But I knew what caused it.
The Hellgate had always been sensitive to powerful emotional states in its immediate vicinity. Rage, grief, fear, anything with enough weight to it could cause a ripple in the thinner parts of the seal. It was one of the reasons I had chosen to live alone on this street for the better part of four centuries, keeping the emotional climate around the Gate as flat and uncomplicated as possible.
I stood at the tree line with two fingers pressed to the earth and acknowledged, with the reluctant honesty of someone who had been lying to themselves for two weeks, that the emotional climate around the Hellgate was no longer flat or uncomplicated.
That was my fault.
Specifically, it was the fault of the way she had looked at me across the pool table three nights ago, like she was solvinga problem she hadn't decided she wanted solved yet. That look had done something to the warding that I was still correcting for.
I reinforced the seal, walked back to the house, and did not look at her windows.
The storm camein fast on a Thursday evening, the way mountain storms do, without much warning and with complete commitment. The power went out across town at half past seven and I was already reaching for my coat before I had consciously decided to move, because her house was dark and she had been alone in it for exactly two weeks and she did not yet know which sounds it made in bad weather were normal and which ones were not.
I told myself that was the reason I was crossing the street in the rain.
She opened the door before I knocked, holding a flashlight pointed at the floor, her hair loose around her shoulders for once, dark curls falling everywhere, and something about that detail knocked every carefully prepared reason for my visit clean out of my head.
"You know," she said, leaning against the doorframe with a small smile that did nothing for my concentration, "you really need a hobby."
"I had one,” I replied my voice sound much more gruff than I’d intended.
She raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"You moved in."
She stared at me for a second, then laughed, bright and unguarded, and stepped aside to let me in. I followed her intothe dark house and reminded myself I was here to check the basement door.
The basement stairs were narrow and the ceiling at the bottom sat low enough that I had to angle my shoulders to move through the space. Lila came down behind me with the flashlight, and the combination of the cramped space and the dark and the particular way she smelled this close made the warding at the back of the property flicker again. I felt it from where I stood and ignored it, which was becoming a habit I was going to have to address.
The old door at the far end rattled steadily in its frame. I moved toward it and she moved at the same moment to look at the far wall and we collided in the middle, her shoulder against my chest, her hand catching my forearm to steady herself.
Neither of us moved away.
I could feel the warmth of her through her thin sleep shirt. I could feel her pulse where her fingers wrapped around my arm. The Gate hummed beneath the foundation and I understood with perfect clarity that the warding was not the only thing that had been wearing thin.
"You're doing it again," she said. Her voice was quieter than usual.
"What?"
"Looking at me like that."
I looked away. She moved around me to examine the rattling door herself, which was unnecessary and slightly dangerous and very her, and I watched her crouch down to look at the bottom of the frame with the flashlight and felt something in my chest pull in a direction I had been refusing to acknowledge for two solid weeks.
"Why do you keep looking at me like that?" she asked, without turning around.
"I don't know."
She stood up and turned around. "Liar."
"I said I don't know,” I repeated the words.
"You act like I'm made of glass."
"No, I don’t.”
She rolled her eyes. “What then?"
The flashlight threw soft light across her face and she was looking at me the way she had looked at me across the pool table, direct and a little relentless. It was like she had decided she was done wondering and wanted an actual answer.
