Chapter 12
Malachi
“What the fuck is wrong with you? What was that?” Eden all-but yells at me, slamming the front door shut with a force that rattles the cheap frame, sending a fine dusting of plaster down from the ceiling.
“What do you mean?” I ask, leaning against the wall to pry my boots off.
“What do I mean?” She whirls on me, her eyes wide and wet with panic. “You were out in the open for an hour, Malachi! One hour! And you picked three fights! And Leo—he was staring at your hands when you crushed his phone! The fingers! He saw the silver!”
She practically rips her coat off, throwing it onto the rack before dumping the pharmacy bag onto the coffee table with a clatter of pills and plastic.
“I did not ‘pick’ them,” I say calmly, hooking my thumbs under the rim of the beanie.
I yank it off, letting out a low groan of relief as my horns finally tear free of the wool.
“I merely responded to the structural weaknesses of the situations presented to me. If your world is filled with fragile egos and breakable electronics, that is hardly my fault.”
I toss the beanie onto the couch and fix her with a level stare.
“And you,” I add, my voice dropping an octave. “You stayed quiet while that lying sack of shit lied to your face. Why?”
“It’s called manners!” Eden shouts, her hands balling into fists at her sides. “It’s called being a person! We don’t just crush phones because we’re annoyed!”
“Ah. Well. There’s your problem. I am not a person, in your limited sense of the word.
We are different species, Eden. Would you blame a cat for not barking like a dog?
” I ask, tilting my head. “I am a demon. I do not do... polite. Especially to those who do not deserve it. And that male? He deserves a great deal worse than a broken screen.”
She doesn’t answer—she’s too busy rustling aggressively through the pharmacy bag. She snatches up a bottle of antiseptic and the cotton pads, collapsing on the couch.
She grips the bottle between her knees, her jaw clenched as she tries to bully the child-proof cap off one-handed, her knuckles white and slick with sweat. Her other arm—the one with the cut—is held stiffly against her chest, blood seeping through the sleeve of her shirt.
This is pathetic.
“Give me the arm,” I say decisively, rolling my neck until the bones pop.
“I can do it myself,” she says through gritted teeth.
“Fascinating,” I drawl, reaching out and turning my hand palm up. “I’m sure you could perform open-heart surgery with a butter knife if you put your mind to it. Give me the arm.”
“Malachi, I said—”
“You said nonsense,” I interrupt, shifting to perch on the coffee table directly in front of her. I jam my knees right up against hers, caging her in and forcing her back into the cushions until she has nowhere left to retreat. “You need someone with steady hands.”
She flinches, but I don’t let go. I pull her limb toward the light, exposing the ugly, weeping mess.
“Where do I start?” I hum, looking at the array of plastic bottles on the table. “Which of these do we start with? Or can I simply cauterize the meat and be done with it?”
“Do not—” She swallows hard, her eyes wide with trepidation. “Do not cauterize anything. Just... the antiseptic. On the cotton pad. Be gentle, Malachi.”
The sterile bite of chemicals fills the air as I drown the cotton pad in the liquid, my nose crinkling in distaste.
The second I press the pad to the wound, she jolts. Her body practically bucks off the upholstery, her free hand clawing into the fabric until the seams groan in protest.
“Hold still,” I murmur in warning, eyes fixed on the way her diluted blood blossoms across the white cotton. “Or I will pin you to the floorboards and finish this while you’re staring at the ceiling.”
“It stings,” she gasps, her eyes squeezed shut, her lashes fluttering against her cheeks.
“Of course it stings. It’s poison killing other, smaller poisons,” I note, scrubbing a particularly stubborn bit of debris from the jagged edge of the cut. “If you wanted a pleasant experience, you should have summoned a spa therapist. I’m built for destruction, not bedside manners.”
I lean in closer, the scent of her pain-spiked adrenaline hitting my nerves like a shot of cheap whiskey.
“Ah. You see this here?” I tilt her arm toward the light, exposing the raw, weeping center of the mess.
“There’s a fiber caught in the flesh—probably a souvenir from that hideous cardigan you insist on wearing.
Strange, isn’t it? How a mortal body throws a full-blown rebellion over something so small it could disappear in a breeze. ”
I reach for the tweezers and dig the cold metal right into the meat of her arm, wrestling with the crusty thread until she’s practically sobbing in front of me.
As I fish for it, my mind wanders back to that incompetent sack of skin in the pharmacy.
Leo. I feel a low growl building in my chest at the mere memory of him.
If the only pillars in Eden’s life are a boring sister and a lying fool in a terrible jacket, it’s no wonder she was desperate enough to reach through the Veil for the Corpse-Boy.
She has no glue. No structural support. Just a house of cards leaning against a tombstone, waiting for a stiff breeze to finish the job.
It makes my gut ache in a way that is entirely, annoyingly unusual.
I shouldn’t care if her social circle is a graveyard.
But the thought of her reaching out into the freezing dark for a ghost—begging for a dead hand because the living ones are too useless to hold hers?
It’s offensive. It’s an insult to the very concept of existence.
If you’re going to be haunted, it should be by something with teeth, not some lingering memory that wouldn’t know what to do with her even if it managed to manifest.
“There,” I mutter, snapping the tweezers back to reveal the tiny, crimson-soaked fiber. “The intruder has been evicted. Your body can stop its pathetic little mutiny now.”
She blows out a long breath, the tension leaving her in a slow rush that has her sagging an inch closer to me. “Right. Okay. Good. Uh... the Neosporin next, and then the steri-strips in the little blue packet.”
I apply the cream, and then catch the edge of the blue packet between my teeth, the reinforced plastic putting up a fight before a fang shears through it with a clean, effortless snick.
I spit the scrap out onto the floor and pull out the adhesive strips with two fingers.
Then I pull the edges of the wound together, sealing the fracture in her fragile mortal shell.
The gauze comes next; layer by layer, I bury the evidence of her blood-stained hobby under a cocoon of clinical white, finishing it off with two sharp strips of medical tape.
“There,” I murmur, smoothing the ends of the tape down with a final, lingering stroke of my thumb. “The breach is patched.”
“Thanks,” she says, her voice so small and fragile beneath the wail of a passing siren in the streets below I almost miss it.
Neither of us moves. I stay perched on the edge of the table, my knees boxed around hers, anchoring her in place.
I look at her—really look at her—there’s a lot of her to see, and every inch of it is a sensory trap. The mess of black hair curling into wild, damp waves from the fog outside, those wide, coffee-colored eyes that look like they’ve seen too many mortal sunsets alone.
I grimace, a sour taste coating my tongue.
“For future reference,” I say flatly. “The next time an irritant like that boy upsets you, it would be beneficial for you to simply pick up a brick and apply it to their skull.”
She blinks, her mouth falling open slightly. “Pardon?”
“You heard me,” I drawl. “Blunt force trauma is a wonderful tactic. It cuts down on the talking.”
“I can stick up for myself,” she mutters, shifting her gaze to the floor. “I know how to defend myself, Malachi.”
I snort, flicking a glance at the fresh white gauze wrapped around her arm.
“Could’ve fooled me.” I stand abruptly, the movement sharp enough to make her flinch.
The air in here is getting too thick. Too sticky.
I take a breath and finally peel off the ridiculously stifling hoodie, dragging the fabric over my head and tossing it onto the floor before rolling my shoulders out, trying to shake off the lingering residue of helpfulness.
Then I snatch the box of painkillers from the table and toss it at her chest.
“Take two. Or don’t. I don’t care.” I say, then I snatch the remote off the cushion, flipping it into the air and catching it. “The dating show, documentaries on torture, or more pornography. Choose.”
“What?” She leans her head back against the cushion, looking utterly drained. “None. I just want to sit here in silence for a bit.”
“I said choose,” I prompt, my thumb hovering over the power button.
“Fine,” she mumbles, her eyelids fluttering shut. “The dating show.”
“Excellent choice,” I note as the television screen flickers to life.
As the high-pitched squeals of a group date that’s definitely going to end up in some kind of mass mating ritual fill the room, I settle back into the couch, right beside her. She’s already drifting, the fight finally bleeding out of her as the exhaustion takes its toll.
Her head lolls in slow motion, her neck losing its battle with gravity until she tips, her temple coming to rest against the hard line of my shoulder.
And I find myself frozen, every muscle locking into place as I am unceremoniously repurposed as a pillow.
My gaze traces her face, marveling at how soft and utterly defenseless it looks against the metallic sheen of my silver skin.
The light from the screen dances across her features, turning her into a canvas of shifting shadows and neon flickers.
She is so soft. So terribly easy to break.
And surprisingly, I think I’m enjoying this—the weight of her, the quiet trust in her slow, shallow breathing.
I reach out, my fingers trembling with a rare, hesitant curiosity, and run a hand through the spectacular disaster of her black, stress-matted hair.
It’s softer than I expected, smelling of her peach shampoo and old rain.
“Rest, my little summoner,” I murmur.
Then the light changes, the bright colors across our skin flickering to a sickly, familiar grey. I snap my attention back to the TV, where the screen’s warping into a corridor of black stone and steel.
The lower halls of the Ninth Division.
The image vanishes as quickly as it came, replaced by the flickering glow of a commercial for laundry detergent.
I blink once. Twice. Three times for good measure.
What the…