Lilla
Ihad convinced myself by morning that the demon conversation had not happened. Demons weren't real. But I had decided my actual takeaway from last night was that my new neighbor had an extremely dark sense of humor and an even stranger way of breaking into houses to deliver it.
It was the only logical explanation. I had driven two hours, unloaded half my life from a hatchback, and fallen asleep on an air mattress at ten o'clock like someone's grandmother.
Sleep deprivation did strange things to a person.
It made you imagine impossibly attractive neighbors saying impossibly strange things in your kitchen.
It made cabinets seem like they opened on their own.
It made whispers under the floorboards sound deliberate instead of architectural.
I made my coffee, pulled my hair into a braid, and stepped out onto the porch in my oversized sweatshirt and leggings feeling very reasonable about all of this.
Then I looked across the street.
Azrael fine ass was shirtless and had my mouth water immediately as I took in the sight of him.
He was crouched down beside his motorcycle in the driveway, working with the focused efficiency of someone who had done it ten thousand times. My eyes tried to drink in the strange dark markings that swept across his shoulders and down his arms, shifting faintly whenever he moved.
Clearly tattoos, I thought, licking my lips as if my tongue wanted to dart out and have a taste.
At first he wasn't looking at me but it was as if he sensed my prescience and turned to stare at me.
He straightened up quickly, wiped his hands on a rag, and looked at me across the quiet street with an expression that gave absolutely nothing away. He just looked like he had all the time in the world and intended to use some of it on me specifically.
I took a long sip of my coffee before giving a slight holler. "Do all demons work shirtless?"
Something moved at the corner of his mouth and he hollered back. "Do all Omegas ask this many questions before breakfast?"
I snorted before sipping again. "Only the ones with creepy neighbors who break into their kitchens to talk about Hell."
He shifted his weight once more. “Neighbor?"
"You're watching me."
"I was watching the tree."
I looked at the empty space between us. "There isn't a tree between us."
He looked at the same empty space. "Exactly."
I went back inside before I said something I couldn't take back, mentally filing him under harmless but extremely committed to his weird neighbor bit.
My backyard was stunning, which felt deeply unfair given everything else the property had put me through in the last eighteen hours.
Wildflowers grew in tall clusters along the fence line, purple and white and yellow against the dark tree line beyond.
Towering pines bordered the back of the property, their roots lifting gently from the earth in places, and the morning light came through them in long slanted beams that made the whole yard feel like something out of a painting.
I was genuinely considering whether I could put a reading chair out here when I saw the stones.
They sat in a perfect circle near the center of the yard, black and smooth, pressed into the earth like they had been there long before the house was built.
There were maybe a dozen of them, each one roughly the size of my fist, arranged with a precision that felt deliberate in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.
I crouched down to get a better look. They were carved with something, thin lines that crossed and curved in patterns I didn't recognize.
Probably an old garden border, I told myself. Decorative landscaping. I reached out to touch the nearest one.
A hand wrapped around my wrist so quickly I barely had time to scream or register what was happening.
I gasped and nearly toppled backward, only to find Azrael's face was inches from mine, his jaw tight. His amber eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that made my heart do something embarrassing. My legs instantly clinched themselves together.
"Don't," he said.
I pulled slightly against his grip, more out of reflex than actual resistance. "Okay, that's twice now you've shown up out of nowhere. You are going to have to start explaining yourself."
His thumb moved across the inside of my wrist, just once, like he hadn't realized he was still holding me. Then he let go immediately and straightened up.
"Stay away from those stones."
I stood and crossed my arms. "Why, is the Hell stuff going to get me again?"
He “sighed deeply. “Trust me."
I could still feel where his thumb had rubbed over my wrist even though he was no longer touching me. “You keep asking me to trust you about a thing you haven't actually proven."
His eyes moved over my face in a way that felt uncomfortably thorough. "I know."
My face contorted and a frown formed. “So…like give me a reason.”
A beat of silence passed between us, long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.
"I'm trying," he said, and his voice had dropped into something quieter than I had heard from him before.
I didn't have anything to say to that, which was a new experience for me, so I went inside and got my keys and decided he was probably one of those guys who was really into local folklore.
Weirdo hottie alert, I thought.
The coffee shop on Main Street was called Hollow Grounds, which I appreciated enormously.
I ordered something with oat milk and too many pumps of vanilla and settled into a window seat, and within four minutes the waitress had refilled my water and asked me if I was the new girl in the old Hollow house.
"That's me," I said.
She smiled. "Don't let it spook you. That house has good bones."
A man at the counter turned around on his stool. He had the look of someone who had lived in a small town his entire life and considered that an achievement. "You met your neighbor yet?"
"Azrael?" I said. "We've met. He told me there are demons under my backyard, so."
I said it like a joke, expecting them to laugh along with me, except they didn’t. The waitress and the man exchanged a look that I could not fully interpret, something quick and a little too serious for my comfort.
"He'll keep an eye on you," the man said trying to offer a smile.
"He always does," the waitress agreed, refilling his coffee without being asked.
I raised an eyebrow, deciding to let the weirdness go because the alternative was thinking too hard about it on a Saturday. "He watches all the neighbors?"
"Just the ones in that house," the waitress said, and she said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and then she went to take another table's order and left me sitting there with my oat milk latte and approximately forty new questions and a creeping unwelcome suspicion that the entire town was in on a joke I hadn't been told.
Someone had fixed my porch railing while I was gone.
I stood at the bottom of my front steps and stared at it.
The lean was gone. The wood had been reset and secured and the whole thing was as solid as the day it was built.
The squeaky front step no longer squeaked.
The mailbox, which had been listing at a fifteen degree angle since I arrived, stood perfectly straight.
I walked across the street.
Azrael was back at the motorcycle, hands dark with grease again, not looking up when I stopped in front of him.
"You've been on my property," I said.
He glanced up. “Yes."
I smirked at him. “I never asked for your help."
"I know,” he shrugged, and continued tinkering with his bike, that was all steel and chrome.
"So why?"
He wiped his hands on a rag and finally looked up at me. "It bothered me."
"What bothered you?"
He sighed. “The loose railing."
I stared at him for a moment and laughed, because there was genuinely no other response available to me. "No."
He looked confused in a way that seemed completely sincere. "What?"
"You." I shook my head. "You bother me."
"I bother you," he repeated, like he was turning the words over to examine them from all angles.
"Constantly," I said, before turning on my heel and walking my ass back home. And as I did so I absolutely did not think about how nice his hands had looked covered in grease.
What if they were covered in your slick, a little voice had teased.
The pool hall was called Cue's and it was exactly what a pool hall in a town called Blackthorn Ridge should be.
There was warm amber lighting, classic rock from a jukebox in the corner, and a bartender who knew everyone's name.
I had been there approximately three minutes when one of the regulars, a cheerful older man named Dale, waved me over toward the tables.
Azrael’s ass was already there. He was lining up a shot with the unhurried precision he seemed to apply to everything, and he didn't look up when I walked over. Dale clapped me on the shoulder and told me Azrael was impossible to beat, which I believed immediately and completely.
"She's with me," Azrael said, still not looking up.
I stopped. "So we're making decisions for me now?"
He took the shot. The ball dropped cleanly. "No."
"You just told everyone I'm with you."
"I told them you're playing with me." He finally looked up. "There's a difference."
I rolled my eyes. “That's not better."
He handed me a cue without comment.
Sighting, I took the stick from him and lined up my first shot, missed it by a humiliating margin. While I was considering whether to blame the cue or my own complete lack of pool skills, I felt him step up behind me.
He didn't touch me.
He was just there, close enough that I was aware of his height and his warmth and that my ass lined up perfectly with his crotch. I also became aware of the fact that he smelled unreasonably good for someone who had been working on a motorcycle two hours ago.
"Relax your shoulders," he said, his voice low enough that it seemed to rumble.
Down girl, I mentally told my coochie.
I did not move a muscle. "I'm a little distracted."
"By what?" His voice rumbled again and he had my shit purring.
"The six foot four guy breathing down my neck."
I felt more than heard the slow exhale that might, under the right circumstances, have been a laugh. "How's that going?"
"Terribly," I said, and somehow sank the shot anyway.
Eventually, after a few games and minor flirting, we walked back to the house in the kind of quiet that didn't need to be filled. Which was new. Azrael was not, I was learning, a person who talked to fill space, and I found that I didn't mind it the way I usually did with silence.
"How old are you?" I asked, somewhere between the pool hall and my street, mostly joking.
"Older than your house," he said.
I laughed but again, he didn't. I looked at his profile in the dark and the laugh faded a little around the edges.
"You're committing hard to this act,” I replied.
He didn't answer, which struck me as a strange but I didn’t push it.
We stopped at the end of my driveway and I was trying to think of something to say when I noticed his expression change.
Something shifted behind his eyes, and every muscle in his body went still ias if he’d identified some sort of threat.
His gaze moved to the tree line beyond my backyard and stayed there.
"Lila…”
The way he said my name made the hair on my arms stand up. "What?"
His eyes didn't move from the darkness beyond the trees. "Stay out of your backyard after sunset."
I looked toward the tree line. It was dark and still and completely ordinary looking. There was absolutely nothing back there to be afraid of.
I looked back at him.
He was already watching the darkness, like he expected it to move, and for the first time since I had met him, the joke didn't quite land the way it usually did.