While Diane and Raphael chatted about the joys of parenting teenagers, I went to the kitchen with the flowers, staring at those thinly veined buds as my throat tightened. I opened a cabinet to pull out a plastic vase, and when I closed it, Malachi was standing beside me.

“You don’t like them?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I love them. It’s just … no one’s ever given me flowers before.” I turned my back, rolling the delicate stems between my fingers. It was one of those cheap grocery-store bouquets. Tegan, the new queen bee of Warwick High School since Nadia’s death, would have scoffed at the already-wilting necks, the scraggly little petals. But to me …

Malachi’s fingers skimmed along my shoulder. “I have never given a girl flowers before.” He laughed quietly. “I hadn’t actually seen a flower up close in a long time.”

He’d spent the last several decades in a walled city of cement and steel and slime, where the only things that grew were the festering wishes of the dead, sorrowful people trapped there. Because it was always dusk or midnight, never day, nothing green or lush or real could grow. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Something had grown between us.

I turned back to him and reached for his hand. I wasn’t used to this yet, this permission to touch. His skin was so warm. Real. Here.

“Unbelievable,” I whispered.

He grinned and pulled me toward him, but at that exact moment Diane entered the kitchen. Malachi let go of me and stepped back, clearing his throat.

“I hope you like pasta,” she said to him. Her tone was light, but she shot him a look. He’d been warned.

“I suspect I will love anything you cook,” he replied. I had no doubt that was true. Malachi hadn’t eaten a decent meal since well before his death, sometime in the early 1940s.

Malachi and I set the table while Raphael poured us each a glass of lemonade. Dinner had been Diane’s idea. She had insisted on meeting both Malachi and his “people” before she would allow me to go out with him. She kept narrowing her eyes, like she was wondering if he’d come armed. I was wondering the same thing. And while I’d seen Malachi kill Mazikin with deadly accuracy and powerful grace, I’d rarely seen him do anything as mundane as setting forks on a table. By the way he watched his own hands and carefully placed each piece of cutlery, he was probably thinking about it as well. I was dying to ask him what was going on inside his head, to finally get to know the real him better. Maybe there would be time to do that now that we were here, on Earth, and not trapped in hell.