Ethan
The leather bound journals had been sitting under my grandfather's workshop for forty years before I found them. I was seventeen, clearing out space for a new water heater, when the floorboard came up wrong under my boot. I’d reached down into the gap and pulled out three leather-bound notebooks wrapped in oilcloth, their pages brown at the edges and dense with handwriting I had to hold up to the light to read.
I sat on that workshop floor for two hours and read every word.
Three weeks later I drove to Asheville and walked into the memory care facility with one of the journals tucked under my arm.
My grandfather was sitting by the window when I came in, looking out at the parking lot with the unfocused patience of someone who had stopped expecting much from what he saw there.
"Grandpa?"
He looked up, hope springing into his eyes. "Robert?"
I shook my head, because my Dad had been dead for the last five years. “No. It's Ethan. Your grandson."
He blinked slowly trying to recognize me. "Ethan?"
"Yeah." I pulled a chair close and sat down. I set the journal on the table between us.
The change was immediate as his eyes dropped to the cover and sharpened in a way I hadn't seen in two years of visits. His hands started shaking before he even reached for it.
"Where did you get that?"
I whisper low, “Under the workshop. There are three of them."
He grabbed my wrist with a grip that was stronger than it had any right to be. "Burn it."
I went still. "What?"
"Burn every damned page." His eyes were clearer than they had been in months, and whatever was behind them was not comfort. "Promise me."
I hadn't the old man anything. I’d had tried to get answers instead, which turned out to be its own particular kind of cruelty, because his lucidity came in seconds rather than minutes, and every time I got close to something real the window closed again.
"The journals say Malphas grants one wish," I said carefully, leaning forward. "To whoever frees him from the Gate."
His face drained of color so completely that I reached for the call button on instinct. "No."
"The journals are very specific about it."
"He doesn't grant wishes." His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "That's not what he does."
"Then what does he do?"
He opened his mouth. For one suspended moment I was certain he was finally going to give me the answer I had driven four hours for, the piece that would make everything else make sense.
Then his expression softened and drifted and his eyes went to the window.
"Have you seen your grandmother?" he asked pleasantly.
I sat back then and took my grandfather’s face in. It was worn with time, crowfeet and wrinkles. His skin was drooping off the bone; he was wasting away in this place and didn’t even know it.
I drove home with the journal but I didn’t burn any of them.
I was sitting in my truck on the edge of Lila's street now, engine off, watching the lights in the house across from hers.
I hadn’t chose Lila specifically. That was the thing people would misunderstand if they ever knew the whole story, which they would not. I hadn’t targeted her just because.
I had simply been waiting for the right conditions to arrive in the same place at the same time, an unmated Omega, close enough to the Hellgate to matter.
I’d needed a compelling enough sacrifice to pull the Guardian out of the isolation he had maintained for centuries.
Lila Hart had been the first person who fit every condition simultaneously.
She thought she’d found a bargain.
But it had been me that had made sure that she did.
The listing price had been my doing. Not the number itself but the nudge, a word to the right person at the assessor's office, a quiet suggestion to the realtor that the property had been sitting too long and the seller was motivated.
I had made sure the inspection came back clean enough not to scare her away.
I had made sure nothing went wrong that would have sent her looking elsewhere.
Blackthorn Ridge had always been good at keeping secrets. I was simply using the town's oldest one.
I opened the journal to the page I had read so many times the paper had gone soft at the fold.
The handwriting was my grandfather's, younger and steadier than anything he had managed in the last decade of his life.
When an Omega carries the child of a demon guardian, the final ward seal may be broken from within. The one who opens the Gate shall receive one wish from the demon enclosed.
Below it, underlined twice: Malphas always pays his debts.
I had to believe it. I had built two years of careful, patient, methodical work on the foundation of that belief, and if it was wrong then everything I had done to Lila Hart, every manipulation and nudge and quiet interference, meant nothing. Worse than nothing.
I reached into the glovebox and took out the small wooden box I kept there. Inside was a photograph of a little girl, maybe four years old, sitting in a red wagon in a backyard, laughing at something outside the frame. Her hair was the same dark blond as mine. She had her mother's eyes.
Emma had died on a Tuesday in November, three years ago, of a thing that should not have been able to take a healthy four-year-old and did anyway.
I brushed my thumb across her face. "Just a little longer, baby girl." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Daddy's going to bring you home."
I thought back to the farmer's market two days ago. Lila turning pale in the produce aisle, waving off the peaches she had been reaching for. The way she had pressed her hand flat against her stomach for just a moment, quick and unconscious, before she smiled and said she was fine.
And then there had been Azrael, hovering closer than he had been the week before. The way he tracked her movement told me things. Things that maybe no one else could see but I could.
That was the moment I understood the plan was working. The Guardian had fallen, completely and utterly in love with his Omega neighbor.
And in falling, he had given Lila something neither of them had yet understood the significance of.
She had no idea what he had given her.
Given us…
That night I walked to the edge of the ward line at the back of the property I had been quietly leasing for six months, two streets over from Lila's house.
I crouched at the edge of the stone circle and pressed my palm flat against the earth.
The ground hummed against my hand, low and patient, the way it always did when I came close enough.
Then the voice came up through the soil, smooth and unhurried and ancient. "Has she conceived?"
I swallowed. "I believe so."
A sound moved through the earth that might have been laughter. "Good."
I gripped Emma's photograph in my other hand until the edges bit into my palm. "You promised me a wish."
"And you shall have it," the voice said warmly.
The answer came too quickly and I felt the wrongness of it in the back of my throat the way you feel weather changing. Still, I pushed the feeling down the same way I had been pushing it down for two years. I stood up and looked toward Lila's house, and then toward Azrael's.
I did not see lovers.
I saw mechanisms like a lock and a key that I had moved into place over two years give or take.
I was sorry for Lila Hart. I wanted to be clear about that, at least to myself. I was genuinely, deeply sorry. But I had buried my daughter once, and I would not leave her in the ground because a demon had finally learned how to love.
The Guardian had given me the key.
Now I only had to take it.