by May Dawson
I throw my best right hook at Linc, slamming my fist across his jaw so hard that the skin on my knuckles bursts open.
Julian, the adorable psycho, bursts out laughing, even though someone’s blood is freckled across his face.
Lincoln starts for me, fury in his eyes, but Julian grabs his arm. I’m not sure if he’s saving me from Linc’s considerable fury or saving him, because the guard is already running toward us, pulling out his baton and barking orders.
I turn my back to the guard as I raise my hands in the air, so he can’t see me grin.
Julian grins back at me, and at first, I think it’s just his psycho drama-loving reaction, but when his eyes meet mine, there’s genuine warmth.
It’s a nice thing to see right before the baton busts across my shoulders, dropping me to my knees.
“This place is hopping tonight,” the school psychologist, Cora, says as she sits on the edge of the table in her office. Her skirt hikes a little higher up her thighs as she crosses her legs.
Everyone but me in this school is a pervert.
Ha, just kidding. I’m one too.
“Are you of sound mind, Everett?” she asks a bit wearily.
“More or less.”
“That’s all I need to hear,” she says, hopping down from the table. “You and I have already talked quite a bit before.”
“Have a hot date?” I ask, tilting the chair back on its two rear legs.
A faint rueful smile touches her lips. “Better than yours. When are you going to start making better choices, Everett?”
“Some people need to be punched in the face,” I said. “I can’t help answering the call of destiny.”
“You’d better learn to help it,” she chides me gently. “I hope your night’s not too rough, Everett.”
“I think I’ll be okay,” I say.
She reaches out and tucks a little pill in a baggie into my blazer’s breast pocket. “In case it gets to be too much to bear, you might find that takes the edge off.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“Just a painkiller.” She pats my shoulder as she heads back. “Like Tylenol or Motrin, basically.”
Sure. From the rumors I’ve heard, I don’t trust Cora’s pills. I’ve heard she experiments on students.
“Thanks,” I tell her.
From there, it’s just a matter of sweet-talking my way into Eden’s cell with her.
Worst date ever.
Chapter Seventeen
Eden
At first, I think being sentenced to the detention center won’t be too different from hiding in my desolate room. I don’t have my book to read, and I’ll miss the small odd comfort of knowing that Julian sleeps in the room on one side of me and Ever on the other—even though I don’t want to talk to either. But I don’t need those little comforts.
I’m bored and alone in the detention center. That’s familiar enough.
The guard leads me past one detention building. The door has a barred window, but I can’t get much of a glimpse of what’s inside. I crane my head to see.
“Don’t worry, your curiosity is about to be satisfied,” the guard tells me. He opens a door and pushes me inside, before slamming it behind me.
I’m in a chilly room with a stone floor and stone walls. It feels damp in here, and I’m not sure why. There’s no window, and there’s a deep gloom in the room, with no light except for what trickles through the hall. For a few seconds, I stand there blinking, my eyes adjusting to the dim light. Like most angels, I can see well in the darkness; it just depresses me to spend too long without sunlight.
There’s a toilet-and-sink combo in one corner of the room and a questionable-looking mattress on a stone slab in the corner. I don’t like the look of that mattress, so I sit down on the floor instead, my back against the cold, hard wall. It’s only twenty-four hours.
Well, I’d wanted time to think. I can’t make sense of Ever and Julian and Lincoln. I don’t understand our shared past, and I have to in order to make sense of the present.
Now I have time to think.
Or so I believe, until the ghosts show up.
One second, I’m alone, staring at my fists as they rest on my kneecaps. I’ve skinned the first two knuckles on each hand, and they’ve scabbed over. I still heal faster than a human, but with Break I notice things about my body that I never did before. Not just the scabs, but how slender my fingers are. It seems strange such delicate hands could do so much damage.
There’s a flicker of motion by the door, and I look up to find Richmond watching me.
I scramble to my feet, even though I know he’s not real. There’s a sudden press of dread at the back of my throat, and I have to swallow hard.
“It’s been too long, little girl,” he says. “We never got to finish our conversation.”
“It wasn’t much of a conversation.” He’s a ghost, he can’t hurt me. “I remember a lot of oh please, oh don’t hurt me…”
“You left me for last,” he says. “Why’s that?”
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself. There’s nothing special about you, Richmond.”
And he was never supposed to be last. I’d saved Ever, Julian, and Linc for the end because I knew it would be hard to reach them in here.
Where does this ghost come from? Is he a real ghost? Is he manifested from my subconscious fears? Or is he some kind of informant for the school used to draw information out of us? Gabriel suspected I killed Richmond. Maybe Gabriel played a part in designing my punishment in order to investigate the truth.
But whether this vision of Richmond is a ghost or a shade of my memory, he has the answer to my questions. Deep down, I must know the truth of what happened that day with Elliot. I just can’t remember it.
“I’ve got some questions for you,” I say. “As long as you’re going to show up where you’re not wanted.”
He glances around the cold, dripping stone room. “You’ve really gotten yourself into a pickle again, haven’t you, Eden?”
“It’s really hard to believe you led a team of superpowered gangsters when you say things like a pickle.”
“We weren’t gangsters.” He scoffs as if I’m being stupid. “We all believed in our mission. We were idealists. Visionaries. Activists.”
“Murderers,” I add to the list. “Terrorists. Arms dealers. Drug runners. Thieves.”
He shrugs. “Revolution is expensive.”
“It sure was,” I remember Elliot’s face, swollen and broken. Gabriel had tried to show me a photo of his corpse to identify him, but I’d insisted on seeing his body. Gabriel and Kinley had taken me down to the morgue. I’d touched my brother’s face with trembling fingers.
Elliot was just one of the costs of their failed revolution.
My revolution. I was a part of it. I can’t forget that, no matter how much I wish I could.
“You know humans just make a mess of their own affairs,” Richmond says. “Look at the world around you, Eden. You know it’s true. Endless wars. Starvation. Depravity. The more they get, the worse they become. They could fix so much, and yet they choose not to. They walk with iPhones in their hands past the homeless. The world is connected, and children are still starving. They have the capacity to fix it all, and they don’t give a damn.”
His lips curl up at one corner. “We could make them give a damn. They need the help, Eden.”
“They’re a mess,” I admit. “But we’re no better.”
“Remember what your grandfather did to you,” he says softly. “How would the humans have made you pay for that?”
I flash back to the creak of the floorboard right outside my childhood bedroom, how I stayed up late listening for it. He used to stand right outside my bedroom door, and I was sure I could hear him breathing in the quiet of the house. He didn’t try to come in at first. He’d just stand there and breathe while I clutched the covers, my heart racing, my lips moving in silent prayer.
Spoiler alert: you’d think Nephilim would be cl
oser to Heaven, but Heaven ignores our prayers too.
“I’m pretty sure the humans would say I could’ve done something else besides killing him,” I say with a smile. “So is this the terrible punishment that the detention center has for me? I’ve got to listen to you talk all night?”
“I don’t want to talk to you, Eden,” he says, stepping toward me.
Somehow, the stone creaks under his foot. My heart is suddenly racing, and I shift into a fighting position, ready for anything.
He laughs as he starts to disintegrate into smoke, flowing up toward the ceiling.
And then abruptly, he rematerializes, this time right beside me. His hand flashes out toward my chest, and his fingers sink through my skin. I let out a scream as his fingers push inside my chest. He’s trying to rip out my heart, the same way I ripped out his.
I push him away, his fingers tearing out of my flesh, and he laughs again as he falls away to nothing.
I collapse to the floor, my legs shaking beneath me, and my hand presses over my bloodied chest. Quickly, I pull off my blazer, then my shirt, and press the blue-stained fabric over the wound, staunching it. They are shallow wounds, at least, four fingertip cuts across my left breast, a thumb-sized gouge above my breastbone.
But those wounds leave me gasping.
I won’t be able to sleep tonight. I’m sure there will be other ghosts, or Richmond will come back. Now I know that there are nineteen ghosts that might visit me, all of whom will try to take their pound of flesh, just like I did with them.
What if Elliot comes to see me?
Would he even be real? Or would he just be a creation of my own brain?
The thought makes my heart race. I want to see Elliot again so badly.
But I don’t understand this place. I should’ve asked more questions. I should’ve sat Everett down and said, “Tell me everything.”
I wish I could see him right now.
Then the door bursts open.
Ever strolls in, his hands in his pockets. “Thank you,” he says politely to the guard, right before the door closes again with far less dramatic flair than when I was shoved in here.
“Hello, Eden,” he says, looking as if he owns the place, like Ever always does. “I worried you’d miss me.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ever
Eden’s face is pale, and she holds a blue-blood-soaked shirt balled up against her shoulder. The sight makes rage rush through me.
“Who hurt you?” I demand, kneeling beside her. “Did Mia and Vanessa do this?”
She smiles thinly. “No, I was visited by a ghost.”
“Doesn’t seem like much of a ghost.” I push her hands away and lift the bloodied shirt so I can see how bad the damage is. There are five gouges trickling blood steadily from across her left breast, running down her taut abs and into the waistband of her black skirt.
“What are you doing in here?” she demands. She shoves my hands away in turn, frowning at me. “Are you even real?”
“Yes, I’m real,” I say.
“The other figment of my imagination could touch me,” she points out. “Obviously. Are they real ghosts or just some kind of magic from my psyche?”
“No one knows for sure,” I say, “but everyone has different experiences in detention. A lot of us believe that the witches work with Cora to design our own special customized hell.”
She nods. “She seemed too sweet to be real.”
Typical jaded Eden.
“I still don’t know you’re real,” she adds. “How did you end up in here?”
“I punched Lincoln in the face.”
She nods consideringly. “I mean, that sounds like you.”
“Eden, I’m not a ghost. You know that.”
Her lips quirk at one corner. “You were a ghost in my head for a long time, Ever.”
What the hell does that mean? I stare at her, not sure if I want to know the answer or not.
“Would the ghost in your head do this?” I demand. “Because I think you’ve been fantasizing about killing me, not kissing me.”
I grab her chin in my hand and tilt her face up to mine. As my lips cover hers, her eyes widen and she breathes in quickly through her nose. Eden is unflappable, but I’ve managed to shock her.
Then her lips soften under mine. Her mouth is still sweet, no matter how barbed her tongue. I tease my tongue against her upper lip, and her lips part, welcoming me in. My tongue glides inside her mouth and meets hers, twisting and dancing.
I pull back slowly, press one last kiss to her lips more tenderly, before I raise an eyebrow. “You hate me now. If I was a figment of your imagination, why would I kiss you?”
“Do you really think it’s that binary for me? Either I want to kiss you or I want to kill you? Maybe sometimes, I want to do both, Ever.”
The confession that she’s thought about killing me has my heart racing. For some reason, it’s not that big a turn-off. I always want Eden.
“You’re the biggest psychopath of all of us,” I tell her.
“Maybe,” she admits, and then she leans forward and kisses me again.
Her lips are demanding, claiming. She’s always had a dominant, possessive side. I cup her jaw, taking control back from her, slowing down the pace of our kisses. The two of us war for control, teasing each other. Her hands glide up my chest, raising sparks in their wake until she grips my shoulders.
I break away first. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, looking at her wounds. They’re still raw and tender, but they’ve finally stopped bleeding.
“Really?” She asks behind me as I rise and move to the sink. “Because the question of just how much you’d be willing to hurt me is the most important one of my life.”
I can almost feel her regret once she admits that. She doesn’t want me to know how important I am to her.
It’s mutual, though.
I pull off my shirt and wet it at the sink. When I turn back, there’s something in her gaze like desire, but the next second, her eyes are guarded. Shuttered. Like they always are to me. That damn smile writes itself across her face, the blank, pretty expression that keeps me at a distance.
“When you look at me like that, I want to slap that look right off your face,” I mutter, which is too honest.
The smile dims, her eyebrows arching. Am I the worst fucking human being in the world that I like her better that way—her unhappiness on the surface, authentic, instead of always putting on a show?
“Have you ever slapped me before, Ever?” she asks, her voice dark.
I press the shirt over the wounds on her shoulder, cleansing the blood away. “You would know. You don’t have amnesia about our entire time together, do you?”
“Julian ratted me out about that.” She shakes her head. “I thought you guys didn’t talk anymore.”
I scoff. “Lincoln doesn’t talk. Julian talks too much. Same as usual.”
I cleanse the blood from her pale skin, which almost seems to glow in the dim light. She’s so beautiful, watching me with those lidded, guarded eyes as I wipe away the blood from her narrow, athletic shoulders, from her lean, taut abs.
Her sports bra is soaked with blood. She leans forward, as if she realizes that too, then grits her teeth with pain as she manages to pull the bra off. Her breasts are small but perfect, and I wipe away the blood carefully from the swell of her breast, from inside her cleavage, across her nipple. As she bites her lower lip, I wonder what goes on in her head.
“I thought maybe one of my ghosts would tell me what’s locked away in my memories,” she whispered. “I thought maybe one of them could tell me that I can trust you.”
“Then I’m sorry all you’ve got is me,” I say.
I’ll never promise her she can trust me. My words won’t mean anything to her.
She leans forward and brushes her lips against mine.
I kiss her back, the two of us trading kisses until she finally straddles my lap in one quick motion. Her hair brushes
over my shoulders as her lips sear to mine.
I can barely pull myself away. I want her so badly, but not like this, not now. I try to pull away, but her demanding lips won’t leave mine. I twine my hand in her hair and then tug her head back away from mine.
“Do you really want to do this now?” I demand, her glittering gaze meeting mine. “You don’t trust me.”
“I don’t even like you,” she corrects.
“You’re a fucking liar,” I tell her. She and I have never been able to quit each other.
“But you’re my ghost,” she continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “And I want you now. One last time.”
One last time, sure.
“You’re broken,” I tell her, and I kiss her anyway.
“And maybe you’re the one who broke me,” she murmurs, right before she presses her lips against my jaw. The two of us kiss as she works my belt buckle, my fly down.
When I slide my thumb between her taut abs and the waistband of her underwear, her breath gives. It’s the most real thing I’ve heard from her; everything that comes out of her mouth is another shade of lie, and her face is always a mask, but for a moment, I had the real Eden.
I yank her underwear urgently down her thighs. Her skin is cool because it’s so cold in here, her muscles lean. I run my fingertips across the back of her thighs and up the curves of her ass.
“I want you,” she says, and so she takes me, gripping my cock in her hand. She brushes me against her clit, circling me through her sudden wet heat, and I almost groan at how good she feels. My cock twitches in her grip, responding to her touch.
She rises up on her knees, a mischievous smile across her lips, and then guides me in. Her lips part in surprise as she pushes herself down all the way on my cock until her thighs meet mine. I feel my cock stretching her, like there’s been no one else for her for these past two years, and the idea makes my heart race with possession and pride all at one time. She feels so good, so tight.
Her pussy feels like coming home. But it’s her shining eyes that I could lose myself in.
