Epilogue
AZRAEL
The backyard was quiet.
The Hellgate was sealed. The stone circle was broken. Ethan lay where he had fallen, and Lila lay in my arms, and the world kept turning the way it always did.
Spinning away, and indifferent and completely unaware that disaster had been averted.
Birds started singing somewhere in the tree line and morning light crept across the ruined yard. It touched the blackened grass and the collapsed flower beds and the splintered porch railing I had repaired three times and would never repair again. I watched it move and did not move with it.
I brushed the dirt from her cheek.
"I'm sorry," I said again. My voice came out wrong, too quiet, too careful, like I was afraid of disturbing something.
"I promised I would protect you." I smoothed her hair back the way I had done a hundred mornings, uselessly, completely, because there was nothing else left to do with my hands. "And I failed."
For the second time in my existence, I had lost the person I loved.
The first time had taken me a century to survive.
I did not think I would survive this one.
I had never prayed before.
In five hundred and thirty seven years the thought had not once occurred to me, because Hell had claimed me long before the Divine had any opportunity to.
I had made my peace with that the way you made peace with things that were simply true.
I was not a something that prayed.
I was something that endured.
But I had nothing left to endure with. I bowed my head over Lila’s body and closed my eyes.
"I don't know if You hear demons," I said. The words felt strange in my mouth, unpracticed and clumsy, offered into a silence I had no reason to believe was listening. "I don't know if I deserve an answer."
My hand settled over her stomach, over the life we had made without understanding what we were making, over the thing I had only just been given time to want.
"But if there is any mercy left," I said, “Please, I beg You. Not for me. For them."
Wind moved through the ruined yard. Birds continued to tweet and the morning light continued its indifferent progress across the blackened grass.
Then a SOFT familiar voice said, "Well. About damn time…”
I looked up slowly and found Debbie and May were walking through the broken garden gate with the unhurried ease of two women. They acted as if Ethan’s dead body wasnt laying twenty feet away, as if I was not sitting in the ruins of everything holding a dead woman in my arms.
They were not afraid.
They were not surprised.
They looked, if anything, like they had been waiting for this particular morning for a considerable amount of time.
Something about them felt different. Not different in a way I could see, but in a way I could feel, the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm, warm and ancient and completely steady.
I understood before I said it.
"Watchers," I said.
Debbie smiled an angelic like smile. "Took you long enough."
May crossed her arms. "Five hundred years isn't exactly quick."
"You're with the Divine." I heard how it sounded coming out, stunned and flat and entirely inadequate for the situation. "You've been here the whole time."
Debbie shrugged. "Been that way since before your horns came in."
May laughed. Even I, sitting in the wreckage of everything, felt something loosen slightly in my chest at the sound of it.
I looked down at Lila and then back to the two angels standing before me. “Can you save her?"
The lightness left Debbie's face. She crossed to where I sat and crouched beside Lila, and the expression she wore was not the Debbie I had come to know in Cue’s.
The loud and warm and entirely ordinary woman who had decided Lila was her daughter.
This was something older than that, something that had been watching this town and everyone in it for longer than I had been standing guard over the Gate.
"Yes," she said.
The air went out of me. "But?"
May nodded. "There's always a but."
Debbie stood and folded her arms and looked at me with the expression of someone about to make an offer they had spent a long time preparing.
"Here's the deal," she said.
May sighed quietly looking at her companion. "You always make it sound like you're selling used cars."
Debbie ignored her completely. "You want Lila back. You want your baby." She counted on her fingers. "Then here's what's being offered. You surrender your immortality. Your infernal birthright. Your horns, your fire, your endless life, your place in Hell." She paused and let May continue.
"You'll still guard this place," May said second. "But for the Divine now. You'll live as a man. You'll age. You'll hurt." She smiled. "You'll probably throw your back out around fifty."
I looked at Lila's face, and her hand that was still resting against her stomach.
I asked only one question. "Will she live?"
Debbie nodded. "Yes."
"Our child?"
May smiled. "Yes."
"Done," I said.
Debbie blinked. "I wasn't finished."
I dropped a kiss on my mate’s head. “I didn't need you to be."
Her expression softened in a way I had not seen from her before.
"You know," she said quietly, "five hundred years ago, this would have been a punishment."
She looked at Lila and then back at me.
"Today it's your choice."
I looked at the woman in my arms, at the dirt on her cheek and her hair spread across my lap and the hand that had stayed curved against her stomach through everything, still protecting something she hadn’t had time to understand.
"One lifetime with her," I said, and my voice broke cleanly in half on the last word, "is worth more than eternity without her."
The fire left me first.
Then the markings, fading from my skin slowly, like ink washed away like sins in warm water.
The horns receded and he darkness that had lived behind my eyes since the day I was made went quiet. And then, for the first time in five hundred and thirty seven years, I felt cold.
Real cold, the human kind, settling into my skin and my bones and my hands where they held her.
My heart started beating and I felt my mind buckle under the weight of being mortal.
May placed one hand over Lila's heart. Debbie rested hers gently over her stomach. There was no light or sound, just warmth, spreading out from their hands like sunrise after a winter that had gone on too long.
Lila inhaled deeply.
Her eyes opened, confused and slow, blinking against the morning light, and she looked up at my face and said, "Az?"
I laughed. I had not expected to, but it came out anyway, broken and wet and entirely beyond my control, and I pulled her into my arms and held her with hands that were shaking and mortal and completely unable to do anything except hold on.
"You're here," I said.
She cupped my face and stopped. Her fingers moved to where my horns had been.
"Your horns," she said.
"Gone."
She frowned. "Did I miss something?"
Debbie snorted behind us. "Girl. You missed a whole lot."
Lila sat up slowly, still holding my hand, and looked between Debbie and May with the expression of someone assembling a very large and complicated puzzle.
"Who are you?" she asked suspiciously.
"Still Debbie," Debbie said.
"Still May," May said.
Debbie looked around the destroyed yard with her hands on her hips, taking in the blackened grass and the broken stones and the collapsed flower beds with the pragmatic assessment of someone calculating repair costs.
"Well," she said. "That's going to be expensive."
She looked at May. "Guess I'll see you Monday."
May nodded. "Bright and early."
Lila blinked. "Monday?"
Debbie looked at her like she had said something genuinely bewildering. "Girl. I still got bills."
May shrugged. "The Divine doesn't cover my mortgage."
Debbie was already walking toward the gate. She stopped once and looked back at me over her shoulder.
"Oh. One more thing." She pointed at me. "Humans bruise. Stretch before you lift anything."
May smiled at us both.
"Congratulations," she said simply.
They walked out through the garden gate, two women headed home after helping the neighbors, and the morning closed quietly behind them.
Weeks later, the backyard was alive again.
The flowers had come back first, stubbornly and without any particular encouragement, pushing up through the turned earth in the places where the stone circle had been.
I had helped them along, planting roses where the stones had stood, working in the dirt with my mortal hands that bruised now and got cold now and got tired now, and found that I did not mind any of it even slightly.
Lila stepped onto the porch on a Tuesday morning with one hand resting over the gentle curve of her stomach and her coffee in the other, and she watched me work for a moment before she said anything.
"You know," she said, "for a man who spent five hundred years guarding Hell, you're surprisingly good with flowers."
I looked up at her from where I was kneeling in the dirt. The morning light was in her hair. Her coffee was the kind she could actually drink now, decaf and full of cream, and she had complained about it every single morning for three weeks and drunk it anyway.
I stood up and brushed the dirt from my hands and walked to her and took her hand.
"Turns out," I said, "heaven grows things too."
She leaned into me and we stood together looking out over the garden that had been a battlefield, over the roses that had grown where the darkness had been, over the yard where everything had ended and somehow, improbably, impossibly, everything had also begun.
For five hundred and thirty seven years, I had believed redemption was something earned.
Lila taught me it was something accepted.
And standing there in the morning light with her hand in mine and her heart beating steadily and the whole quiet future opening out ahead of us, I finally understood mercy.
THE END