Page 31
He lingers on the word, his gaze flicking for a fraction of a second to Eden—to the way she’s vibrating with fear and the way she’s holding onto me.
From the corner of my eye, I spot a girl in a denim jacket slow down, her phone already half-raised as if she’s considering filming the giant in the blue hoodie with an oversized skull threatening some environmentalist nut. To them, I’m just another unhinged city statistic, a looming threat in cheap polyester.
He’s watching the girl with the phone too, his plastic grin twitching. He clears his throat, the sound like dry leaves skittering over a grave, and attempts a very bad impression of human casualness.
“Yeah, it’s all... rad, dude,” he says, giving a stiff, disjointed thumbs-up. “No sweat. Totally chill vibes. Save the planet, right?”
He looks back at me, his eyes gleaming with a ‘fuck you’ that requires no translation across any division of Hell.
A low growl ripples the marrow of my bones. It’s the sound of a structural collapse, a warning that the ‘chill vibes’ are approximately one second away from being replaced by a localized apocalypse. I don’t care about the phone-wielding mortals or the ruse anymore. I want to take that clipboard and feed it to him one splinter at a time.
“Malachi, stop,” Eden hisses—and then does the unexpected. She dives her hand right into the front pocket of the hoodie, her fever-warm fingers sliding past my wrist to interlock with mine. The contact sends a bolt of pure, living heat traveling right to my gut. I should pull away. I should be insulted by the restraint. But instead, my fingers curl around hers of their own volition, pinning her small hand against my stomach.
“He’s just a volunteer,” she mutters, using the leverage of our entwined fingers to tug me along. “Keep your mouth shut. And walk.”
She can’t see the roach behind his eyes. She just thinks I’m being a dick to a college kid. But I move, letting her pull me past him, even if I don’t take my eyes off the prick until we’ve put a dozen yards of human filth between us. I can still hear his cheerful, chirping behind us as he stops his next victim.
“Hey! Do you have a minute to talk about the environment?”
My boots strike the pavement with enough force to send jolts up my spine.
I am fucking fuming.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Eden hisses, her voice barely audible over the roar of a passing bus. She’s still clutching my hand inside the pocket, her pace frantic. “We are supposed to be laying low. We are supposed to be invisible. What was all that about? You almost started a fight with a kid asking for donations!”
“I just don’t like to be bothered,” I snap, jaw tight. “And I don’t like being stopped by insects who think their time is more valuable than mine. This entire realm is a logistical nightmare. How do you live like this? Everything is so... loud and it fucking stinks.”
Eden lets out a long, ragged sigh, the kind that says she’s too exhausted to unpack the layers of my ego. She doesn’t let go of my hand, though. If anything, she pulls me closer, navigating me around a cluster of morons.
Mortals think they’re alone here, but the city is crawling with my kind.
There’s another one right there—a hot dog vendor on the corner, his skin a shade too sickly, fingers moving with an insect-like twitch. He’s slathering mustard onto a bun with a grin that I can guarantee promises forty-eight hours of violent, soul-shredding food poisoning. Purely for the sport of it.
There are always a few like him in this realm. Licensed pests. They punch a clock, file their little reports, and go home to whatever damp hole they call a den, thinking they’re important because they made a toddler cry over a ruined meal. It’s pathetic. Back in the Ninth, we have architects of despair—beings who can turn a soul inside out with a whisper. Here, the ‘forces of darkness’ have been reduced to losers in grease-stained aprons, content to peddle intestinal distress to the masses.
I’m surrounded by the dregs of my own kind and the most boring of hers. It’s a match made in a very specific, very boring corner of Hell.
This was supposed to be it—the grand unveiling. I’d spent centuries listening to the travelogues of other entities who bragged about the ‘sensory feast’ of the surface, and enough time on the waiting list to come and see it for myself.
But on my first trip outdoors, I’m being harassed by a clipboard-wielding scavenger in a world that smells like a wet basement. It’s a joke. The architecture is drab, the people are hollow, and the ‘nature’ they’re so worried about is currently represented by a single, dying weed pushing through a crack in the cement.
She stops suddenly, her shoulder brushing against mine as she points toward a storefront with a flickering neon sign.
“There,” she says, her voice trembling with relief. “It’s right there.”
I look up to where a green cross glows against the smoggy sky. This is it. This is the grand temple of mortal healing. After several miles of inhaling the collective exhaust of a dying civilization and nearly committing several counts of homicide, we have arrived at the source of salvation.
Chapter 11
Eden
“Would you hurry up,” Malachi whispers, his breath brushing against my temple.
“I am hurrying,” I breathe back, my boots squeaking on the linoleum, almost drowning out the sounds of the automatic check-outs and the child crying three aisles down.
I reach for the shelves, grabbing with a desperate, shaky efficiency. Antiseptic. Gauze. A box of steri-strips—the heavy-duty ones. Then a tube of Neosporin gets tossed into the basket to cover all my bases. It’s not exactly what I need, but I can’t call a doctor. If I actually showed a professional this cut—they wouldn’t be as forgiving as Piper was—they wouldn’t just give me a prescription; they’d send me somewhere I don’t think I’d ever come back from.
I’m not going down like this—in any way, shape, or form.
