Page 89 of How (Not) To Raise The Dead

She smooths down the lapels of her blazer before giving Chain-Chewer another scratch. “Which is why I am going to fix it for you.”

Hope, hot and bright, flares in my blood, nearly making me dizzy. The bind. The nightmare of being tethered to Malachi. It’s all going to be gone. I can get Vesper. I can go home. I can go back to a life where my biggest problem is paying the electric bill, not dodging demons in Hell.

“You know how to do it?” I ask hesitantly.

“Of course I know how to do it,” she snaps.

My eyes dart between the two of them—the lethal sister and my protective demon—tracking the invisible sparks of violence flying in the air.

Malachi clears his throat, looking very interested in a smudge on the ceiling. “Vee did a stint. Before she went into... administration.”

“A stint?” Veraxia scoffs. “I spent eighty years in the Occult Research Program while you were busy dicking around doing fuck-knows-what.”

I stare at Malachi, pulse throbbing in my ears. “You’re telling me your sister is a literal expert in the one thing that’s upended my life, and you didn't think to mention it?”

“Usually, you don't ask the person trying to put you in a cage for medical advice!” he snaps back.

Veraxia ignores us both and yanks open a desk drawer, pulling out a stack of parchment so thick it lands on the wood with a dust-displacing thud.

“Section 4, Paragraph C of the Soul-Tether Act states that nature abhors a vacuum, and so does magic,” she sighs, wetting a silver finger to flip through the yellowed pages. “There is no such thing as a bind without terms, little mortal. If you didn’t speak the terms aloud, the magic simply bypassed your vocal cords and drafted the contract based on your subconscious intent.”

She stops on a page covered in dense, shifting black script, tapping it with a nail.

“It calcified around the loudest emotion you were feeling at the exact moment of summoning,” she says, looking up at me. “To break the bind, we have to complete the terms. And to know what the terms were, we have to excavate the specific frequency of the desire that fueled the spell.”

A hot wave of nausea lurches through my stomach, instantly coating the back of my tongue with the taste of bile.

Excavate. What the fuck does that mean?

“I... I can just tell you what it was,” I say quickly, my hands sweating against my thighs. “We don’t need to dig for anything. I know what it was. I was sad. I was... I was lonely. I wanted to see Matthew again—my dead boyfriend. There. Solved.”

She looks at me with a flat, dead-eyed stare that makes me want to dissolve into the floorboards.

“When you go to a hospital and tell the doctor you have a fever,” she says slowly, sounding like she’s explaining quantum physics to a toddler, “do they simply take your word for it? Do they scribble a prescription based on your vibes? Or do they shove a thermometer up your ass to verify the data?”

I wince, my face heating up. “I—uh...”

“Exactly,” she clips. “Subjective testimony is useless in a binding of this magnitude. Mortals are fickle, wet, and unreliable observers of their own lives. I need the raw data.” She reshuffles the stack of parchment, banging the edges against the desk to straighten them. “So I’m just going to use standard cranial extraction. I’ll file the requisite authorization forms, obviously—I’m not running a circus here—but once the ink’s dry, we’re going to the Pit.”

Cranial extraction? In the Pit?

The blood drains from my face so fast the room tilts, grey spots dancing in the corners of my vision.

No.

I can’t let them do that. I can’t let them crack my skull open like a walnut and rummage through my memories. Because if they look… if they dig past the surface-level fear and the adrenaline… they’ll find it.

They’ll find the rot I’ve been hiding. And if he sees what’s inside my head—if he sees what I really am—he’ll drag me to the deepest depths of Hell himself, and he’ll make sure they torture me and peel my skin off for everything that I’ve done.

“No,” Malachi growls.

“Excuse me?” Veraxia blinks, pausing with her pen hovering over the inkwell, a single drop of black ink suspended from the nib.

“I said no. You are not taking her to the Pit.” The sound of splintering metal cracks through the room as Malachi stands up, his thighs firing. He moves so fast he takes the furniture with him—the executive chair screeches across the floor before shattering against the back of his legs, wood and leather raining down like confetti until the armrests dangle against his shackled wrists.

The sudden noise startles the Hellhound, and the beast lurches forward with a guttural roar, jaws snapping at her face, but Veraxia doesn't even flinch.

“Oh, shut up, Three-Oh-One,” she hisses at the hound, and the terrifying creature instantly cowers, whining and sliding onto its belly like a kicked puppy.