Azrael
Aweek had passed since I’d walked Lila home from Cue’s. I was back on the ward line at dawn, pressing my fingers to the earth at the outer seal the way I had every morning for five centuries, telling myself I was getting back to routine.
Five hundred and thirty seven years of discipline had come undone by one receptionist with terrible financial judgment and an even worse taste in neighbors.
The seals were hold and the warding was intact. Everything was exactly as it should be and I had absolutely no reason to look across the street.
Until I looked across the fucking street street.
Satan’s nutsack, I groaned.
Lila was watering her flowers, moving from pot to pot along the porch railing with a delicate patience, talking to each plant as she went.
I had watched her do this three mornings in a row now and I was no closer to understanding why she felt the need to narrate the watering process to the plants themselves, but she seemed to find it productive.
Her plants appeared to be thriving so I was not in a position to argue with the results.
I went back to the ward line and told myself I was focused.
The truck pulled into her driveway at half past ten, and it was one I definitely didn’t recognize.
Every muscle in my body went still as I waited and watched.
The man who climbed out was tall, broad across the shoulders, radiating the easy confidence of an unmated Alpha who had never had much reason to be uncertain about anything.
He reached back into the cab and pulled out a potted hydrangea.
Pool Hall Boy.
My first thought was that he was bringing her flowers, which was unnecessary because she already had flowers and watered them every morning while talking to them.
My second thought was that she had come out onto the porch and was smiling at him with the particular warm smile she gave to people she had decided she liked.
My third thought arrived quickly and without any complexity whatsoever.
I disliked him…a lot
I picked up the screwdriver I’d been using on the fence post and got back to work.
I didn’t meant to eavesdrop either… I simply had exceptionally good hearing, which is a physiological reality rather than a choice. The conversation happening across the street happened to be audible to me then that was a matter of acoustics and entirely beside the point.
"Figured your yard needed a housewarming gift," Ethan said.
Lila laughed. "You brought me a plant?"
"I remembered you saying you liked flowers."
"That's actually really sweet."
The screwdriver snapped clean in half and my gaze dropped to the metal in my hands.
It was old anyway, I lied to myself.
I set the pieces down with more care than the situation required and picked up another tool and returned my attention to the fence post with the focused discipline of someone who had maintained a Hellgate for five and a half centuries and was certainly capable of maintaining his composure for one Sunday morning.
I lasted four more minutes and before I knew it, I’d crossed the street without a plan.
Which was not something I generally did.
I had maintained a Hellgate for five centuries on the strength of always having a plan.
But I was apparently past the point where planning was a resource I could reliably access on short notice, so I crossed the street and walked up to where Lila was crouched by the flower bed and said her name.
She looked up and something moved through her expression that she put away quickly. "Oh, hey…”
Pool Hall Boy straightened and offered his hand with easy confidence, "Ethan."
I looked at his hand. I was aware, that the appropriate response was to shake it. I shook it, briefly, and released it.
He had the grace not to comment. "Heard you're the neighborhood expert on the area."
"Not really,” I said.
A silence followed and I didn’t feel any urgency to fill it.
Lila pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and looked at the sky with the expression of someone asking a question she did not expect the sky to answer.
Finally, she knelt to plant the hydrangea near the south corner of the flower bed and Ethan got down beside her. I stood with my arms crossed and watched in a bit of misery, wanting to snap the fucking guys neck.
Ethan picked up the small spade and started to dig and I said, without raising my voice, "Don't."
They both looked up.
"Why?" Ethan asked, with genuine and reasonable curiosity.
I shrugged, “Wrong spot. Tree roots."
He looked at the ground around him with the reasonable skepticism of someone who could not see any evidence of tree roots. "I don't see any."
"They're there."
Lila had turned to look at me with her eyes slightly narrowed in the way that told me she had already worked out exactly what I was doing. "You just don't want him helping me."
There was no reasonable response to that other than the honest one. "No. I don't."
Ethan laughed, which was a more gracious response than the situation required of him. "I can stop.”
"Good," I said.
Lila made a sound that was working very hard not to become a laugh and not entirely succeeding.
When Ethan offered to help carry the bookshelf in from the porch I had already picked it up before Lila drew breath to answer. It was a solid piece of furniture and I carried it one handed because that was simply the most efficient way to manage it.
Lila followed me inside with the expression of someone who had a great deal to say and was selecting carefully. “I “didn’t ask you to do this…”
“You were going to ask Pool Hall Boy…and his limbs seem a little weak.”
“Azrael…”
"I saved us time,” I shrugged.
Lila huffed and I could tell that I was getting to her. “That is genuinely not the point."
Ethan followed us in and helped direct where the shelf should sit against the far wall, which I permitted because it was her house and she had already extended him a level of welcome I was not technically in a position to override.
The three of us stood in her living room surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and houseplants and sticky notes on every available surface, and the atmosphere had the specific quality of a situation that everyone present was interpreting differently.
Lila's phone rang from the kitchen counter. She reached over and hit speakerphone without looking at it.
"So," Debbie's voice filled the room at considerable volume. "Did Hot Neighbor come over?"
Lila moved for the phone with a speed I had not previously observed her apply to anything. She did not make it in time and Ethan glanced in my direction.
I gazed at him while Lila picked up the phone, took it off speaker, and walked into the kitchen with the brisk energy of someone who intended to have a very focused conversation in another room.
Ethan gathered himself to leave with the composed dignity of a man who had assessed the situation accurately and arrived at a sensible conclusion. He was, I had reluctantly determined over the course of the last hour, a decent person, which did not make any of this easier.
He looked at Lila in the doorway. "I was thinking, if you're free next Saturday, we could grab dinner?"
She hesitated and it was brief but she covered it quickly. Something had crossed her mind and made her pause, and whatever it was she found the pausing irritating.
“She's not," I answered for her.
And then…”Mine.”
It came out quietly, with more certainty than I had intended, and underneath it was every single thing I had been refusing to say out loud since the night she moved in.
The room went still and Ethan turned to look at me slowly. "Excuse me?"
I heard my own words replayed through the silence and understood, with perfect and unhelpful clarity, exactly what had come out of my mouth.
Lila was staring at me. "Did you just..."
"No."
She quirked a brow.”You absolutely..."
"No."
“Azrael…you called me yours."
Rubbing at the back of my neck, I replied. “I didn't mean to say it."
Lilabit her lip. “You didn't mean to call me yours."
The silence that followed had considerable weight to it.
"No," I said.
Ethan looked between us with the expression of a man was defeated. He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and smiled at Lila with what I had to acknowledge was genuine warmth.
"I'll let you two work this out," he said pleasantly, and let himself out.
The door had barely closed before Lila turned to face me with the full force of her attention, which was, I had learned, considerable.
She took a deep breath, and then unleashed on me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I winced. “I don't know."
She took it up a notch. “Yes the fuck you do know!”
"No…”
She shook her head and then stabbed a finger into my chest. “You're jealous."
I said nothing.
"Azrael."
I looked at her and then at the sticky note on the wall behind her that said water plants Friday. At the way she was standing in front of me, anger radiating off her body, her chin up and her eyes fixed on me like she had decided she was owed an honest answer and intended to collect it.
"Yes," I finally admitted..
She looked at me for a long moment, something working behind her eyes that I couldn't quite read. Then she turned and walked down the hall and the bedroom door closed behind her with a firmness that communicated everything a slam would have.
I stood in her living room for a moment before letting myself out.
I was halfway across her yard when I stopped.
The hydrangea Ethan had helped Lila planted near the corner of the flower bed was withering.
Not slowly, the way plants wilted from poor soil or insufficient water, but visibly and rapidly, the stem bending and the petals browning at the edges and the whole thing folding inward like something was drawing the life out of it from beneath the soil.
I turned toward the tree line.
The ward pulsed once beneath the earth, low and deliberate, and a voice drifted through the dark space between the trees with the unhurried quality of something that had been watching for a while and had decided the time had come to be heard.
"Everything she touches dies eventually."
I stood completely still in the middle of Lila’s yard with the dead hydrangea behind me and looked at the tree line and felt something settle in my chest that had nothing to do with jealousy and everything to do with five centuries of understanding exactly what lived below that ridge.
Whatever was listening from the dark below the earth was no longer content to simply speak my name in the small hours.
It was making threats now.
And the smile I had been wearing, however reluctantly, since the moment Ethan walked out of her front door was completely, entirely gone.