Bonus Epilogue
LILA
The voices coming from under the floorboards woke me, even though the volume was careful and quiet.
A one sided argument was taking place and I heard Azrael say, “Fine, fine! You’re making excellent points.”
I lay there for a moment, realizing the other side of the bed was empty and had grown cold. With that I sat up and slipped from the bed and followed the voices down stairs.
In the predawn light, I found Azrael holding our daughter against his chest. Together, they slowly swayed the way he’d done since we’d brought her home from the hospital.
Our baby girl Tessa, wasn’t having it. She had turned as red as her father’s skin use to be and she was screaming for all she was worth by the time I joined them in the kitchen.
"I understand," he murmured to her, his tone sounding of defeat. "And I hear you."
Baby Tessa cried harder and briefly I watched Azrael’s eyes close.
"But screaming at me isn't going to solve the problem."
Tessa stopped for just a moment, and then she cranked it up a notch higher.
“No," he said, with the patience of someone who had once talked a lesser demon back through a rift and was now being comprehensively outmatched, "I don't think eating the blanket is the answer either."
I leaned against the doorframe, of our home and just watched. Finally, he turned his head and found me there, and the expression on his face stopped me cold.
His eyes said, plainly and without any attempt at dignity, that he was in over his head.
"She hates me," he sighed.
I frowned. “Stop it, she does not.”
"She does." He looked back down at her, then at me. "Lila, I have fought demons. I have survived Hell itself." A beat. "I cannot win an argument with someone who weighs eight pounds."
I laughed at his words and our daughter took notice, her cries stopping instantly. Azrael stared at her and then threw a glance back at me.
The muscle in his jaw moved. “Clearly, she has favorites.”
"Give her here."
He handed her over with the careful reluctance of someone who had been trying very hard to solve a problem and was not entirely at peace with the solution coming from somewhere else.
The second she settled against my chest she yawned, a tiny enormous yawn that took over her whole face, and closed her eyes.
He watched this without speaking.
"Traitor," he said quietly, to her sleeping face.
An hour later, after getting dressed for the day, I found Azrael in the backyard. He was kneeling in the garden with our daughter strapped against his chest in the soft carrier Debbie had brought over without being asked.
Carefully, he worked around her, planting something in the bed closest to the porch.
She was deep asleep with one tiny fist curled into the fabric of his shirt, her cheek pressed flat against him, her mouth slightly open.
He moved slowly, shifting his weight from knee to knee to avoid waking her, reaching around her with the focused patience of someone for whom this had already become second nature.
I stepped off the porch and crossed the yard to them.
"Thought she hated you," I said.
He looked down at her and the tightness that had been in his face in the kitchen was completely gone. Instead, it was replaced by something I had watched grow in him over the past eight months.
"Turns out she was just hungry," he said. He brushed one finger very gently over her cheek, barely touching.
She stirred and resettled without waking, tightening her fist in his shirt.
I wrapped my arms around both of them from behind and rested my chin on his shoulder and looked out over the garden he had planted where the stone circle used to be, roses growing thick and unhurried in the morning light, completely unbothered by the history of the ground beneath them.
Our daughter made a small sleepy sound.
He turned his head and caught me looking.
"What?" he asked.
"You look good human," I said.
He laughed, quiet and real. "I was hoping."
I reached up and ran my fingers through his hair where his horns used to be. It still caught me sometimes, the absence of them, not as a loss exactly but as a surprise, the way you reach for something on a shelf and find it has been moved somewhere better.
He felt it. He always felt everything.
"Miss them?" he asked.
I thought about it honestly. "Sometimes."
He was quiet for a moment, looking out over the roses. "I don't," he said.
I looked up at him. "No?"
"I spent five hundred years hiding what I was." He looked down at our daughter, her tiny fist still wrapped in his shirt. "I'd rather be seen."
I pressed my face against his shoulder and held on.
We stood together in the early morning quiet, looking out over the place that had almost taken everything from us, and the wind moved through the roses and the light kept coming and our daughter slept against his chest like she had always known exactly where she belonged.
She stretched in her sleep, one tiny arm extending and curling back, and he looked down at her and then across at me with an expression that five hundred years of exile and isolation had apparently been quietly building toward.
"Worth it," he said.
"What was?"
He pressed his lips to my forehead and then to our beautiful daughter.
"Everything," he said.
Three weeks later I walked back into Blackthorn Family Medical for my first day back, and Debbie and May were sitting at the front desk with their coffees already made, the appointment schedule already pulled up, and the collective energy of two women who had simply come to work.
Debbie looked up. "You made it."
I stopped in the doorway. "You two literally negotiated with Heaven."
May shrugged. "Yeah."
Debbie took a long sip of her coffee. "Quarterly reports were still due."
I stared at them for a moment, at their completely ordinary coffees and their completely ordinary expressions, and then I started laughing.
I couldn’t stop, leaning against the doorframe while Debbie looked pleased with herself. May looked serene and the fish tank burbled away in the waiting room exactly as it always had.
"Are you seriously just back at work," I managed.
Debbie looked genuinely offended. "Girl, the Divine gives us assignment, but we have still got to make a living…”
The front door opened behind me and I turned around. Azrael was coming through it with our daughter in the carrier against his chest, because he had insisted on driving me in.
I’d decided not to argue, and the waiting room turned toward him the way sunflowers turn toward light, every head swiveling at once.
Debbie looked at him over the crowd with the satisfaction of someone watching something they had waited a very long time to see.
"Never thought I'd see the Guardian changing diapers," she said.
Azrael looked down at our daughter, who was awake and regarding the room with the serious dark eyes she had inherited from him.
“I’m surprisingly good at it," he said.
May nodded. "Guarding tiny humans counts too."
Our daughter reached up and grabbed a fistful of his shirt and held on, and he looked down at her and then across the room at me, a smile developing like a picture in a dark room.
I returned my mate’s smile.
Outside the mountains sat solid and blue at the edge of the sky, and Blackthorn Ridge went about its ordinary Saturday morning, completely unaware of what lived beneath it or who was keeping watch.
Just the way it was supposed to be.