by May Dawson
I feel dirty, sticky with blood and cum, with my knees against the bruising stone floor and his cock buried deep inside me.
But I don’t hate that feeling.
I feel more alive than I have in two years, even though I’m trapped in this hellhole.
“It’s all right, Eden,” he murmurs into my ear. “I’ve got you. I’ll watch over you tonight.”
“You might try to kill me again,” I whisper.
It’s the conversation we need to have, even though maybe now is the wrong time. He shifts, his fingers pressing against my naked lower back as he eases me off his cock.
I straddle his lap, the two of us still intimately close, but not quite as close anymore. I don’t know if I can bear to look into Ever’s eyes, his cum still trickling down my thigh, and assess whether or not he once stood by as the Lords tried to beat me to death.
“I know how smart you are,” he says, tracing a finger across my jaw. “So how can you be so stupid?”
“I’ve never been my best when it comes to you, Ever.”
“Oh, I beg to disagree.” His fingers skim my skin, raising sparks every place he touches. His eyes are very intent on my face. “At least, you’ve always brought the best out in me.”
“Maybe there wasn’t much best to draw out.”
His lips twist. “Maybe.”
His fingers dip down my throat, trace my shoulder. Even though I’m still sensitive from the powerful orgasm that rocked my body, my core tenses with desire at his touch.
How can I want him, and want to hate him?
“I think Richmond sent us away because he knew we’d fight for you and Elliot,” he tells me. “I’ve imagined the scene that played out once we left, a thousand times. I should’ve realized something was up.”
I press my fingertips to the wound on my chest, which at least has clotted again. “He was my ghost that did this to me. The last body.”
“What do you mean, the last body?” His gaze sharpens on mine.
What the hell is wrong with me? Am I that punchy on endorphins from sex that I just babbled my biggest secret to this boy I used to love?
That’s me. Eden Greyson, total badass, big mouth post-coitus.
“I wonder if you’d have been able to see him too,” I muse. “Is he just a figment of my imagination?”
“Did you imagine that?” He touches his thumb just over the gouges. “Or did you maybe do it to yourself?”
I give him a scandalized look.
“Right, neither of us would ever punish ourselves for surviving,” he says, with a bitter edge in his laughter. “That would be stupid.”
“The Sent agents who came to see me in the hospital,” I say carefully, not mentioning that the two of them are our instructors, not yet, “they thought you and Julian and Lincoln were there.”
“Sure,” he says. “I bet they thought that then. But one of the many things we’re here being punished for happened that day.”
“Do tell.”
He offers me a quirked eyebrow that tells me he hasn’t forgotten the last of the bodies comment, but he continues. “One of the many things we were sentenced for was the murder of Hector Cortez.”
I frown. “The arms dealer we worked with sometimes.”
“Yeah, he wasn’t just manufacturing explosives and running guns.” He rakes his hand through his hair and heaves a sigh. “He was running people, too.”
“That day, we got there early. There were… kids… waiting. When Linc realized what he was doing,” he goes on, “he went full-angel. You know, scary Linc.”
“He’s always scary.” But I know exactly what he means. Linc’s wings unfurling, shredding clothes—and sometimes people who are unlucky enough to be standing too close. His body levitating off the ground. Gold eyes blazing.
“He’d be so touched to hear you say that,” he murmurs, with a touch of his usual Ever humor.
“Anyway, it turned into a bloodbath,” he adds, his voice dark. He shakes his head. “We fucked up that day. Richmond would have been pissed. If you and Elliot had been with us, we would’ve just run. Just go start a new life, like we always talked about.”
“You never meant that.”
His gaze locks on mine. “You’re being stupid again, smart girl.”
“Then why didn’t we do it?” I’d had doubt about the Lords. Ever and I used to whisper about them at night. Ever used to fantasize about how we could escape, but I thought his words were idle talk, not an invitation.
“Because I thought maybe we were all too far gone to ever make it out,” he confesses. “And Elliot… I thought Elliot was a true believer.”
“We were all so stupid,” I say, my voice heavy with bitterness.
“Now, now,” a familiar voice says from the door. “You’ll be a happier person if you learn to forgive, Edie. Even yourself.”
No one’s called me that in years.
I look up to find Elliot leaning against the door to the cell, his arms crossed over his chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I’ve seen my brother’s swollen, battered unseeing face in my head so many times that I barely recognize him restored and whole.
I grab Ever’s hand without realizing what I’m doing. I can’t tear my gaze away from Elliot as I ask Ever, “Do you see him too?”
“I do,” he says.
Elliot holds his arms out. “It’s really me, sis. At least for the night.”
“Eden,” Ever says urgently. “Don’t forget why you’re here. Don’t forget he’s your punishment.”
I jerk my head in a nod, because his warning makes sense. And yet, if this is really my brother’s ghost, or an incarnation of my brother as I remember him, he would never hurt me.
Still, there’s the possibility he’s something else, some kind of monster that speaks out of my memories and my emotions, but holds a deeper malevolent sensibility.
“I’ll be careful,” I promise Ever as I rise to my feet. Ever jumps up behind me, throwing his blazer over my shoulders.
Elliot shakes his head. “I tried so hard to avoid seeing you two, you know, in life. And it was hard, because you two never stopped touching each other. And here I am, dead, and still can’t escape it.”
“It’s you,” I say senselessly as I cross the distance between us. I reach my hands out, feeling for him, but my hands pass right through. I frown. “But I thought…”
“We can only turn temporal briefly,” he tells me.
“What are you? A ghost?”
His lips turn up at one corner. “I’m a… manifestation. I’m part of you.”
He leans toward me. “Do you really think I’d wander the earth forever, Eden? I don’t have the attention span for that. I’m in Heaven.”
“Then why would I hurt myself?”
“The ‘ghosts’,” he makes air quotes, “give you what you feel you really deserve.”
I shake my head. “That doesn’t make sense. I don’t feel any guilt for killing Richmond.”
Ever doesn’t look surprised by this confession.
“You might not feel guilt,” Elliot says, “but deep down, you know that if you spill enough blood, eventually you’ll drown in it.”
His gaze is amused, not concerned. “And you’ve spilled a lot of blood, haven’t you, sis?”
This really isn’t my brother.
I never thought about how Elliot would feel before. But now I know. Elliot would have been afraid for me if he really thought all that killing had changed me. The realization shakes me. I’ve been trying to get revenge for Elliot, and yet he wouldn’t have wanted this for me.
But still, maybe this illusion can unlock the answers buried deep in my damaged brain.
“Can you tell me about the day you were killed?”
“Let’s not obsess over such ugly things,” he chides me gently. He nods past me to Ever. “Has he put together yet that you intended to kill him?”
Everett doesn’t respond, but he folds his arms across his chest, s
haking his head slightly. He suspected I might want to hurt him, but I don’t think he realized I’d gone quite that far.
“Elliot—” I begin, but apparently my manifestation won’t shut up.
“She killed all the rest of them, you know,” Elliot tells Ever, locking eyes with him. “James, who taught you to handle explosives. Jack and Gloria, the husband-and-wife team. You know they had a baby? Eden didn’t realize that until after she’d axed the mama and the papa. Then she had to figure out what to do with the kid.”
God, that terror-stricken moment as I stared at a sobbing infant I’d just orphaned is one of the worst of my many dark memories.
Now I wonder if Jack and Gloria had left the Lords behind them when they started a family.
I’d braided her hair for their wedding. She’d watched them beat Elliot to death. Does anyone deserve to move on from that?
I don’t know the answer.
But I do know that I couldn’t just leave that baby crying in a blood-splattered house and wait for someone to find the bodies. I’d had to pick up this baby and carry her, dropping her off at someone’s doorstep and ding-dong-ditching a wailing infant. I wasn’t sure who had been more alarmed, the nice elderly woman who opened the door or the baby I’d just orphaned. Then I’d run.
“Norris, who you used to play Chess with, remember him?” Elliot mused to Ever.
“I’m not the one who played Chess with Norris,” Ever said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “And I don’t know if you remember this, Eden, but you need to—Jack and Gloria were true believers. Terrible people. You were scared of how far they were willing to go, even while you were loyal to the Lords.”
I jerk my head in a nod, but those memories feel blurry compared to the arc of my knife into Gloria’s chest.
“They blew up a bus with kids on it after we all split up,” Ever says. “Did you happen to see that in the news? They were paid to get rid of a witness.”
“Now there’s no one left from the Lords.” Elliot looks as if something has just occurred to him. “Except for the three of you.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Ever says drily. “I shouldn’t sleep too deeply around Eden.”
He says it as if it’s a joke, but I have a feeling he means it.
But he still rests his hand on my shoulder as he stares down Elliot, then looks at me. “Eden, when I was in the detention center before, I thought I saw a ghost at one point. But it couldn’t touch the world. I think there’s something else going on in here.”
“What?” I demand.
“I don’t think this is just your wayward psyche torturing you,” he tells me. “I think the detention center’s been reset to kill you.”
My eyes widen. “That doesn’t make sense. Who would want me dead?”
“Anyone connected to the Lords?” he suggests. “Anyone connected to someone the Lords killed, for that matter?”
That’s a pretty big suspect pool.
I frown. “Could it be Lincoln and Julian?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head.
“You don’t think they’d hurt me? I thought you guys hated each other now.”
“Well, yes,” he says bluntly. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know them. They’re a pair of fucked-up psychopaths, but they wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Maybe there are still Lords here. At school.”
“Now you’re thinking.” Elliot’s voice surprises us both into looking at him, as he presses a finger to the side of his head. “Deep down, you both know it’s not that simple, right? Some of the Lords are gone. But there are still more, and they could use killing.”
I raise my hands. “I’m out of that business.”
“I don’t think you get a choice, Edie,” Elliot says, with laughter in his voice. “They die, or you do.”
He tilts his head to one side. “Or maybe it’s just… you die. Tonight. I guess we’ll see.”
“Elliot,” I say, and there’s a pleading edge in my voice that shocks me. I know he’s not even real.
He’s already drifting into smoke.
I brace myself, ready for him to try to hurt me like Richmond did when he vanished.
But all he says is, “Even on the other side, you know I love you, right, Edie?”
Then he falls into nothing, and his smoke curls up through the ceiling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Julian
THE NEXT MORNING, Lincoln and I wander toward the detention center without admitting our mission to each other. Then I try to make conversation with him, and he stands there like a lump, as usual.
One of the guards side-eyes us as he walks past for shift change, but he leaves us alone. It’s not like there’s a rule against loitering outside the detention center, but the rules in this hell-hole feel ever-shifting sometimes.
That same guard walks toward us a few minutes later. “Hey, Nephilim,” he barks. “Your friends need your help.”
Lincoln’s brows arch in an insolent question. We aren’t all friends, after all. But the two of us head toward the door of the detention center.
Just walking toward that door makes my chest tighten.
“They had a rough night,” the guard says when we walk into the cell. “Get them out of here.”
Everett and Eden are slumped together on the concrete slab as if they’re holding each other up. Both of them look like they’ve been beaten half to death. Eden’s pale skin is stained with blood, and she wears Everett’s blazer buttoned, exposing her cleavage underneath. Everett has his arm around her protectively, but he doesn’t look any better, his swollen, beaten face resting against her hair.
“Morning, boys,” Eden says thinly, her voice husky as if her vocal cords are injured.
“What the hell did they do to you?” I ask, shocked.
The guard was almost to the door, but his head whips around. “What?”
“Sorry, sir,” Lincoln says. “He’s just worried about our friends. They sure look like they got beat up bad during their fights yesterday.”
Those conciliatory words are more than I usually hear Lincoln string together, and he never uses that polite, passive tone, which sounds odd in his rough voice.
As the guard nods and moves on, Lincoln gives me a look. “Let’s get our friends out of here.”
Right. And let’s not get taken into detention ourselves.
Still, my hands are shaking, I’m so livid with rage, as I help Eden up. She tries to smile at me, and her lip splits again and she winces. I help her toward the door.
“Get up,” Lincoln tells Everett, his voice hard and unyielding. Everett pushes Lincoln’s offered hand away.
I turn back with a sigh. “If you two are going to be weird, I can help Ever.”
“You all need to get over it,” Eden says, her voice coming out a whisper but no less commanding. “I want to know what happened between the three of you.”
“Nothing,” Lincoln grumbles, and she gives him a look that might even wither an angel.
Ever presses his hand against the wall for balance as he rises to his feet, and he rocks briefly before he trusts himself enough to lurch away from the wall. He leaves a blue-stained handprint where he supported himself. He winces, and I have a feeling there’s something broken in his leg.
“Linc,” I warn.
Lincoln growls—at either no one in particular, or at all of us—and then sweeps Ever off the ground and over his shoulder. Ever protests, but he doesn’t fight Linc; deep down, he must know he needs the help.
The four of us half-stagger out of the detention center. It’s still early, and there aren’t many out to see our sad parade as I help Eden limp toward the house and Lincoln carries Ever behind us.
Eden’s skin feels cool to the touch where my hand rests just above the waistband of her blood-stained skirt, and I can feel the pulse of her blood through her body. I ache with the desire to heal her and take the pain away, and above that is the constant hum of rage.
Someone hurt her, and I
really want to hurt them.
The four of us make it down the hallway in the Nephilim house, spotted by just one wide-eyed kid, and we head into the male shower room. I help Eden onto one of the benches, then check the door, locking it. I would pity any fool who wandered in here when Linc is in this mood of seething rage.
“How bad is it?” Lincoln growls as he lowers Ever to the bench—being careful of Ever, almost tender, no matter how he barks.
“That damned Break,” Eden murmurs through bloodied lips.
Lincoln probes Everett’s wounded leg, and Everett lets out a bark of pain. “Get off me,” he says. “I’ll heal.”
“Eventually,” Linc says. “What happened?”
“I think the detention center was set on kill in Eden’s cell,” Everett says.
“All night long, these…ghosts…came at us,” Eden says.
“What kind of ghosts?” Lincoln demands.
Ever glances at Eden, and I can feel the secrets between them, binding them. Linc must too, because rage etches itself across his handsome features.
“You two fucking idiots are going to get yourselves killed.” Linc’s tone is even harsher, more demanding, than usual. He looks between Eden and Everett with a frown.
It’s painful to watch. He’s scared for the two of them, but all he knows how to do is get angry. It’s leaking out at them because he doesn’t know any other way.
“I think I’d already be dead if Ever hadn’t been there,” Eden admits. There’s bitterness in her tone; she hates to admit it. “The ghosts could hurt me. Hurt us. And they did. It took both of us to fight them off.”
“Luckily, each ghost only had a minute or so of temporality.” Ever leans against the wall, his face exhausted. “Unfortunately, they also had supernatural strength and we never knew when they were going to stop talking and try to kill Eden.”
I rest my hand on Linc’s shoulder, because I can tell he has more harsh words for them otherwise. “We need to get you two cleaned up. Get you into bed to heal. Then it’s time for a reckoning. No more secrets.”