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She gave a little pleased smile and set the plant to the side. “It will grow back. These plants are far too evolved not to, but the mugwort apparently worked on the newly Inhabited woman you took the sample from. She may not have known what was going on, but it worked.”

“But she still died,” he considered aloud, taking a sharp bite of an apple.

Atta’s shoulders slumped as she chewed on her bottom lip. Jesus, that was distracting.

“The mugwort must not stop the Inhabitation, but slows it down.”

“So we need a way to— What?” He couldn’t help being a teacher to his bones. “What happens in a classic exorcism in Catholicism? The priest uses what to hold the demon?"

“Usually holy water or salt.”

“All right. And then what is used to drive it away? To officially exorcize it?”

Atta was slower to answer this time. “It’s a series of things. That is exactly the train of logic I’ve been following, but they’re not demons. I have some ideas, but I don’t think we’ll know for certain in this case until we have a test subject.”

“And we need to know how to contain it—the faerie—or it could very well just find someone else. That might be what’s happening when the human host dies, the faerie is simply finding a new, suitable host.”

“That makes the most sense.” She looked down at her hands, her dark nail polish chipped. “But why has the hawthorn atrium ecosystem thrived?”

“Perhaps because I gave it the shelter it needed,” he ventured.

Atta stood from the floor, where he always seemed to find her working rather than at a desk or a table. He adored that about her.

“I don’t think that’s it. I think—” She broke off, contemplating. “I think it thrived because it had two hosts. One Inhabited prior to death?—”

Sonder sat up straight. “And one after.”

Atta nodded, looking sombre. He didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t venture where she needed to because those cadavers were his parents, but he also couldn’t be completely honest about them. “Go on,” he encouraged her. “Say what it is you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know what I’m thinking yet, but it’s significant, the pair of them. Don’t you think?”

Sonder nodded and Atta sat back down, talking about how plants thrive and what they need from the soil. After a while, he missed everything she said because, with the glow in her eyes from the fire, the wine suppressing his inhibitions, andher—Ariatne Morrow—sitting cross-legged on the floor of the room he’d worked, laughed, wept,livedin his entire life in a jumper of his she’d found on his desk chair, speaking of everything with such passion and brilliance, he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would sacrifice anything,everythingfor her.

“Are you even listening to me?” he finally heard her say sharply. She popped a cube of cheese in her mouth. “Are you drunk?”

“Only on you.” The words were out before he could stop them.

She pouted, her brows furrowed with skepticism. “Go to bed, Murdoch.”

Atta

“Maybe this was a bad idea.”

A terrible, horrible, foolish idea.

Atta and Sonder stood looking up at a run-down apartment building with cracked walls and a door lilting off its hinges. Inside flat C6 was a woman in her mid-forties. Sonder’s sources said she was fine one day, then not the next, and the deterioration had been swift after that.

Truth be told, neither of them was certain what they would face. They weren’t sure anything they’d done to protect themselves, or the supplies they’d brought with them would work. It was highly likely they’d be laughed out of the flat and have to go into hiding somewhere off the Amalfi Coast. Actually, that didn’t sound half-bad. Sonder in only swim trunks, lying on the beach, sipping cocktails.

Stop it.

“This isn’t a bad idea,” he reassured her. “We do what academics do. We go in there, test our theories, and we learn. There is no failure here today, no matter the outcome. Understood?”

“Yes, Professor Murdoch,” she droned in her most irreverent tone.

“You might want to watch that smart mouth, Miss Morrow.”

Heat licked up her neck, despite that it was hardly the appropriate time for such things. “Or what?”