No one else.

Pan

Twelve hours ago he put on his boots and tucked in his shirt and found the Cultist where she'd watched the sun come up with the others, with his keys. She wasn't asleep. Probably felt her blood pressure spike when he took the keys back from her, gave her back the empty promise that she could call Rosa and see if he had or had not arrived.

Empty because if he did decide to go out to find John Brogan on his own he'd be dead and Rosa would have no knowledge of it. A promise because he cannot lie.

Nine hours ago Rosa picked up the phone at La Iglesia del Buen Pastor and said "Good Shepherd, this is Rosa," and did not exactly hide her disdain but she did concede that Father Echeverría was there. He's going out of town, you'll see him when he gets there. Just about hung up on her.

No sign of Brogan or anyone else. No sign of the Technocrats. No sign of Sleeper law enforcement. No sign of the priest until the smeared hours before nightfall when the air gets heavy with the temperature dropping and the sky looks like spilled ink.

Just as the sun is disappearing beyond the horizon the tires of his truck crunch down on the gravel at the end of the driveway. He walks the length of it and does not go into the cabin first but comes around the side to check out the backyard. If the Verbena are with him they're in a separate vehicle. Maybe they're not coming until tomorrow.

Either way, he returns.

Serafíne

The admonition was almost entirely in her eyes, at dawn. Blue eyes gone bloodshot from lack of sleep and too much THC, which did only so much to calm her and only so much to cushion her from the way that feeling of uncleanliness pushed itself back into her body through her pores when she was still or thoughtful or alone for too long. Or when she was near strangers for too long; or even near not-quite-strangers for too long. Or near anyone.

In the woods at dawn and in the woods at dusk Serafíne looked much less like a prostitute and much more like a girl just maybe out of college hanging around the fire and getting high with old friends a year after graduation, looking back and forward at the same time. Imagining a future that might never come. That morning she was wearing one of Jim's t-shirts and still in her safety-pinned skirt and she stood with the keys dangling from her fingers and watched him fiercely and listened to his promise, which was empty, with her arms crossed, hugging herself and holding herself away from him again. Until the moment when she finally handed them over in the early morning light mist drifting up from the trampled grass and threw herself at him for a stark hug.

Her chin resting sharp on his shoulder. Her mouth finding his ear.

"Not alone, okay?"

That was all she said.

---

This is what she did all day: slept, outside, on a blanket by the firering. Slept in the sunlight and the gentle dappled shadows of the aspens all around them. Slept through the heat of the day, with the sun above to keep away the shadows. Woke up to eat and call Rosa and get near about hung up on and went back to sleep away the afternoon. Curled up beneath the long shadow of a leaning pine tree, the scent of needles sharp in her nostrils.

By sundown, though, she's awake again and down by the stream, her feet bare, her legs bare. She's wearing cut-off jeans and no fucking fishnets and no makeup. Long hair is pulled back in a ponytail that is flattened from her nap. There are pine needles and dead leaves in her hair and a SIOUXIE AND THE BANSHEES t-shirt loose around her torso. The t-shirt is loose enough that not even the shadow of her breasts are visible. She's pretty flat-chested anyway when she's not wearing a push-up bra covered with roses and nothing else, but dressed like that she has the physique not of a party girl but of a long-distance runner.

Sera's smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer and ignoring fucking everyone else, except Jim sometimes and Sid the one time Sid comes up and touches her voluntarily and Leah until the crunch of tires on gravel pulls her attention back to the cabin.

Pan comes around the side to check out the backyard and finds a Cultist climbing up the slope from the stream, breathing out a stream of smoke from a cigarette or maybe a joint, so hard to tell in the gloom. Her arms are crossed and one side of her face has those odd striations that come from sleeping on a textured blanket all day on the hard ground and she is sharp shouldered as she looks him up and down, something almost sulky about her mouth still that is the lingering hangover of her raging at him last night.

But that sulkiness is better than the blunted edge of her miserable withdrawal.

"You came back." A little breath or shrug, her shoulders rising and falling. "Good." Like she still doesn't trust that he has or will.

She almost wants to ask for his keys again.
But doesn't.
Not yet.

Pan

With all the exposure he's had to teenagers over the course of his life he has developed a resistance to sulking the likes of which even the public school teachers in his congregation envy. The only time anyone has ever heard him raise his voice has come when he has hollered from his desk for Rosa, expecting her to pop her head through the door that separates the pastor's study from the reception office and ask him what he wants a moment later.

He does not return drenched in his own blood tonight. He wears black jeans and a black t-shirt beneath a black blazer tonight. The work shirt has been left in the car. He carries a duffel bag up on his right shoulder and his watch flashes in the dying light.

Beneath the black he all but glows with the Work he's done. Risen with the sun as he was he expects to follow it to sleep soon but she cannot glean from the sheen of his eyes whether he's tired or has driven too long today. The cabin to Denver to the Chantry and back again is a long time to be without company other than God.

God has gotten him into some shit before but He's always bailed him out.

"I wanna head out early tomorrow," he says. "Do me a favor and don't stay up all night, huh? See you in the morning."

And the keys clatter in his left hand as he turns to head into the cabin.

Serafíne

"I just woke up." He knows that; he can see that in the dull flicker of her gaze. Hear it in her voice or is that marijuana. God knows what the Cultists were doing while he was preparing himself before God and preparing his affairs in case and preparing his weapon for the demon he intends to kill on the morrow. There are other people here, strangers Pan has never met and the two Verbena he has brought back with him and there's the noise from the kitchen that sounds like the din and clatter of someone making dinner.

Sera stands there another second or two her arms crossed her body language all closed off blowing smoke out the corner of her mouth the way teenagers do watching his broad back as he turns around, keys in his left hand. Clattering.

Another moment passes and he cannot see this but: she stubs out the cigarette on one of the stones ringing the fire and tosses the butt into the sandbottomed ashtray close by and glances up at his shadow cutting dark through the rays of the setting sun.

No one really sees this when they look at her because Sera shows the world her body in a wholly different way but - she is slender and light-footed and athletic. It comes through in that physical confidence, the way she walks on those murderous heels like she's some badass a hundred pounds heavier than she is and not the sort you want to fuck with, rather than the mincing steps most women effect because feet were not meant to be contorted into such shapes.

But when she's sober (which she is) and when she runs (as she does now) she has all the lean elegance of a lifelong athlete. How she maintains that with her diet of beer and pretzels and LSD and hash is anyone's guess but: for the second time in as many nights one 5'5" Cultist slams into Pan Echevarría's back.

This time there are no blows. She wraps her arms around his ribs and presses her cheek solidly, yearningly, against his shoulderblade. This fucking adorable little bearhug and she smells like tobacco and yeast and pine.

She says nothing, but her heart is in her throat and her eyes and her eyes. Her grip on him tightens.

Pan

And he stands and absorbs the impact. Last night he did not expect a blow but took them anyway. Knew somewhere in the thick of his poor judgment that he deserved her ire. She was young and did not deserve loss and for whatever else he believes or does not believe he does not think her to care little for him.

He also believes that he is just a man and that his death would be just the death of a man. That he has no importance beyond the strength he draws up out of other people. That death is such an impermanent and equalizing thing that to go through life without ever having felt the sting of grief does a person as little good as going through childhood without ever having caught the chicken pox.

He believes a lot of things that make people like Sera angry.

When the collision of her body against his does not follow with small fists against his shoulders and back they jerk with the expulsion of air come as a laugh. Beneath her arms she finds him solid and stable, no bone palpable through the muscle and fat laid overtop his frame. He smells that terrible soap he uses underneath tobacco smoke and the sweat from driving with the sun glaring through his windshield during the afternoon.

He lowers the arm holding the duffel bag and pockets the keys. Brings up his left hand to cover her arms where they intersect across his gut. When she doesn't let go after a few seconds he drops the bag on the ground to free up his right hand.

"Alright?" he asks. Swallows up the pronoun the way he does in Spanish sometimes.

Serafíne

"'Course." Serafíne breathes back into the strength of his broad back. The word sounds choked off and her throat closes around it but there are no tears in her eyes. The surfeit of her emotions just clot up in her blood and her vocal chords and in the tightness of her arms around his midsection. If he ever suffers a heart attack the pain might feel like this. This belt around his center, a small fist at the base of his sternum, pushing beneath his hand.

Then not her cheek but her forehead and this time in the shallow valley his spine winnows down his back. She breathes in that awful soap and his sweat and the shining sensation of his work backed by something stronger and deep and strong and deep as his faith, holding on quietly, fiercely, for what seems an age.

There's no fire in the firepit just now and the shadows are falling slow but the sky above, seen patchy through the trees, is luminous, now. Fading but luminous. There are crickets, the hoot of an owl somewhere out in the fastness, the constant murmur of the street over its boulders and rocks. Sera's feet are damp and a little muddy with pine needles stuck to the mud so the piney scent just opens up as she plants them deeper onto the packed sod.

'Course - she says, though she's not. But she will be, or she won't. Just as he will be, or he won't, tomorrow. Still feels unclean, that feeling hasn't left her and it's not just Brogan who laid it on her but she's more in her right mind and she felt the way he held her last night, like he would absorb any poison he could take from her into his own body. She wouldn't ever lay this on him because it is hers and she has a Will same as he but: just that knowledge is a kind of quiet absolution.

Moody thing, she just holds on, eyes closed, until it is okay to not hold on anymore, and then she leaves her left arm mostly still curling around him as she slips to his right and picks up that fucking duffle bag of his. Dropping her left arm from his torso then but shouldering the bag with a slowly-inching-upward look that ends at his profile.

"I mean I will be I guess." A beat. Sera looks up at the house, where the lights are coming on in the windows, all aglow. Beating warm yellow light against the dark shadows that make them look so small. "Some other girl came or whatever," Sera has not yet bothered to learn Lena's name. Hooks a shoulder sideways in this desultory gesture. All okay, fine. Whatever, we need other people. Maybe. "and Sid."

Pause. Then:

"¿Llamó por teléfono Rafael?"

Pan

She answers and the hug stretches on after the bag drops into the dirt. The priest tries to glimpse her over his shoulder but can only bring her hair into his periphery. Lets his right arm drape across her shoulders as she moves to stand at his side. If he wants to carry his own bag he does not wrestle her for it.

Voices and clattering cookware inside draw his eye. He will not be able to sleep inside the cabin. It only has one bedroom and the couch is not large enough for him to lie on. The truck's cab is not large enough for him to sleep in either but it's quiet and cut off from the youth who find no reason not to stay up until the sky changes colors again.

Part of him thought about spending the night at the Chantry but he came here anyway.

"Yeah," he says. "La otra mañana. He was off hiking in the mountains or something, just got back. Asked if he ought to come help with the situation." A beat. He smiles wry in the dark but doesn't laugh. "I should have known better than to say the word 'Nephandi' when I was talking to a Euthanatos, huh?"

Serafíne

There's that moment of unnatural stiffness in her shoulders when he drapes his arm over them. The lingering threads of the sense she carried with her everywhere yesterday, and with all the strangers and newcomers here today but: then she relaxes into the warmth and weight of his arm. Like maybe she thinks it doesn't matter because he burns so bright or maybe she knows that he gets something that she gets even if he doesn't know she gets it and she doesn't know why or how that knowledge is inside her -

just that it is,
inside her.
Behind an stoppered wall.

"I didn't know he was - " there's a pause, her eyes are cast down now, at their shadows on the ground. Didn't know he was many things, but Awake is the foremost among them and Euthanatos is the second after that. So. " - open-eyed. That's cool.

"I mean that you called him." Her voice is a little still and a little stark. "I'm glad you did."

She does not know that he thought about spending the night in the chantry.
But she knows that he came out here anyway.

--

"I'm glad you came back, too." She means: last night as well as today. He could've just shrugged off her assault and pushed her back toward Jim, climbed into the fucking truck but she might've stolen his keys then or god knows what. Jumped in the flatbed as he drove off, she was that lashing and that furious.

She still wants to ask for his keys; can hear them in his fucking pockets as they stand there and there's a tightening note in the back of her throat that he can hear and feel in her shoulders beneath his arm. The bunch of her deltoids and trapezius, the lean tension in her spine. "But what the fuck were you thinking? How could you - "

Who else is there? He said to her, or words to that effect. Who else is going to go. What else was he supposed to do: there's no one else.

He had his arm thrown over her shoulders, all companionable. She's smaller out here in the woods, fucking barefoot, than she is out there in the world where she dares to take up as much as as she wants to take up, as much space as she can. That makes her no less prickly at moment's like these, and maybe he's tensing in expectation of the blow, maybe he doesn't realize it is coming, maybe he imagines that he has endured every blow she will sling his way but no: she punches him again, in the stomach, her head down and turned away from him in that moment, when he tells her that. The blow is minor. She's not particularly strong and there's no momentum to it, but he can feel the tension in her body beneath his draped arm.

"I'm here. I told you I'd fight." Quiet and earnest, the crown of her head turned in his direction. "How could you think I'd let you go alone? I got you into this? What sort of - " Her eyes are screwed tightly shut and her head turned away so the priest cannot see the single tear spilling down her cheek. "What sort of person do you think I am that I would let you go out there all by yourself. Jim won't either he's gonna help. Damnit." She sniffs and sniffs hard and jerks herself away from his arm, this violent gesture all-at-once. Whips off her cheek with a curve of her shoulder before he can see the fucking tear. "You best go inside and eat dinner before I beat you fucking up. I'm kind of a badass you know.

"Anyway, Jim's taking Leah for another hike and I wanna go. I'll see you in the morning, Pan."

She turns around and walks away.