Chapter Text
The fighting ended on a Tuesday.
The young 10-year-old would not remember it that way; he would remember it as the day his mother stopped sleeping in their house. The day he found her instead at the edge of the water before dawn, standing so still in the grey September morning that he had mistaken her for a piece of driftwood until she turned her head, and her eyes caught the light in the way no human woman's eyes ever had: a flash of opalescent violet beneath the brown, like oil trembling on the surface of a still pond.
The Russo-Japanese War concluded at the end of the summer in 1905, and Japan, small, improbable, and furious, had won. The world was still catching its breath about it.
Lady Yuna was someone far older and far less pronounceable in any living language and did not celebrate. She stood at the water's edge with her bare feet sunk into the wet sand and looked out at a horizon that no longer meant what it used to mean, and her son, who was still growing and already taller than most of the fishing village's grown men, stood a careful distance behind her and waited.
She had always moved like water moved: with a patience so total it registered as stillness.
Even now, even in her grief or her knowing, for she carried both so seamlessly that he had never once been able to tell which was which, she was beautiful in the way that old and immortal things are beautiful. Frozen in time, her black hair still caught the light as though the sunset waited to stretch its dying rays to her face. Her face bore no line the years had earned. She had been standing at water's edges for longer than this country had a name for itself, and she would be standing at them long after the name changed again.
He had inherited her cheekbones and his father's freckles and some arrangement of both their features that produced something not quite one thing and not quite another. Standing at the edge of the fishing village, he was acutely, specifically aware of this. The war had made men look twice at his face. He was tired of being a question someone else wanted answered.
"Shinya," she said, without turning.
He answered in Japanese, as he always did with her. "Haha-ue."
"Your father has received a letter."
He already knew, not because he had snooped, though he was certainly capable of that, but because the letter had arrived open, as if inviting scrutiny, and the handwriting inside had been careful and deliberate in the way no other meaning could be derived from the simple sentence.
Montreal Diocese, Canada. Your work here is complete. Come home.
Come home, as though Canada had ever been his father's home in any meaningful way. David Hollander had come to Japan as a young priest with a faith like a new coat and had stayed long enough to forget he was wearing it. He had learned to take his shoes off at the door. He had learned to sit in silence without filling it, bowing his head to show that he was in no way different from the laity of Japan.
He had learned, most impossibly of all, to love a woman who was more comfortable drinking from a man's neck than from a cup, to love their sweet, honest boy who had come from that love, who looked enough like his father to confuse the village fishermen and enough like his mother to unsettle them for reasons they could not name.
"We can't stay," The boy said.
"No," Yuna agreed. "You cannot."
Not we. He heard it. He felt it move through him the way cold water moves through a body: slowly, and then all at once. The boy watched as the lady of many names, tales that stretched centuries, opened the paper parasol to shield her from the rising of the sun.
So many names, and yet the only one stuck with him.
Mother.
She finally turned, and in the grey morning light, her eyes found his and held them, and he saw, as he had always seen, since he was small enough to be carried, the double nature of her gaze. His mother looked at him as if trying to memorize every detail of his face. That look was mixed with a primal urge to disregard reason and let her true instincts set this new, unfamiliar world ablaze. The boy knew that this was the truest expression of her love available to her nature.
"Will you-"
"I will find you," she said, and her voice carried the particular certainty of someone who knew too much to be wrong. "No matter how much time passes, I will always find you."
She pressed one palm flat against his chest, over his heart, over the place where the small silver cross his father had given him hung on its chain, and he watched her face flicker, very briefly, into something that looked almost like pain before she controlled it again.
"Wear this carefully," she said, her voice cracking slightly. "Not too close to the skin."
He looked down at her hand and then up at her face. He did not tell her that he had already learned that lesson the hard way, or that he had woken three mornings ago with a livid red mark burned into his sternum and had spent a panicked hour convincing himself it was a rash before his father saw, pressing his lips together in that particular way of knowing yet saying nothing, then retreated to his study.
He did not tell her that the cross had been hanging in his desk drawer for two weeks.
"I know," was all he said.
She kissed his forehead. Her lips were cool in the morning air, and faintly, very faintly, in the way that all terrifying things can smell faintly sweet, she smelled like copper.
"You are different than the world of your father or me. Be more than the halves that make you," she told him with a single tear falling down her face.
He had no idea, standing there on that grey beach, how literal an instruction that was going to turn out to be.
Canada was flat and the colour of snow, and then, more snow.
He had braced for difference, but difference, it turned out, was a polite word for the experience of arriving in Montreal in January with a Japanese mother's aesthetic sensibility, English learned from old books of his childhood home, and a half-formed understanding of French that his father had tried to teach him on the boat and which had not taken. It didn’t help that he was barely managing to conceal his sensitivity to silver only by dint of keeping his hands in his coat pockets at all times.
The city was all grey stone and ambition and the particular kind of cold that did not care about you personally, which was somehow worse than the kind that did.
His father's colleagues looked at him with the measured, careful neutrality. The head priest having a baby out of wedlock was scandal enough, but to bring that child here into the house of God? It was its own kind of loneliness, and the boy, who had grown up fluent in several varieties of being looked at, identified it immediately and filed it away in his mind.
He had asked to change his name on the second day. Not because anyone asked him to, David had not asked, had in fact given him a long look when he announced it over breakfast. That look suggested he understood more about what was being lost than he was willing to say, but because the boy could feel, with some instinct that seemed less like thought and more like weather, that Shin’ya would be another target. Another reason to call attention to himself. And he was already carrying enough of those.
“My boy…” The older man started, then thought better of it and changed his tone. “How about Shane?” he questioned openly, thinking out loud. “Shane Hollander.”
Shane Hollander, the boy thought, testing it. It sat in his mouth, new and foreign, and a mixture of emotions sat in his chest. Happy to share in his father's surname, but sad to lose the name of his mother. He accepted the name anyway, pushing down the unsaid emotions inward.
The seminary smelled of candle wax and lemon polish and the particular dusty-book smell of men who had devoted their lives to questions without answers. Shane loved it immediately and fiercely, in the way that lonely people love places that make the loneliness feel purposeful.
He did not understand at first that this was suspicious, a child surpassing men with years of experience and knowledge. He had grown up with a mother who had taught him to read Japanese and Chinese classical texts for pleasure. A father who treated the library as a second church, and he had spent his childhood in the space between their two worlds, absorbing both with the particular voracity of a child who senses early that knowledge is the one inheritance no one can revoke. Latin came to him in a matter of weeks. Greek as well. French finally took it as he was able to practice with everyone around him.
Shane, too young to go to seminary school, learned with the altar boys by his side, happy that child-like innocence could see past their differences and accept him as a friend.
What could not be filed was the hunger.
As he grew older, he became ravenous all the time. He ate everything placed in front of him, carefully, methodically, in the order he had arranged it on his plate, which no one commented on because the seminary had seen stranger habits, and woke in the night hollow with wanting and lay very still in the dark with his hands flat on his sternum and breathed through it. He mistakenly believed it was the hunger for God, which at least had the virtue of being a sentence that made sense in the context of a seminary.
His father one night slipped him a letter under the door of his quarters; he recognised the kanji, the brushstrokes were unmistakably his mother's.
Food will not feed you, my child. Your father writes of your constant appetite with great concern. You must feed as I have taught you as a babe.
He told himself a great many things in those years; many of them were lies to make sense of the world. He told himself the silver cross hurt because of a skin condition. He told himself he didn't look at girls because he had better things to think about. He told himself the way certain men moved did not register in him as anything other than neutral observation. He told himself the hunger for blood, which he would not call that, not yet, not for several more years, was simply an unusual appetite that more vegetables would address.
He couldn’t run from the inevitable. He was wrong about all of it, in varying degrees, and the wrongness accumulated in him the way snow accumulates on a roof: quietly, steadily, waiting for the weight to become its own argument.
All holy relics were thrown out when he was seventeen. The meat went next, he was so terrified of the smallest taste of blood sending him somewhere he could not come back, so while having small indulgences here and there, he publicly existed instead on rice and vegetables and the sheer force of a willpower that was, he had come to understand, one of the more reliable things about him. He had a need for things to be in order. His clothes neatly folded, his books shelved, his schedule full. When the world outside was beyond his control, his own nature announcing itself in ways he could not suppress, the order was what he had.
Another note slipped under the door, this time in his father’s rushed English.
At the behest of not causing too much trouble, maybe start small with squirrels or rabbits. Your mother has always relied on them in a pinch.
Shane laughed to himself as he chucked the letters in the fire; even an ocean apart couldn’t stop them from being his parents.
He was not afraid of his own body. He was afraid of other bodies. Specifically, he was afraid of what happened inside him when he registered certain ones.
He had catalogued this fear carefully over the years that had followed, the way he catalogued everything. He did not look at girls, and he had long since stopped trying to feel bad about this because it simply was not there. What was there, in its place, was something he had no good framework for: a bone-deep attentiveness that activated at specific angles of jaw, specific depths of voice, the specific quality of a man's hands when he was thinking about something else.
He did not act on any of this. He shoved the thought deep, deep, down and returned to his Greek New Testament with the focused intensity of a man barricading a door. He was not stupid; he knew, on some level, what was on the other side of that door. He was simply choosing, with great deliberateness, not to open it.
What he did instead, what he was genuinely good at, was the night work.
The Church's interest in creatures of the dark had never entirely disappeared, and Shane had grown up with a mother who could identify the taxonomy of supernatural entities with the matter-of-fact authority of a naturalist who had spent several centuries doing the fieldwork. He had absorbed this knowledge the way he absorbed everything, completely, without meaning to, and in enough detail that when his father had set the old Latin manual on exorcism in front of him at eighteen, Shane had read the first three paragraphs and felt something in him sit up and pay attention.
“Instead of taking up the ordained life, you could instead use your gifts for good.”
The night was his element. While his childhood friends turned to seminarians training outside in the cold small hours, Shane arrived alert and clear, his senses sharper than any reasonable accounting of his biology could explain, opening like windows. He could hear things in the dark that had no business making sound. He could smell disturbances. He could track a creature through a city block on some combination of instinct and data he did not know how to explain and had stopped trying to.
He also healed very fast. A fact he had kept from everyone, including himself, until the winter of his eighteenth year, when he had taken a gash to the forearm from something that moved faster than it should have been able to and had watched, in the lantern-light of an alley in the lower city, as the wound stitched itself closed in the time it took him to breathe in and out twice.
He stood in that alley for a long moment, looking at his arm.
"Haha-ue," he said, to no one, to his mother across an ocean, to the part of himself that had always, on some level, been waiting for this particular confirmation.
The alley offered nothing in return. Outside, Montreal went on being Montreal.
He went back to the seminary, went to bed, did not tell anyone, and woke in the morning hungry, as always, and sang in the chapel with the clergy in his clear and unremarkable baritone, and decided he was going to be perfectly fine.
By the time he was eighteen, Shane Hollander had achieved something approximating equilibrium. He had his studies, his work, his careful routines, the precise arrangement of his books, the exact temperature of his tea, the specific order in which he completed the daily offices. He had moved away from the church as he had forgone the path of his father and instead worked as a freelance hunter. He had a reputation, among the lay people of the diocese, as someone to call when the problem couldn't be solved by pastoral care and needed to be solved by whoever could move fastest in the dark and had the stomach for things that didn't stay put.
He wore plain black. He kept his hair short and neat. He had a face that people tended to underestimate, fine-boned and quiet, with dark eyes that could look brown or, depending on his degree of irritation, could catch the light and become something else entirely, and a smattering of dark freckles across his nose and cheekbones that he had inherited from his father and resented with a specific and enduring irritation. He was not tall. He moved very quietly. He was, by every measurable standard, the closest he could get to normal.
He was also a creature of the night who had not yet figured out what that meant and was choosing, for the time being, not to.
The Russian Orthodox clergy arrived in Montreal that autumn in dribs and drabs, driven west by the Soviet government's systematic dismantling of everything the Church had been. Shane had followed the news: the Renovationist schism, the destruction of the churches, the arrest and execution of the clerics. The specifics were lost unto him, a somewhat distant interest of a man watching a house burn from a distance and understanding, intellectually, that the distance might not hold.
Shane was not particularly interested in meeting them.
He was standing in the seminary garden on a Thursday afternoon, reading contentedly in the shade after feeding on a squirrel the night before, when he heard the car. He did not look up. He heard the doors open, footsteps on gravel, several sets. His father's voice, warm and precise, welcomed them in careful English.
And then he heard another voice.
Russian.
It had been years since he had heard the language, only remembering bits and pieces of the war that tainted his childhood and the place he called home. There was no winner; in the end, countless lives were lost.
He did not look up. Shane closed his book and took a deep breath to calm himself. But the voice reached him across the garden in the winter cold. Everything else went very quiet as Shane’s heightened ears zeroed in. The voice was low and slightly rough at its edges, carrying the shape of Russian consonants inside English words, and it was saying something polite and entirely unremarkable about the building. It was also, he could not have explained why, the most interesting sound he had heard in years.
He looked up.
The man was tall. This registered first, simply because it registered. The height, the easy occupation of space, the way he stood near the seminary door as though he had decided to own it, and the door had agreed. He wore black vestments that had seen better days, the fabric worn at the elbows in the particular way of a man who had been working too hard for too long and had not yet decided to care about this. He had golden hair, with a three-bar golden cross on his neck; it was the colour of sunlight through amber. His hair was being tussled by the November wind in a way that should have been undignified and was not. His jaw looked as if it had been designed specifically to make a point, accentuated by a mole on his cheek. He left the crowd to walk over to the other man. His lips were curved into something that was not quite a smile and not quite a smirk, occupying the infuriating territory between the two.
He was smoking. In the seminary garden. As though this were an entirely unremarkable location for it.
He was also looking directly at Shane; he had gotten close enough that there was really nothing else in his line of sight. Not the garden. Nor the chapel. At Shane, with the specific attentiveness of a cat who has spotted something interesting and is deciding what to do about it.
Shane looked back. He was very good at looking back.
The man took a slow drag and exhaled into the cold air, and the smoke curled between them in the weak winter light, and he tilted his head very slightly to one side. His grey-green eyes, the exact colour of the cold winter, moved over Shane's face with an unhurried thoroughness that was not rude, exactly, and was also entirely insufficient warning for what it did to Shane's ability to think in consecutive sentences.
"Shane Hollander?" he said. Not a question. More like a name being tested for sound.
Shane set down whatever he'd been holding. "Yes."
"You are not a priest." He said it with the analytical neutrality of a man making an observation rather than a compliment. "And yet you are to work with me as an exorcist."
"I'm aware," he answered in a guarded tone.
"Ilya Rozanov." He did not offer his hand. He seemed to feel the introduction was sufficient and that anything further was the other person's concern. "Is good to meet, Da?"
Shane considered a number of responses to this. "Shane Hollander," he said. "I don’t think you're allowed to smoke here."
Something crossed Rozanov's face at that, quick and interested, and then the not-quite-smirk deepened at the corners.
"Ah, it is first day, Hollander, if we are to work together hunting, is no good to be… delicate about smoke," he said, as though this resolved something the priest had been wondering about.
He finished his cigarette, stubbed it against the stone wall with the economy of a man who had smoked in worse conditions than this, gave the other man a wink, and followed the delegation inside without further ceremony.
Shane stood in the garden for a moment longer than he needed to.
He was, he informed himself, completely fine.
But his thoughts raced. Was he mocking Shane? To rile him up as a first impression? Was this sarcasm or something else he wasn’t able to figure out?
Shane wanted to follow the other man, for reasons he couldn’t explain; he was drawn to him. But the church had too many things that would cause him pain: holy water, crosses, judgmental eyes in every pew. He instead went home, sat down at his desk, turned on his lamp, and read the same line of his book seventeen times before he noticed he had not retained a single word of it.
But he couldn’t forget that wink.
He no longer called the seminary his home. About a mile away, Shane was up late as sleep had evaded him once again.
The inkpot lived on the left side of his desk, the blotter on the right, the half-finished letter to his mother precisely centered, waiting for the brush he could not currently locate because it was the one object in his house that refused to stay in its assigned place. He was on his hands and knees beside the writing table, peering into the shadow beneath it, when the knock came.
He cracked his head on the table's edge while standing up. He said something in Japanese that would have made his mother wince.
"Brother Hayden." He opened the door, pressing two fingers to the back of his skull where the ache bloomed, and found the older man in the doorway looking sheepish and yawning in equal measure. "What has you up so late at night?” Shane asked, confused at the visitor at his door. While everyone was amicable even after his time living in the seminary, Hayden and J.J. were his true friends growing up and had helped him adjust to life here in Canada over the years.
"Technically early morning," Hayden said, trying to keep his eyes open. "Your father got word. Disturbance, two miles east, near the abandoned rail line. Something that the constabulary had the sense to leave alone." He paused. "He also wants you to have some help, just in case.”
Shane was already reaching for his coat. "Who?"
Hayden opened the door a little further.
Ilya Rozanov stood in the predawn dark looking entirely awake, which was offensive. He had his coat on, not the worn vestment coat but a heavier one, dark wool, collar turned up against the early morning cold, and his arms were crossed, and he was watching Shane with the expression he wore that smug face from before.
He had a censer in one hand. The small brass thurible swung faintly at his side, already breathing a thread of smoke into the cold air. Frankincense and something else beneath it, myrrh, Shane thought, and something older and resinous that he could not name. The smoke made his eyes water slightly. He ignored this.
"Hollander!” Rozanov said with too much cheer for what time it was. “It seems your skills may not be enough for tonight. " He said with a smirk, “To watch a true professional is good for you. To see how it is done. The taller man said with an air of confidence.
"Rozanov," Shane said, by way of answering. “I think you forgot who came to whom for help,” he finished with gritted teeth.
Hayden looked between them, darting his eyes back and forth. "Right then," he cleared his throat and stepped out of the way. “I’ll leave you both it.” Hayden left the pair of them and walked back to his warm bed at the seminary.
The motor car was Rozanov's. Shane had not known he had one, which in retrospect was consistent with everything else Rozanov did without announcing: he simply had it, a black vehicle that had seen considerable use and was parked outside of his small home, without apology, directly in front of the walkway.
"You drive?" Shane said, looking at it.
"Da." Rozanov opened the driver's door and folded himself into the seat with the ease of a man who had made his peace with most inconveniences. "You have problem with this?"
Shane did not have a problem with it, exactly. He had never had to drive to do his work, almost always relying on his inhuman speed to get him to and from places regularly. Rozanov had climbed into the driver's seat with the body language of a man who seemed like he, too, considered speed an appropriate response to most situations. Many of the seminarians still relied on horses, so a car was a rare treat.
Rozanov drove the way he occupied a room: like everything was built to accommodate him. The frost on the road appeared to be his concern only insofar as it made the corners more interesting. Shane put one hand flat on the dashboard and said nothing, because he was not going to give Rozanov the satisfaction of noting that he was holding on.
"You are gripping the dashboard," Rozanov said pleasantly, not looking at him.
"I am steadying myself."
"Da, of course." He took a corner that Shane estimated was twenty percent tighter than strictly necessary. "You smell of ink, Hollander. You were writing something."
"A letter."
"To whom?"
Shane looked at the road ahead, where the headlamps cut a pale channel through the dark. "My mother."
A pause. Rozanov's driving did not change, but something in the quality of his attention shifted. Something that even Shane noticed and fixated on for a reason he couldn’t name.
“You were born in Japan, yes?” The other man thought through his words carefully. Is she…she is in Japan still?"
"Yes."
Rozanov’s eyebrow raised in a way that Shane couldn’t tell was annoying or amusing. If he could have blushed, he definitely would have.
"You write to her by brush. I have seen this. Not pen."
Shane looked at him. "How did-"
"Your desk was the only part of your house not…what is English saying? Neat as a needle? "
“Pin.” Shane answered, “Neat as a pin.”
The other man laughed, “It is shame you decided not to be a priest, you would be as good as me.” Rozanov teased.
Shane didn’t laugh. “And you think you're the best?” he asked pointedly.
“No,” the other man replied seriously, “I know I am.” Rozanov finished flashing a toothy grin.
Shane scoffed and rolled his eyes, turning away from him as he didn’t want Rozanov’s ego inflated even more by the small grin that Shane couldn’t stop his mouth from forming.
I can’t figure out this guy at all.
"The brush…is this Japanese custom? Or is this personal?" his thoughts were interrupted.
"Both," Shane said, which was true. His mother had taught him to write before his father had. The characters had come first, before Latin, before English, before the tidy Roman alphabet that the seminary ran on. “My mother and father taught me equally as a child.”
Rozanov was quiet for a moment, then: "My mother…she was the only person able to get me to learn." He paused. The headlamps caught the rail line ahead, a gleam of iron in the dark. "I have many teachers, but no one is like how she was."
Shane said nothing. He was aware of the strange intimacy at this late hour, of cold glass and engine noise and the specific way that darkness made honesty cheaper than it would be in daylight. He was also aware of Rozanov's profile in the pale light, the jaw, the particular set of his mouth that could mean several things, and tonight meant something quieter than usual.
All Shane could focus on was the past tense in which Rozanov spoke about his mother.
The car stopped.
"Here," Rozanov said softly.
The railway yard was wrong. Shane knew it before he was out of the car, knew it the way he always knew, the specific sharpening of his senses that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with what he was. The air tasted of cold iron and something beneath it, something old and bitter that the incense from Rozanov's censer cut across without covering.
He put his hand on his bag. Inside: the salt, the oil, the Latin manuals he had memorized years ago and brought anyway because routine was routine. His hands were steady. They were always steady on a job.
"You feel it," Rozanov said beside him. Not a question.
"Yes."
"How far?"
Shane tilted his head slightly. The creature, he could hear it now, or rather could hear the absence it created, the way sound bent around it, the way light bends around a dark object, was perhaps thirty yards ahead, inside the derelict switching station.
"Thirty yards. Inside."
Rozanov looked at him for a moment. In the dark, his grey-blue eyes were unreadable, but he kissed his teeth with his tongue, letting out a small tsk sound.
"Khorosho," Good, he said. "I go left. You go right. On my word."
Shane wanted, briefly, to point out that Rozanov had not been given command of this situation. He did not say this because Rozanov was already moving left, the censer swinging in his hand, the smoke leaving a pale thread in the dark.
He went right.
What was inside the switching station was not one creature but two, which was the kind of information that would have been useful thirty seconds ago.
They were vetala, Shane identified them by the way they moved, wrong-jointed and too fast, and by the particular quality of the cold they brought with them, which was not the cold of the weather but the cold of something that had not been warm in a very long time. He recognized them from his books about the East Indies. Russian, both of them, which explained why they had drifted this far. The revolution had scattered things in all directions, not only the living.
He had one of them occupied. The salt circle he had put down in the first fifteen seconds was holding, and the Latin came automatically, the words of the rite falling from his mouth with the same ease as the offices he said every morning. He had always been better at faith as practice than faith as feeling, and this was practice, this was the repetition that held. But his left arm was caught where the second one had ensnarled him before the circle went down, and the wound was already closing, which it should not be doing at a visible rate, the kind of thing he could not afford Rozanov to see.
He heard the censer before he saw the result.
The frankincense hit the second vetala like something physical. Shane had not seen this before, had not known the Orthodox rite used incense offensively, but Rozanov swung the thurible in a wide, deliberate arc, and the smoke poured over the creature, and it made a sound that rattled the iron walls of the station and recoiled. Rozanov's voice followed: not Latin, but the old Church Slavonic of the exorcism rite, deep and measured and completely unrattled, and Shane felt something in his own chest respond to it the way certain frequencies resonate in certain chambers.
The vetala fled. Both of them, the one in the circle broke when the other did, and they went through the far wall in the specific way of things that do not need doors.
The station went quiet.
Shane lowered his arm. The sleeve of his coat was dark with blood, and he moved it behind him without thinking, a habit so old it was automatic.
Rozanov was looking at him.
"You are hurt," Rozanov said. His voice was even.
"It's minor."
"Let me see."
"It's minor," Shane repeated a bit harsher this time, met Rozanov's eyes, and held them. This was, he knew, a calculation. Rozanov was not going to accept that lame excuse without evidence, and if he saw the arm, he would see the wound closing, and that conversation was one Shane was not prepared to have at 1 am in a derelict switching station with blood on his sleeve.
Rozanov looked at him for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes, the cataloguing quality, the assessment, and then he made a decision Shane could not read and looked away.
"Alright," he said, quietly. He lifted the censer and let the last of the smoke disperse into the cold air. "You did well, Hollander. The circle…I have not seen it placed so fast."
"I've had practice."
"Da." He looked around the station, at the salt, at the careful lines Shane had drawn, at the specific arrangement of the oil that was nothing the Latin manual prescribed and everything Shane's mother had taught him before he was old enough to understand why. "More practice than seminary gives, I think."
Shane did not answer this.
Rozanov looked back at him. The frankincense smoke was fading, but the resinous undertone lingered, and in the dim light his face was serious and unsmiling. The upbeat attitude from before was all but gone.
Rozanov drove more slowly on the way back. Shane did not comment on this.
The city was still dark, the streets empty in the way of very early morning, not abandoned but suspended, waiting for the light of day hours away. The engine was a low, steady sound, and the heater, which Rozanov had turned up without being asked, had made the interior of the car warm enough that Shane had loosened his coat.
His arm had stopped bleeding. He could feel the skin knitting, the particular tingling itch of accelerated healing that he had spent years pretending was a different sensation. He kept his sleeve down and his left hand in his lap and watched the dark streets go past.
"The incense," Shane said eventually.
"Mm?"
"I didn't know it worked like that. Offensively."
Rozanov glanced at him. "It is consecrated. Blessed incense, the smoke is not just a ceremony, it is- " he searched for the word " osvyashchennyy. Sacred. The vetala cannot bear it the same way; they cannot bear holy water. But the water must touch. The smoke…the smoke goes where you send it." He returned his eyes to the road. "Is very useful.”
They were quiet for a moment. Shane was aware of the warmth of the car, of the proximity; he was not accustomed to being in enclosed spaces with anyone for this long. Out in public was one thing, but this was smaller, more immediate, the specific intimacy of two people sharing the same air in a small space that was moving through the dark.
Tonight was supposed to be a calm night of speaking to his mother and hopefully trying to sleep at a reasonable hour. And yet, Shane wasn’t mad about the events of tonight, wasn’t mad about being called to do work like he normally was. He wasn’t even mad about working with someone, especially that someone being Ilya Rozonov.
Shane looked at him. The streetlamp they passed lit the side of Rozanov's face for a moment, the jaw, the curve of his mouth, the specific line of his brow, and then they were past it and in the dark again.
And then it hit him. The times his friends would talk about girls in their youth, the ways in which they felt around them. How Shane thought he was supposed to feel around them. The fact that those who were swept up in romance left the seminary, and he was the only non-priest of his friends unwed.
Is this the way a woman is supposed to make me feel?
Shane's throat was very tight. He looked at the road.
No. It was one thing to be born a half-human, one thing to feel foreign in this cold, unforgiving country. But this? He didn’t choose to be born this way, nor did he choose the difficulty life has afforded him. But…if he chose to allow these feelings in, to let himself explore these thoughts that wanted this Russian priest to do and say…unspeakable things.
Then what was all of this for? The restraint, pushing down his true self, ignoring the hunger that manifested in more ways than one.
The car stopped in front of Shane’s house.
The engine went quiet, and the silence that followed felt heavier than the night outside. The early morning dark pressed in around them, thick and unmoving, and Shane stayed where he was, one hand still braced against the seat, like moving might break something fragile between them.
He turned to look at Rozanov.
Rozanov was already looking at him.
Close, too close. The car was small. Its size didn’t change, but now it felt impossibly narrow, like the space between them had been reduced to something deliberate. Something chosen.
Shane became acutely aware of everything at once: the warmth still lingering in the car, the faint scent of smoke and incense clinging to Rozanov’s coat, the slow, steady rhythm of his breathing.
"Wha—" he started, but the word didn’t land.
"Shane," Ilya said softly. "Please."
There was no teasing in it now. No edge. Just something low and certain that settled directly under Shane’s ribs.
Shane’s gaze dropped, just for a moment, to Ilya’s mouth.
That was the mistake. Or a decision. He wasn’t sure.
He felt it before it happened, the shift, the way the air seemed to tighten, the way his body leaned forward a fraction before his mind caught up.
Ilya closed the distance.
The kiss wasn’t clean. The angle was wrong at first, the gear shift pressing awkwardly between them, and Shane’s hand came up almost instinctively to Ilya’s shoulder to steady himself, steady them, and for a brief second, it was all misalignment and breath and uncertainty.
And then…it settled.
Something clicked into place.
Ilya’s hand slid up to his jaw, firm and warm, holding him there, not forcing, just anchoring, and Shane felt the contact like a spark straight down his spine. The kiss deepened, not rushed, but deliberate, like Ilya was taking his time learning him.
Shane inhaled sharply against his mouth.
Warm. That was the first thought. Warm in a way nothing else had ever been.
It spread through him too fast, too sudden, heat blooming in his chest, in his throat, in the space just beneath his skin where everything in him had been held tight for years. His fingers tightened slightly in the wool of Ilya’s coat without thinking.
Ilya shifted closer, just enough that the space between them disappeared entirely.
Shane felt it, every point of contact, every inch where they met, and something in him gave way.
He kissed him back.
Not carefully. Not the controlled, measured way he did everything else.
There was hesitation for half a second, just long enough to feel it, and then it was gone, replaced by something more instinctive, more honest. His hand moved from Ilya’s shoulder to the side of his neck, thumb brushing just under his ear, and he felt the answering reaction in the way Ilya exhaled softly against him.
The kiss deepened again, slower this time, fuller.
Shane forgot to breathe. Or maybe he didn’t care to.
Time stretched, seconds or minutes, he couldn’t tell, and when they finally broke apart, it wasn’t clean. Their lips parted only just enough for air, their foreheads nearly touching, breaths uneven in the small space between them.
Ilya didn’t move far.
His hand was still at Shane’s jaw, thumb resting against the corner of his mouth, tracing once, absentmindedly, almost reverently, over the freckles there.
"Nakonets-to," he murmured. Finally.
Shane exhaled, and it felt like something had been knocked loose inside him.
"I should go in," he said, clearing his throat; it came out harsher than he meant it to.
"No." Ilya’s voice dipped, something almost like a quiet protest in it. "Shane?"
His name, just his name this time, landed differently. Warmer. Closer.
"Yeah?" Shane breathed.
Ilya’s hand shifted slightly, fingers brushing just behind his ear, lingering there.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Come find me."
Shane gave no response; he got out of the car. He walked to his front door. He did not look back.
He listened, standing inside his closed door, to the sound of the engine turning over, the slow pull of the car moving away down the street.
He put his back against the door and stood in the dark of his front hall and felt, with a clarity that did not require analysis: undone. Completely, entirely, willingly undone.
He was also experiencing a new emotion he had never felt before. A kiss that left him wanting more.
Shane was scared of what more could mean.
“Ah fuck!” he said out loud as a sharp pain suddenly blossomed in his mouth. He opened his jaw wider to reveal his fangs had popped, digging into his cheeks.