11. Lila
LILA
Azrael’s eyes had not left my facefor a full five minutes at least. His posture remainedthe same and the coffee cup in his hands remain unused. The coffee inside of said white cup had to have grown cold. I tried raising a brow casually at him, and then I tried to give a small laugh.
"You can smell it?” I asked flatly.
"Yes."
"You can smell that I'm pregnant."
"Omega pregnancies change the scent within days of conception. It's distinct." He paused. "Unmistakable."
I looked at him for a long moment. Then I picked up my purse, found my keys, and drove to the pharmacy three blocks away without saying another word. I was so quick inside of the store you would have thought I was the Flash.
I came back with a box and held it up between us.
"Go home," I said.
"Lila…”
"If this thing says negative, I am never letting you live this down." I pointed across the street. "Go."
For the first time since I had known him, Azrael looked genuinely nervous.
"I'll be across the street," he said, his voice wavering just a bit.
Something about the way he said it, made my throat feel tight in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
"I know," I said.
He left and I stared at the bag containing the pregnancy test.
Demon bae knocked you up didn’t he, I rolled my eyes as I snatched the bag up.
The bathroom was very small and very quiet and the test was very straightforward.
I followed the instructions carefully because I was the kind of person who read instructions, and then I set it face down on the counter and set a three-minute timer on my phone and walked directly back out of the bathroom because I could not stand in there for three minutes waiting for something that was almost certainly going to tell me I had a stomach virus.
I made it as far as the front porch.
The evening air was clear and cool, the mountains sitting blue and solid at the edge of the sky the way they always did.
The sun was starting its lazy descent across the sky, completely indifferent to the fact that my entire nervous system was currently staging a protest. My coffee was still on the railing where I had left it an hours ago.
I looked at it and felt my stomach turn and forced looked away.
My phone timer read 2:17.
"This is ridiculous," I said to the mountains because I needed someone to hear me.
2:04.
"I'm probably sick. I've been under a lot of stress. I moved to a new town, I bought a haunted house, my neighbor turned out to be a five-hundred-year-old demon, these things take a toll on a person."
1:33.
"I cannot be pregnant." I crossed my arms. "I've known him for like." I stopped. I actually counted backward. “A month…”
1:04.
The one month thing sat in the air for a moment. I thought about the basement and the storm and then days between then and now and the claim mark on my neck that Azrael had told me was permanent. Slowly, I pressed my fingers against it without thinking about it.
0:38.
I started pacing.
I hadn’t realized I was pacing until I noticed I had crossed the porch four times and was starting a fifth round. I stopped at the railing and looked across the street. Azrael was on his living room, I could see him pacing back and forth as well.
0:12.
"I'm going to be fine," I said, to no one in particular. "It's going to say negative and I'm going to go back over there and I'm going to make him regret every single smug demon second of this."
0:00.
My phone vibrated.
I stood very still for one moment. Then I turned toward the front door and took one step forward and stopped because a voice came from the edge of the porch that did not belong to Azrael and had not been there ten seconds ago.
"I wouldn't check it yet."
I went cold from the shoulders down.
I turned around slowly to find Ethan was standing at the top of the porch steps with his hands in his pockets. He looked relaxed and unhurried, the way he always looked.
He was smiling, but it was not the smile I had seen at Cue's or the farmer's market. This one was softer and sadder and wrong in a way I could not immediately name.
"What are you doing here?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.
He looked at me for a long moment with that sad smile still in place, and something moved through his expression that looked, genuinely and disturbingly, like remorse.
"I came to apologize," he said.
I did not move. "For what?"
The silence stretched long enough that I heard a bird call once from somewhere in the yard. Ethan looked down at the porch boards, then back up at me, and the remorse in his face deepened into something that looked like it had been there for a very long time.
"For choosing you," he said.
The words did not make sense in the order he had put them. I turned them over twice and they still did not make sense, and the hair on the back of my neck was standing up in a way that had nothing to do with the morning air.
"I don't understand," I said carefully.
He did not explain. He stepped off the porch slowly, not toward me but sideways, moving in a wide unhurried arc toward the side of the house, toward the backyard gate. There was nothing aggressive in the movement, nothing rushed, and that was somehow worse than if there had been.
"You were simply," he said, pausing at the gate latch, his voice carrying the resigned quality of someone finishing a thought they had rehearsed many times, "the right Omega…”
My back found the porch railing.
"What?" The word came out thin.
He looked toward the backyard. Toward the stone circle at the center of the yard that I had been told not to touch on my second day in this house. His expression had gone distant, like someone looking at something they had been waiting a very long time to see.
"I waited," he said quietly. "Longer than you'd believe."
He lifted the gate latch.
I opened my mouth to say something, to call for Azrael, to do anything, and the ground moved.
The ground moved beneath my feet, deep and deliberate and nothing like anything natural, coming up through my soles like a warning from something that had been waiting a very long time and had finally decided to stop.
The black stones at the center of the yard began to glow.
Ethan looked at them and something crossed his face that might have been relief and might have been grief, and I understood in that moment, with the specific clarity that comes just before something terrible, that he had been planning this for a very long time and that I had never been anything other than a piece of it.
I turned toward the street and screamed Azrael's name….