Chapter 41
Malachi
“You’re not real. Take a ticket and get in line,” I mutter, squeezing my eyes shut to try and block the light. But it doesn’t work. It never fucking works. The lumens punch right through the thin skin of my eyelids, turning my vision into a wash of searing, aggressive red static.
“Malachi…”
“Go. Away,” I grit out, my wrists screaming in protest as I strain against the iron cuffs. “I’m not buying what you’re selling. The visual effects are cheap and the dialogue is derivative.”
“Look at me.”
“No.”
“DO IT.”
The command slams into my skull like a sledgehammer, bypassing my will entirely, eyelids snapping open. And there she is. Eden. But she’s not the soft, cardigan-wearing disaster I remember. She’s absolute, biological ruin.
She traipses toward me in a ragged jerk of mismatched angles. The peaches are gone, replaced by the cloying stench of the meat-locker. She looks like she’s been put through a grinder and loosely reassembled without the manual.
Subtlety really isn't the Oubliette’s strong suit.
I’ve been here for ten days… thirteen… maybe a fiscal quarter?
I don’t fucking know. I lost count somewhere in the middle of my ninth session with the neural-whips.
“The bind was too tight, Malachi. I didn’t even make it back to my apartment.” It reaches out, tracing a cold, gore-slicked finger down my jawline. “I’m dead because of you.”
“Oh, shut up,” I rasp, jerking my head away from the touch. “Honestly, the dialogue in this place has gone downhill since the last epoch. ‘I’m dead because of you’? That’s the best the torment-writers could come up with?”
“I never went back, Malachi…”
“Boring. Derivative. Next,” I snarl, focusing on the throb of the headache behind my eyes rather than the visual horror show in front of me.
The real Eden is fine. She’s back in that drafty apartment, hopefully swaddled, hyperventilating over a cup of herbal tea, or reading her terrible romance novels. She is safe. She is whole. She is delightfully, boringly alive in a world full of taxes and pizza and dating shows.
“You killed me…” the hallucination wails, escalating the volume to an annoying screech.
“You’re a bad loop of corrupted code,” I mutter to the floor. “And you’re interrupting my sulking.”
“No one’s interrupting a damn thing.” A sharp, bored, and irritatingly familiar voice cuts through the noise.
I peel my eyes open just as the thing flickers away, dissolving into pixels of grey smoke.
Good fucking riddance.
Instant regret blooms through me as I try to crack a smile, only for the chapped skin of my lip to split wide open, weeping fresh iron into my mouth.
“Is that a new suit?” I croak, eyeing the neon-blue ensemble that is arguably more painful to look at than the LED glare. “You look like a highlighter.”
“Hmm. Yes,” Veraxia says, smoothing a lapel. “And you look like a rejected prototype. Half-dead really isn't your color.”
Without looking at me, she reaches out with a manicured hanger and presses a recessed switch on the wall. The chains holding me to the ceiling lose their tension instantly and I drop like a sack of wet cement, hitting the tiles in an ungraceful, bone-jarring heap.
A fresh wave of agony explodes through my upper body—my shoulders burning, muscles seizing in relief.
“Ow,” I wheeze into the floor, waiting for the room to stop spinning. “Cunt.”
With a snap of her fingers, two Wardens march in. They don't lift me so much as dredge me up from the tiles, their grip bruising what little skin I have left. Before I can even get my feet under me, one of them jams a syringe into the side of my neck.
The stimulant hits my bloodstream like a freight train made of liquid anxiety, and my eyes snap wide, pupils blowing out as the fuzzy numbness of exhaustion is ripped away, replaced by a chemical vibration that rattles my teeth.
I feel awake. Horribly, violently, nauseatingly awake.
I dry heave, the sudden clarity making the pain in my shoulders a thousand times more vivid.
“Is it execution day?” I gasp through retches. “Because if it is, I’d like to lodge a formal complaint about the pre-show amenities.”
Veraxia inspects a microscopic smudge on her cuff. “Worse. The paperwork was flagged. Someone Upstairs saw your file.”
My stomach drops through the floor, landing somewhere in the sub-basement. “Who? Legal?”
”No. First Division Management.”
My essence shrivels so fast I nearly pass out, stimulant be damned. If I had anything in my stomach to give, then it’d be splattered onto my own feet
“I’m not going,” I croak, digging my heels into the floor, which is pathetic considering I have zero traction and less muscle mass than a starving cat. “I’ll stay here. I love the Oubliette. Really. It’s growing on me. Minimalist chic.”
Veraxia sighs. “Oh, brother. You have no choice whatsoever. You are a summoned asset.” She nods to the Wardens. “Move him.”
I’m hoisted, dragged, and practically thrown out of the blinding white and back into the labyrinth of the office complex.
They shove me into a glass elevator where Veraxia punches a code into the panel with trembling fingers, and the doors slide shut with a pneumatic hiss.
We shoot upward with a velocity that turns my insides into a slurry, passing by every floor including my own, punching through the sulfurous clouds, right toward The C-Suite.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Veraxia turns on me, her eyes wide and frantic, and starts aggressively smoothing down the ruined, blood-crusted hem of my shirt. She tries to wipe a smear of grime from my cheek with her thumb, but only succeeds in smearing it further.
“Stop it, Vee,” I hiss, swatting her hand away.
“Shut up,” she snaps as she grabs my chin, forcing me to look at her.
“Listen to me, Malachi. Do not speak unless spoken to. Do not make jokes. Do not be you. If you embarrass me in front of Her, I will personally file the paperwork to have you thrown into the sun. I will skip the committee review and do it myself. Do you understand?”
“Understood.”
The elevator dings, and the doors open into a cavern of polished obsidian and floor-to-ceiling glass that looks down on the Ninth Division. Up here, it’s just silence and the hum of terrifyingly efficient air conditioning.
Flanking the door are two monstrosities—eight feet of jackal-headed muscle and gold-leaf armor, holding halberds that look like they could split an atom.
And then, there’s the desk. A slab of black stone the size of a landing strip. The chair’s high-backed, leather, and turned away from me, facing the infinite void outside.
“Malachi Aurelian Virezeal,” the voice echoes through the room. “Torture Administrator of the Ninth. Veil-jumper. Realm-breacher. Demon-killer. Tram-breaker.”
I flinch at the last one. That was one time.
The chair spins slowly.
“Mortal lover.”
Long, gleaming red hair spills over the shoulders of a tailored black power suit—the kind of cut that costs more than my entire department’s annual budget.
Her lips are painted a slash of violent crimson.
And curving out from her temples, sleek and black as oil, are massive ram’s horns that frame her face like a crown.
She stares at me with eyes that are older than the dirt on my boots, and raises a hand, gesturing to one of the chairs.
“Sit down, please.”
My knees give out before I can decide to move, the leather chair creaking beneath me as I very shakily take a seat opposite Satan.
“You have been... disruptive,” she says, the words rolling off her tongue like smoke as she raises a perfect, terrifying eyebrow.
“Your sister here wants to liquidate you. She claims you’re defective.
She says you bonded with a mortal, caused significant havoc in the Ninth Division, and generally treated our dimensional barriers like wet tissue paper. ”
I whip my head around, despite the stiffness in my neck muscles.
“You wanted to liquidate me?!” I snap, glaring at Veraxia, who completely ignores me.
I know I’m a pain in the ass. I know I treat the employee handbook like a suggestion box. I know I fucked with a lot of the rules. I know I’m the demonic equivalent of a paper jam in a very expensive printer.
But liquidation?
That’s not a firing. That’s an unmaking. We shared a womb, and she’s trying to have me shredded into confetti without so much as a warning memo.
I am seething, the heat of it coiling in my gut and radiating out to my fingertips. I want to flip the desk. I want to set fire to Veraxia’s stupid suit. I want to file a grievance with HR, burn down the HR department, and then salt the earth where it stood.
Talk about a toxic fucking work environment.
“I wouldn’t say defective,” I grind out.
Veraxia stiffens beside me, probably mentally calculating the trajectory of my corpse into the sun, but I don’t care.
Satan leans back as she studies me with eyes like pools of ancient, cooling magma.
“Neither would I. You traversed the Veil twice without exploding, and without a permit—a Class Eight breach, I believe, and you navigated the mortal realm without a shell.” She pauses, tapping a black nail against the desk.
“Most demons would’ve lost their eternal souls to madness with everything you’ve done.
But you?” She tilts her head, the massive horns catching the light. “You have a unique… adaptability.”
My jaw hangs loose for a solid second. What?
Did I just hear that right? Did the CEO of Hell just call my catastrophic lack of impulse control a skill?
The shock curdles instantly into something much sweeter. Smugness. Pure, unadulterated, grade-A smugness. I slide a glance over to Veraxia. If looks could kill, I’d be a pile of smoking ash on the carpet, but she can’t touch me. The Boss just endorsed my chaos.
Suck on that, highlighter.
Satan leans forward, steepling her fingers. “Tell me, Administrator. What was your station before this job? Your file is... dense.”
Oh, fuck no. Anything but that.
My soul shrivels inside my chest, a deep, internal cringe that rattles my bones. It’s the one smudge on my resume I can’t scrub out. The shame of my early career.
“I was...” I clear my throat, wishing the floor would open up and swallow me whole. “I was a Welcomer, ma’am.”
Veraxia lets out a tiny, derisive snort, but Satan’s expression doesn’t change. “Reception. The Gates. Endless lines of the newly damned, confused and asking for the manager. Did you enjoy it?”
I scoff. “Fuck no,” I say, forgetting for a second who I’m talking to. “That’s why I transferred to torture. Flaying is messy, sure, but at least the souls don’t ask you if there’s a vegan option in the cafeteria.”
A smooth chuckle drifts from her throat.
“I like you, Malachi,” she croons. “You have... texture. Most of my staff are so tragically smooth. So polished. Like Veraxia here. Tell me--have you ever considered a lateral move? Something with a bit more... bite?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe...” She tilts her head, studying me. “Something in Compliance?”
I blink, fighting the urge to physically recoil.
Compliance? The Wardens?
Those fleshy, pink, shrimpy little bastards that have made my life a living misery recently? Joining them would be like a wolf voluntarily shaving its fur to join a flock of naked mole rats.
“With all due respect, ma’am,” I say, the disgust practically dripping off my chin. “Absolutely not.”
She throws her head back and laughs, looking genuinely delighted by my revulsion.
“Oh, no, no. You misunderstand,” she says, waving a hand dismissively. “I’m not talking about the shrimps in the Ninth. I’m talking about First Division Compliance.”
My brain stutters. First Division. The Headhunters. They carry scythes made of void-metal, they hunt rogue demons on behalf of Her.
“Jesus Christ,” the mortal blasphemy blurts from my mouth before my brain can stomp on the brakes.
The temperature in the room instantly drops to absolute zero. The amusement vanishes from her face, replaced by a sudden, terrifying stillness.
“Watch your mouth,” she hisses, her voice layering over itself—three, four, five octaves deep, vibrating with the weight of a fallen star. “Do not speak that name in my realm.”
“Apologies, ma’am,” I choke out, bowing my head until my chin hits my chest. “The mortals… they rubbed off on me. Bad habits. Terrible vocabulary.”
My fucking Eden rubbed off on me. Even when she’s not here, she’s managing to get me almost incinerated. That girl is going to be the death of me, even after I'm already dead.
Veraxia looks like she’s about to throw herself through the window just to escape the awkwardness. “My Lady, I am so sorry. He is a liability. He is clearly unstable. I will take him back to the Oubliette immediately and have his tongue removed to prevent further—”
Satan holds up a hand to shut her up, and exhales hard, the room warming back up from ‘absolute zero’ to ‘pleasant summer evening in a volcano.’
“Quiet, Veraxia.”
“But—”
“I said quiet. This is exactly what I need. Someone who sounds like them. Someone who can blend in without setting off every holy alarm from the Vatican to the Bible Belt. I’m offering you a position, Malachi. I want you to work for me. Directly.”
My eyebrows shoot up.
“You’ll be stationed at the intersection,” She continues. “Working between the First Division—my personal district—and the mortal realm, where you will have permanent residency.”
My heart skips a beat. Permanent residency? I could be with Eden. Not as an accidentally-summoned demon, not as a nightmare she has to hide away from her boring sister, but as a... person. A guy. A domestic, grocery-shopping, spider-killing, tax-paying boyfriend.
Saints below. Is that the right word? Boyfriend? Boyfriend?
Yep. That sounds right. I’m going to be a boyfriend.
“And regarding the… aesthetics,” she adds, waving a hand at my current, battered state.
“You won’t be using a standard-issue Ninth Division shell.
First Division vessels are bespoke. Matter-woven.
They don’t sit on top of your essence; they fuse with it.
Think of it less like a hazmat suit, and more like… a tailored Italian suit.”
It’s the single greatest sales pitch I’ve ever heard, and I’m vibrating so hard I think I might actually be glowing.
“So, Administrator,” She asks, leaning back. “What do you say?”
The answer flies out without any hesitation.
“Fuck yes.”