Chapter 35 Malachi
Malachi
Every single, small detail that I know of Eden makes so much sense now. She did have pretty little secrets in her head.
Guilt is so easily confused with grief; they smell almost exactly the same. But this wasn't just grief. This was the knowledge that she held the keys to life and death in her hand, and she chose to walk away.
On the slab, Eden curls in on herself as best as she can with the restraints still pinning her down, sobbing so hard the slab shakes.
“I didn’t mean to…” she chokes out. “I just wanted to live… I just wanted to live…”
“To walk the path between life and death…” Veraxia mutters behind us, quill scratching on her clipboard.
Fuck.
“Hold still,” I grit out, as I jam my thumbs into the release mechanism and twist, the pressure seal breaking with a hiss.
The second the hollow needles slide out, the monitors cut off, Eden’s painful memories ceasing to exist.
“Ah! God!” she cries out.
“Blaspheming? In Hell?” Veraxia scolds. “How redun—”
“Shut the fuck up!” I roar.
Dark, sluggish rivulets of blood well up from the puncture sites, hot and red, streaming down her pale temples, getting caught in her eyelashes and streaking down her cheeks to mix with the snot and tears.
I toss the helmet onto the instrument tray with a deafening crash that sends a spray of sterilized tools skittering across the floor. The Wardens jump, their pincers twitching to attack and take me down.
“Undo the restraints!” I bellow, spinning on the nearest one. “Now! Get them off her!”
He hesitates, beady eyes darting to my sister.
Veraxia barely looks up, still taking notes. “Mm, no. I don’t think so. We haven’t cut the bind yet.”
“Undo them,” I hiss, “or I contact Mother and Father, and tell them exactly how you secured your promotion in the first place.”
Her quill freezes mid-scratch. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“Oh, would I not?” I challenge. “Because perhaps it’s about time the golden child gets knocked down a peg or two, and I’ll fucking do it. You know I will.”
She stares at me, her nostrils flaring, chest heaving as she weighs her dignity against her cruelty.
“Fine!” she screeches, waving a frantic hand at the guards. “Release it before he bursts a vessel! Honestly, Malachi, you’re so dramatic.”
The second the locks click, the iron cuffs fall away with a heavy clang, and I’m on her in a second.
“Easy,” I murmur, the rage evaporating. My hands hover for a split second before I slide one hand behind the damp nape of her neck and the other under her trembling knees. “I’ve got you. You’re okay. Easy now.”
I haul her up into a sitting position and she collapses into me, limp as a ragdoll, all the fight drained out of her along with the blood. Her forehead presses hard against my collarbone, smearing a thick, wet streak of red sludge across the white tunic.
“I left him,” she sobs into my neck. “Malachi, I left him in the metal. I could have tried to pull him out, but I didn’t. I just… I crawled away. I let him die.”
I hold her tighter, my jaw locking so hard I feel a molar crack.
I saw the memory. I saw her crawling through the shattered glass of that wreckage.
But I also saw what happened two minutes before the impact.
I heard the wet, sickening smack of that prick’s palm connecting with her cheekbone.
I saw him lunge for the steering wheel like a petulant child because he couldn’t handle her finally standing up to him.
That fucking Corpse-Boy. That mediocre, abusive sack of shit.
He died because he was trying to kill her. And she’s spent an entire year convincing herself that surviving made her a monster.
“I’m a murderer,” she chokes out, her whole body shuddering against mine, the confession tearing out of her throat like barbed wire.
“I’m a bad person. I’ve been sitting in my apartment for a year, crying over an urn, knowing deep down that I killed him.
I deserve to be here, Malachi. I belong in the Pit. ”
“Stop,” I snarl, the word vibrating right through my chest into hers. I grab her face with both hands, ignoring the blood slicking her skin, and force her head up. Her eyes are wide, fractured, and drowning in a year's worth of misplaced, suffocating guilt.
“Listen to me,” I breathe, staring at her like she’s the only source of light in this entire damn realm.
“I deal with evil for a living, Eden. I have spent centuries dissecting the worst of humanity. I have peered into souls that are black with rot, men who murder for coin, for sport, for bruised egos. Do you understand me? I know what a murderer’s soul looks like. Yours is completely clean.”
She lets out a sound that fractures my stupid chest wide open—a wet, broken gasp, like a drowning victim finally breaking the surface.
“He grabbed the wheel, Eden,” I tell her fiercely. “Physics killed him. Hubris killed him. You didn’t murder anyone. You just refused to die with him.”
“But I walked away,” she weeps. “I left him.”
“You severed a rotting limb to save the body,” I murmur, bringing my hand up to cradle the back of her head, pressing her face into my chest to shield her from the dark. “That isn’t a sin, baby girl. That’s survival. It makes you brave. It makes you ferocious.”
I close my eyes, wrapping my arms tighter around her, absorbing the violent, wracking sobs that are finally tearing the poison out of her system.
A desperate, fierce ache blooms behind my ribs.
This hurts more than any punishment Hell could give, and I would take it a thousand times over if it meant I could keep holding her together.
“I’m just... I'm such a mess,” she whispers into my chest, the words wet and exhausted. “I’m completely broken.”
“Broken?” I let out a short, dry laugh, tracing the line of her spine.
“Oh, yes. You are shattered, little summoner.
Your foundations are cracked, your mortal body fails you, and you wear clothes with cartoon animals on them.
But a ruin is still a building, Eden. You don't discard a fortress just because the walls were breached. You hunker down in the rubble and defend what’s left.
You survived a monster. You dragged yourself out of a metal coffin.
And then a year later, you stood in your own living room and plunged a knife into a Warden to protect a demon you barely know.
" I press my jaw against the top of her head, my voice dropping into a fierce, possessive rumble.
"You are my strong girl, Eden. You are so fucking fierce it actually terrifies me. "
She lets out a tiny, shuddering breath, her hands fisting in my shirt like she’s trying to stitch us together.
"You should be proud of the rubble," I murmur, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head. "Because I am looking at it right now, and I have never been more proud of anything in my entire miserable existence."
A dry, theatrical cough tears through the air. “As charming as this little soap opera is,” Veraxia drawls, her voice slicing through the heavy atmosphere like a scalpel, “I think it’s time to break it up now. I’m starting to get sympathetic toothache from all the sweetness.”
Reluctantly, agonizingly, I pull back, peeling my chest away from hers.
But I don’t let go completely. I slide my hands down her arms, fingers locking around her trembling hands, gripping them tight enough to anchor her to the world, enough to tell her I’m still here, even if the air between us is turning to ice.
“You opened a channel and asked to see the dead abuser,” Veraxia says dryly, looking down her nose at us. “You wanted to drag his foul soul back across the line so you could gain some closure. But your syntax was a mess. That gibberish little poem you read aloud? It was riddled with loopholes.”
She steps closer, tapping her quill against Eden’s chin to tilt her head up, forcing her to look into those cold, golden eyes.
“You asked to see him,” she purrs. “But you did not ask specifically where you wanted to see him.”
Eden blinks, confused and terrified. “I… I thought…”
“Yes. You thought. With that stupid, mushy little brain of yours,” Veraxia sneers. “You asked for a reunion. You asked for the barrier between you to be removed. But since Matthew can't get fleshy again, the only way for the ‘hidden world’ to be ‘real’... is if you go to him.”
She picks up a scalpel from the tray, toying with the blade, letting the light catch the edge. “So when numb-nuts here stepped through the Veil, the universe chose him as your driver. He's the one who has to deliver you to him. Once the transaction clears, the bind snaps. Simple.”
Simple. Are you fucking kidding me?
To break the bind—to free us both from this messy, chaotic tether—I have to take the beautiful girl trembling in my arms, the girl who clawed her way out of a broken car to escape a monster, and hand-deliver her right back to him.
If I do this... if I take her to him, the transaction clears. The bind dissolves like sugar in rain. She survives. But it will shatter her soul all over again.
Veraxia rips the parchment off the top of her clipboard, revealing the pulsing, obsidian shard of glass embedded in the frame underneath.
“Now, where did the little cunt land?” she mutters, her fingers scrolling across the glass. “Fallon… Fallon… ah. Well, clearly he isn’t Upstairs with the Cult of Winged Fucks. Far too much baggage for the 'Live, Laugh, Love' crowd.”
She spins the clipboard around to face me, tapping to where a bright red dot pulses on a topographical map of the Ninth Division.
“Matthew Fallon was initially processed in the Grey Archives,” she says, her voice flat and professional.
“We’ll take the tram to the intake sub-level.
We’ll pull the filing on his current location, and then you can have your little reunion.
We find him, we snap the bind, we scrub your memory and shove you back to Earth, and I can finally renounce you as my brother. ”
I cup Eden’s jaw, smearing a fresh streak of red across her cheekbone with my thumb, forcing her to look at me. “We don’t have to do it, Eden,” I say. “We can stop right here. I won’t make you see him. We can figure something else out. There’s got to be a loophole.”
Veraxia lets out a long, exasperated groan, throwing her head back toward the ceiling.
“Oh, for the love of the fires, yes you do,” she hisses, stepping into my periphery and leveling that scalpel at my chest. “Don’t start getting sentimental now, Malachi.
It’s physically repulsive. I can smell the pheromones from here. ”
“She’s traumatized, Veraxia!” I snap, my grip tightening on Eden’s face. “She’s not one of us. She can’t handle this confrontation.”
“She doesn't have to fight him, you idiot. She just has to arrive at the destination!” Veraxia’s voice rises.
“The clause is mandatory. Wardens! I’m putting through the paperwork now, have a transport tram ready at the sub-level terminal.
Stat! And someone fetch a mop—I’m tired of all the mortal fluids. ”