Azrael
Ihad spent five hundred and thirty seven years mastering self control.
I knew what it felt like to hold a ward line steady through an earthquake. I knew how to maintain a containment seal through a demonic incursion that lasted eleven days without sleep. I had once talked a lesser demon back through a rift using nothing but patience.
Control was not something I had ever struggled with.
Then Lila Hart had bought the house across the street from me and I wanted to touch every fucking inch of her body.
Wind my finger through her French braid…
Now every morning started the same way. I would be on my porch with my coffee and my book, telling myself I was monitoring the Hellgate's energy signature.
It seem strongest in the early hours when the boundary between realms was thinnest. That was the reason I was outside.
That was the reason my attention kept drifting across the street to where she stood on her porch in an oversized sweatshirt with her coffee mug and her French braid, talking to herself about something I was too far away to hear.
She talked to herself constantly. She also talked to her houseplants, to the mailman, and once, that I had witnessed, to a squirrel that had gotten onto her porch railing. The squirrel had not responded, but she had seemed satisfied with the conversation anyway.
She had thanked the mailman yesterday. Like she had actually stopped what she was doing, walked to the end of the driveway, and thanked him by name.
Who did that?
I turned a page I had not read and told myself I was watching the tree line.
Then, the fucking seal had flickered on a Tuesday.
It was subtle, the kind of shift I might have missed if I had not been running daily checks since the night she arrived.
I had found a faint irregularity in the warding that smoothed itself out within seconds and left the containment intact.
It wasn’t anything too dangerous, or anything that required immediate action.
But I knew what caused it.
The Hellgate had always been sensitive to powerful emotional states in its immediate vicinity.
Rage, grief, fear, anything with enough weight to it could cause a ripple in the thinner parts of the seal.
It was one of the reasons I had chosen to live alone on this street for the better part of four centuries, keeping the emotional climate around the Gate as flat and uncomplicated as possible.
I stood at the tree line with two fingers pressed to the earth and acknowledged, with the reluctant honesty of someone who had been lying to themselves for two weeks, that the emotional climate around the Hellgate was no longer flat or uncomplicated.
That was my fault.
Specifically, it was the fault of the way she had looked at me across the pool table three nights ago, like she was solving a problem she hadn't decided she wanted solved yet. That look had done something to the warding that I was still correcting for.
I reinforced the seal, walked back to the house, and did not look at her windows.
The storm came in fast on a Thursday evening, the way mountain storms do, without much warning and with complete commitment.
The power went out across town at half past seven and I was already reaching for my coat before I had consciously decided to move, because her house was dark and she had been alone in it for exactly two weeks and she did not yet know which sounds it made in bad weather were normal and which ones were not.
I told myself that was the reason I was crossing the street in the rain.
She opened the door before I knocked, holding a flashlight pointed at the floor, her hair loose around her shoulders for once, dark curls falling everywhere, and something about that detail knocked every carefully prepared reason for my visit clean out of my head.
"You know," she said, leaning against the doorframe with a small smile that did nothing for my concentration, "you really need a hobby."
"I had one,” I replied my voice sound much more gruff than I’d intended.
She raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"You moved in."
She stared at me for a second, then laughed, bright and unguarded, and stepped aside to let me in. I followed her into the dark house and reminded myself I was here to check the basement door.
The basement stairs were narrow and the ceiling at the bottom sat low enough that I had to angle my shoulders to move through the space.
Lila came down behind me with the flashlight, and the combination of the cramped space and the dark and the particular way she smelled this close made the warding at the back of the property flicker again.
I felt it from where I stood and ignored it, which was becoming a habit I was going to have to address.
The old door at the far end rattled steadily in its frame. I moved toward it and she moved at the same moment to look at the far wall and we collided in the middle, her shoulder against my chest, her hand catching my forearm to steady herself.
Neither of us moved away.
I could feel the warmth of her through her thin sleep shirt. I could feel her pulse where her fingers wrapped around my arm. The Gate hummed beneath the foundation and I understood with perfect clarity that the warding was not the only thing that had been wearing thin.
"You're doing it again," she said. Her voice was quieter than usual.
"What?"
"Looking at me like that."
I looked away. She moved around me to examine the rattling door herself, which was unnecessary and slightly dangerous and very her, and I watched her crouch down to look at the bottom of the frame with the flashlight and felt something in my chest pull in a direction I had been refusing to acknowledge for two solid weeks.
"Why do you keep looking at me like that?" she asked, without turning around.
"I don't know."
She stood up and turned around. "Liar."
"I said I don't know,” I repeated the words.
"You act like I'm made of glass."
"No, I don’t.”
She rolled her eyes. “What then?"
The flashlight threw soft light across her face and she was looking at me the way she had looked at me across the pool table, direct and a little relentless. It was like she had decided she was done wondering and wanted an actual answer.
"Temptation," I said in a whisper.
I let the word sink into the air, and our bones and the floor beneath our feet.
Then she did something I hadn’t seen coming and I was really the type to analyze most situations. Lila crossed the space between us in an instant, took my face in both hands, and kissed me.
It wasn’t a tentative kiss either or shy. It was like she’d been thinking about it for a very long and had finally gotten tired of not doing it.
Satan’s fucking nutsack, my thoughts stirred as I let the scent of her surround me.
I completely understood the no longer wanting to wait part, because I had been thinking about it since the second night she’s arrived. I’d been holding myself back from doing more than kissing too.
I kissed her back in a hungry way. Five fucking centuries of careful self-discipline had disintegrated in a moment when Lila’s most had met mine.
When we finally broke apart she was still holding my face and we were both breathing harder than the situation technically warranted and she was looking at me like she wasn't sure what to do with what had just happened.
"I should go upstairs," she said.
"You should," I agreed.
Neither of us moved, just stood there our breaths heavy and filling the eerie basement.
"We're making terrible decisions," she said.
"Yes."
"You're also a complete stranger.”
"Yes,” I nodded.
"I've known you for two weeks."
"Thirteen days," I found myself giving her the amount of time, and watched something shift in her expression, the realization that I had been counting, and then she kissed me again and I stopped keeping track of anything at all.
I had touched her braid every chance I had found to do it, tugging it, wrapping a curl around my finger, feeling her go still every time I did it.
So the first thing I did when she finally let me was take it apart, unwinding it slowly until her hair fell loose and dark around her shoulders and she looked up at me with those warm brown eyes and I understood, in a way I had been avoiding understanding for thirteen days, that I was in a significant amount of trouble.
She laughed when I pulled her toward the stairs, soft and a little breathless, and said something about terrible decisions again, and I said I was aware, and she said that wasn't reassuring, and I said I know, and she laughed again.
We made it upstairs.
The moment her bedroom door clicked shut behind us, the last thread of restraint snapped.
I spun her around and backed her against the wall, my mouth crashing down on hers again—hungrier this time, all teeth and tongue and five centuries of denied hunger.
Lila moaned into the kiss, her hands fisting in my shirt, pulling me closer.
I tangled my fingers into that thick, wild mane of dark curls and wrapped them once, twice around my fist, tugging her head back sharply so I could drag my mouth down the column of her throat. She gasped, the sound going straight to my dick.
"Azrael…”
I didn’t let her finish and yanked her thin sleep shirt over her head, baring her to the cool storm air. Roughly, I palmed one breast roughly while my mouth found the other. Her back arched, pressing into me, and I growled against her skin.
I walked her backward until her knees hit the bed and pushed her down onto it. She looked up at me, lips swollen, eyes dark with want and need. Her hair had already become a beautiful mess against the sheets. I stripped off my own clothes in seconds and came down over her, caging her with my body.
"Turn over," I ordered, voice low and rough.
She obeyed, a shiver running through her. I grabbed her hips and pulled her up onto her knees, then fisted her hair again…tighter this time…using it like a leash to arch her back as I lined myself up and drove into her waiting pussy.
Lila cried out, the sound half-moan, half-laugh, her walls clenching around me.
Fuck.
She was a tight little thing.
Tight, hot and fucking perfect. I pulled back and slammed in again, this time going deeper.
Going so deep and so hard that her bedframe slam against the wall with every thrust, while the storm outside roared into the night.
I kept my grip tight in her hair, pulling just hard enough to make her feel owned and filthy. All while using the leverage to fuck her harder. My other hand dug into her hip, holding her exactly where I wanted her as I pounded into pussy with a relentless.
"Like this?" I growled against her ear, teeth grazing the shell. "This what you wanted every time I looked at you?"
"Yes…oh my God! Fuck, yes!!!” Lila panted, pushing back to meet every brutal stroke. Sweat slicked our skin. Her moans turned into broken cries every time I bottomed out, the wet sound of our bodies colliding filthy in the dark room.
I released her hair only to slide my hand under her, finding her clit and rubbing tight, demanding circles.
Her thighs started to shake and I wrapped her hair around my fist once more, yanking her head back so I could bite down on the junction of her neck.
I fucked her even harder, driving her into the mattress.
She came apart with a sharp, shattered cry, pulsing around my dick so tightly I saw stars.
Still, I didn’t stop…didn’t slow, chasing my own release through the tight grip of her orgasm until it slammed into me like lightning.
I buried myself to the hilt and came hard, groaning her name against her skin as I filled her.
We collapsed together, breathing ragged, bodies still joined. I kept one hand tangled in her hair, stroking it now, gentler, while the storm slowly eased outside.
She was still asleep when the storm completely clear.
I, however, hadn’t slept a wink. Which wasn’t unusual for me, but the reason I hadn’t closed my eyes, was considerably more unusual than anything I had experienced in the last five centuries.
I sat with my back against the headboard and watched the early light come through the curtains and didn’t dare try to examine what I was feeling with any particular rigor.
Because I already knew what it was and I was not ready to say it out loud.
Lila’s hair was everywhere.
She made a small sound and shifted, and then went still, and then I watched the exact moment she woke up fully and remembered where she was.
She paused and went very still in a different way and then opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
Then, ever so slowly, she turned her brown eyed gaze onto me.
"You undid my braid," she said.
"It was distracting."
She blinked. "My braid was distracting."
"You," I said. "You’re a distracting little thing.”
She stared at me for a long moment with her hair spread across the pillow and something moving behind her eyes that I could not quite read.
"You're impossible," she said finally.
"I'm aware."
She sat up and found her shirt and pulled her hair back with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been managing it their whole life, and I watched her do it and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say that wasn't something I wasn't ready to say yet.
She looked at me from across the bed.
"This won't happen again," she said.
"Of course," I nodded in agreement.
Get the hell out of her house, before you fuck her again…
She nodded, satisfied with that, and I got dressed and let myself out.
I stood on her porch for a moment in the early morning grey, listening to the town settle into its first quiet sounds, and then crossed the street to my own yard and made my way to the tree line the way I had every morning for five centuries.
I pressed two fingers to the earth at the edge of the outer seal.
The Gate pulsed beneath my hand, slow and deliberate.
A voice drifted up through the dark soil, unhurried, the way things sound when they have been waiting long enough to stop being impatient.
"You've grown attached."
I didn't answer.
"Careful." There was something in the tone that might have been sinister amusement. "Love has ruined stronger demons than you."
I looked back toward her house. The porch light was still on, burning steadily in the early morning grey, small and warm and completely ordinary.
"Then they'll have to make room for one more," I said quietly to no one in particular, and walked back inside.