12. Azrael
AZRAEL
Something was wrong before I even understood what it was.
I had been sitting in the chair by the window, watching her porch after pacing for way too long. That was when the feeling started. There was no vision, or particular sound…
Just a wrongness moving through me from the inside, the specific cold of something that was supposed to be there and wasn't, the way you register a missing step in the dark before your mind has named what your body already knows.
I set down my coffee.
The mating bond that had begun to live inside of me me the way my heartbeat did, constant and warm and so thoroughly present seemed to have just stopped existing.
It was simply gone.
It had been there since the morning after the claim, a steady thread running through everything, connecting me to her the way the ward line connected me to the Gate, fundamental and permanent and not something that changed.
It had gone out like a candle.
Not a dimming or a weakening.
It was simply gone, between one breath and the next, and the place where it had been was so cold and so absolute that for one full second I could not move.
"Lila…”
The silence that answered me was not the ordinary silence of a house with no one in it. It was the silence of something severed.
I was through the front door before I had decided to move.
I cleared the road between our yards in a single motion and landed in her backyard.
Immediately, I was met with turmoil and stench of fresh death.
The grass was black. Not burned, not dead in a normal way as if a drought had pulled the moisture from the surface, but blackened from beneath, as though something below the soil had reached up and taken the life out of it at the root.
Her flower beds, the ones she watered every morning while talking to each plant by name, were collapsed and gray.
The air tasted like sulfur and old fire and the specific darkness I had spent five centuries keeping out of this yard.
The stone circle blazed crimson.
The wards I had maintained for five hundred years were fracturing, the lines of infernal script peeling away from the stones like burning paper, the seals dissolving not because something had broken through from below but because they had been unlocked from above, deliberately and with knowledge no ordinary person should have possessed.
Ethan was kneeling at the far edge of the circle with something clutched in both hands, his head bowed, his shoulders shaking. The Hellgate cracked and line of red ran through the center of the stone circle, dark and widened, pulsing as if it were alive.
And Lila was lying in the center of it.
My mate…
She was on her side with one hand curled beneath her cheek. The other hand was resting flat against her stomach. The stones beneath her were dark and wet and I knew before I reached her what the darkness was.
I dropped to my knees beside her.
"No. Please no…” I had nothing else left inside of me, I had gone cold and empty.
My mate…gone…
Our child…gone….
I heard Ethan before I fully understood what I was seeing.
"I did everything you asked." His voice broke on the words.
He was still kneeling at the edge of the Gate, aphotograph in one hand, journal in the other, tears cutting through the dirt on his face.
He looked like a man who had walked a very long road and arrived somewhere he had not truly let himself imagine. "I kept my end of the bargain.”
The ground split beneath him then.
The darkness that came through the Gate moved like something alive, like shadow with intention
It was there for Ethan. He looked at it with one terrible moment of understanding in his face, the expression of a man who had just grasped that it was too late. That he had indeed made a deal with the devil.
"No," he said.
It took him anyway.
He screamed once, and then the screaming stopped and something else inhabited him, something that wore his face and his voice and looked out from behind his eyes with an age and a satisfaction that had nothing to do with the man who had carried a little girl's photograph in his glovebox for two years.
"There was never a wish," Malphas said, in Ethan's voice.
I watched it happen from where I knelt beside Lila and felt five centuries of careful containment collapse into something much simpler and much older than strategy.
I stood up as anger feel every part of my being. I began to ache from love and loss.
I wanted revenge and I would have it.
I stopped being the demon that Lila had loved.
I had kept that version of myself carefully in place since the morning she stood on her porch and told me I was committed to a bit, the quiet neighbor with the ancient books and the single coffee mug, the one who fixed porch railings and carried groceries and learned, for the first time in five hundred years, what it felt like to belong somewhere.
I had been that person because she made it possible and because I had wanted, more than anything, to be something she was not afraid of.
I let it all go.
The black wings burst from my back first, then the fire, then the full weight of what I was.
A sword of pure hellfire formed in my hands.
I was what Hell had made me before it exiled me to this mountain ridge.
I was the thing that had kept the Gate sealed through earthquakes and incursions and every dark thing that had ever pressed against the boundary of this town.
Malphas looked at me across the ruined yard with borrowed eyes and smiled.
"Guardian," he whispered gleefully.
I hit him before the word finished. The fight moved through everything Lila had built.
Her porch came apart under the force of it.
The fence we had leaned against and talked across in the early evenings exploded outward.
The oak tree at the corner of the property caught fire.
Every place where something good had grown in the last weeks was unmade in minutes, and I felt each one as I fought through it, not as distraction but as fuel, the specific grief of someone destroying the thing they were trying to protect and unable to stop.
Malphas was strong in a body in a way he had never been as a whisper through the gate, with Ethan's Alpha strength layered beneath his own, and he knew how to use both. I took the hits I had to take to landed the ones that mattered.
Then Ethan broke through.
One moment, one fracture in the possession, and Ethan's own eyes looked out at me from his face.
The person behind them was already far gone.
I could see it in the quality of his gaze, the way a candle looks in the last second before it goes out, everything concentrated into one final point of light.
"Guardian." His voice was barely his own.
I went still for just a moment and listened.
"Kill me," he said.
Malphas slammed back into control and smiled at me with Ethan's mouth. I understood that Ethan had known somewhere beneath the grief and the planning that this was always where his road ended.
He had known and he had done it anyway because he had buried his daughter and could not find another way to reach her. I drove the flaming blade through his chest.
Malphas screamed with a sound that had no business coming from a human throat.
Fire from the blade began to consume the vessel that had once been a man and the Gate began to close.
The crack sealing from the edges inward, the runes fading, the glow dying from the stones one by one until the yard was dark and still and smelled of rain and overturned earth and nothing else.
I let the weapon go before it hit the ground, the flame dying immediately.
She was exactly where I had left her, curled on her side in the center of the circle, one hand still resting against her stomach.
I gathered her into my lap and her head fell against my chest and her blood was on my hands, the same hands that had planted flowers in her yard and tucked her hair behind her ear and held her while she slept and made promises I had believed I could keep.
"I'm sorry, Lil,” I murmured, tears began to pool in my eyes.
In five hundred and something years, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried. Lila remained still, and didn’t stir because of the tears hitting her face.
"I promised you." My voice did not sound like mine. "I promised you."
I brushed her hair back from her face the way I had done a hundred times, carefully and completely unnecessarily.
It was the only thing I knew how to do in that moment.
Her hand was still curved against her stomach, still there, still protecting something she had not yet had time to understand she was carrying.
I pressed my forehead to her hair and closed my eyes.
The Hellgate was sealed. The ward would hold. The town above it was safe and sleeping and entirely unaware of what had been spent tonight to keep it that way.
None of it mattered now, though.
Because I had promised her, and I had not saved her.
My mate was dead and lifeless. And, I wanted to join her wherever her soul might have gone.