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She’s sobbing desperately. “It hurts, please, I can’t⁠—”

“Stop acting like an infant and do as you’re fucking told,” I sneer, leaning down until my face is an inch from hers.

I twist the crank, and the sickening pop of steel breaching the outer table of the skull vibrates up my arm so hard that I nearly retch.

“Malachi!” she screams, her voice shredding, body trying to thrash against the restraints.

“Stop fighting the recall!” I bark through clenched teeth, leaning my weight over her as hot, angry tears spill over my lashes, tracking silently down my face, burning lines of guilt into my silver skin. They splash onto her forehead, mingling with the blood beading around the needles—a silent, weeping apology for every cruel command leaving my mouth.

“You are making it harder! Yield to the image! Give it to me, now! Stop being weak!”

The wall of monitors flickers. The white static screams, distorts, and then—the image coalesces. High definition. Her living room. The shitty mortal apartment. Her ridiculous little ritual setup. A thunderstorm roiling through the windows. Right in first person view.

A surge of twisted, fierce pride rushes through my chest.

Good girl.

She fucking did it.

My hand leaves the crank and crushes hers, gripping her delicate fingers tight enough to bruise—anchoring her to me, to the present, to the physical reality of my skin against hers as the machine drags her mind down into the dark.

Veraxia snaps to attention. Her boredom vanishes instantly, replaced by the sharp, predatory focus, her eyes darting across the monitors.

I lean down, my mouth brushing the shell of Eden’s ear.

“You did so well,” I breathe, my thumb rubbing furiously over her knuckles. “I’m so fucking proud of you, baby girl. Now just breathe through the memory. Don’t fight the current. Let us see what we need to see so we can get this done.”

On the screens, the memory stabilizes. The living room. The candles. The salt. It’s perfect high-definition recall. Veraxia hums, tapping her quill against the emotional readout pulsing in multicolored lines at the bottom of the screen.

Eden whimpers, her body seizing on the slab as the image of her living room on the monitor shudders. The memory is destabilizing, pixels tearing apart and bleeding into one another, morphing into something dark.

“Sadness... and loneliness? You ‘just wanted to see him?’” Veraxia steps closer to the monitors, the static reflecting in her golden irises. She taps a manicured fingernail against a spike on the graph—a line that is shooting up so fast it’s nearly off the chart. “That’s what you said, wasn’t it, Meat-Sack?”

“Yes,” Eden chokes out through her pain and fear as the slamming sound of rain hammers against the monitors, the image distorting into something completely different.

“Grief is passive. Grief is blue,” Veraxia says softly, tracing the line. “This isn’t sadness…”

Chapter 34

Eden

ONE YEAR AGO

The windshield wipers are fighting a losing war against the deluge, screeching across the glass with a rhythm that claws directly into the migraine throbbing behind my eyes. Outside, the world has dissolved into a blurry, greyscale smear. But inside, the cabin is a suffocating trap of damp wool, red wine, and the cloying, chemical rot of a vanilla air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.

“Everyone loved the dip you made, babe,” Matthew says over the low hum of the radio and the tapping of his fingernails against the passenger window. I catch sight of him in my peripheral vision, a perfectly curated smile playing on his lips. “Seriously. Janice actually asked for the recipe. You were the star of the night. You really charmed them.”

My stomach gives a watery lurch, bile climbing the back of my throat like a rising tide, because I know how that smile always ends. I shift my grip on the wheel, casually—carefully—tugging the left sleeve of my sweater down, creating a flimsy wool barrier over the ugly, purple-black bloom on my wrist from last Tuesday.

“Thank you,” I say politely, stretching my lips into something that’s more like a grimace frozen in rigor mortis than an actual smile.

Don’t mess up. Just get us home. Don’t let the mask slip. Do not give him a reason.

“I’m serious,” he continues. He shifts in his seat, turning his body toward me. “You were magnetic tonight. Did you see the way your sister was looking at you? Pure jealousy. She knows she can’t compete.”

He reaches out, his hand drifting from the window to rest heavy and hot on the nape of my neck, fingers toying with the fine hairs there.

“It makes me look good, having you on my arm,” he murmurs, his thumb tracing the tension. “My beautiful, perfect trophy. You made me very proud tonight, babe. We’re quite the team, aren’t we?”