He might not recognise me. I don’t know which terrifies me more—that it will work, or that it won’t. And—” His voice breaks. “...I would come for you, too. I think I’d know if it were you.”

The truth. Finally. A lightness sets over Kevin’s heart.

Jeremy cups his face, thumb pressing into the corner of his mouth, pinky brushing pulse. “I know. We know. We have always known.”

The grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs sounds its first chime. Second. They stumble apart at the twelfth.

There will be time later, Kevin tells himself, wondering about the truth of it as he thinks it.

The ritual begins in silence, in reverence. When they start, Jeremy holds the bowl of warm water. Kevin starts with Jean’s face. He wipes the dirt of his ear where it must have touched the earth when he fell. He is gentle in his movements, careful as he moves down Jean’s arms, across his hands, underneath his fingernails.

As if cleanliness could undo death. Jeremy takes the cloth next, eyes brimming, hands careful over Jean’s neck and arms. When he pulls the blanket down, Kevin almost breaks.

It’s the knees that do it. Bruised, mottled, grotesquely human. The knees of someone who lived, who was just alive. It is always the ordinary that devastates—the same unruly hair,; the crooked nose; his classic white t-shirt and black shorts. Of all things, it’s this that does Kevin in. Jean Moreau—the person he’s loved the most in his life, and the person he hurt the most, too—shrouded in death.

Jeremy’s look says what words cannot. Don’t let it get you. Not now.

Kevin steals a squeeze of Jean’s cold hand before moving on.

They take their places, chalk underfoot. Breath shallow in the suffocating heat. Memories bleed into the moment: he’s here, and suddenly he's back at the Nest, meeting Jean for the first time. He's here, then he’s in the library, bent over necromancy texts he shouldn’t have ever touched. Every past collapses into now.

He doesn’t falter.

The blade kisses skin. Blood spills. Kevin carves across arms, collarbone, neck.

Jeremy lifts his own arm in silent demand. Kevin protests without words. Jeremy insists, bringing his other hand to the dagger. Kevin knows him—knows he will do it himself if Kevin doesn’t.

Kevin cuts him too, painting runes to mirror his own. Blood binding them together, the price already paid.

Time drags and rushes, hour after hour, distorted in effort and grief. Sweat soaks Kevin’s hair, tears streak his face raw. Jeremy’s voice is ragged, throat flayed by repetition, a dark red tint high on his cheeks and across his neck.

Patience is key. This is no simple spell. This is no short of begging death to release a soul it has already dug its claws into, no short of pleading for one more chance. Death does not bargain cheaply.

They’ve both been fighting the feverish, stupid impulse to chant louder and faster. The hand of his mother feels heavier on his shoulder than ever, despite all these years without her earthly touch.

Patience, darling. Keep going.

Kevin catches Jeremy’s gaze.

Exhaustion, terror, something sharper than both. Kevin does not look away. Lets it burn. All the love he’s buried, all the want he’s denied—it spills out in a glance. Jeremy meets it. They chant in tandem, eyes locked, the syllables older than everything they’ve even touched tearing from their throats.

And then—

The clock downstairs strikes three.

Glass shatters.

The room itself exhales.

Every candle dies at once.

Darkness swallows them whole.

Kevin gropes forward in the dark, feet tacky against the melted wax on the floor. The air smells of smoke and iron. Jeremy collapses without warning, his weight sudden, crushing. Their foreheads knock together. Two kinds of grief meet in the dark—Kevin’s guttural, ragged sobbing, Jeremy’s depleted weeping, quiet as if silence could soften exhaustion.

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy whispers. Again and again, like penance.

Kevin holds him, rigid, unyielding. He cannot move, cannot breathe. He can only beg in silence. Please.

Please let him come back.

The voice comes, deep and startling, not his mother’s this time but his father’s: Patience, kid.

Something shifts. Hope strikes like lightning through him. He digs inward, through the mess of knots that tether him to love. It takes everything—focus, faith, rage, magic, so much magic—but then he finds the right one: a thread, fragile but living. And with Jeremy’s weight against him, he pulls.

Every candle flares back to life.

The body on the bed convulses.

Jean’s scream rends the air, and Kevin nearly breaks with it. This is what he asked for. This is what he clawed from death’s grip. He thought he wanted it—no, he knew he wanted it—but the sound makes him sick with fear that he has made a mistake.

The candles burn too bright now, firelight stuttering across Jean’s face as life drags itself back into him. His chest rises. His chest rises. Kevin’s own lungs stutter as though they’ve forgotten how to keep breathing.

Jean’s body jerks, pins and needles animating dead nerves, and Kevin is struck with the horror of it: the violence of the miracle.

Jeremy is slumped against him, shaking. Kevin cannot look away. He drinks in every detail like punishment. Him, his Jean, his heart: the nest of black hair gone silver at the edges, the perfectly crooked nose, the thin t-shirt stretched over a chest that had not risen for hours. Now it rises. It rises.

Jean’s eyes open. Blank at first. Then focused. Piercing. Alive.