“Azrael…you called me yours."
Rubbing at the back of my neck, I replied. “I didn't mean to say it."
Lilabit her lip. “You didn't mean to call me yours."
The silence that followed had considerable weight to it.
"No," I said.
Ethan looked between us with the expression of a man was defeated. He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and smiled at Lila with what I had to acknowledge was genuine warmth.
"I'll let you two work this out," he said pleasantly, and let himself out.
The door had barely closed before Lila turned to face me with the full force of her attention, which was, I had learned, considerable.
She took a deep breath, and then unleashed on me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I winced. “I don't know."
She took it up a notch. “Yes the fuck you do know!”
"No…”
She shook her head and then stabbed a finger into my chest. “You're jealous."
I said nothing.
"Azrael."
I looked at her and then at the sticky note on the wall behind her that said water plants Friday. At the way she was standing in front of me, anger radiating off her body, her chin up and her eyes fixed on me like she had decided she was owed an honest answer and intended to collect it.
"Yes," I finally admitted..
She looked at me for a long moment, something working behind her eyes that I couldn't quite read. Then she turned and walked down the hall and the bedroom door closed behind her with a firmness that communicated everything a slam would have.
I stood in her living room for a moment before letting myself out.
I was halfway across her yard when I stopped. The hydrangea Ethan had helped Lila planted near the corner of the flower bed was withering. Not slowly, the way plants wilted from poor soil or insufficient water, but visibly and rapidly, the stem bending and the petals browning at the edges and the whole thing folding inward like something was drawing the life out of it from beneath the soil.
I turned toward the tree line.
The ward pulsed once beneath the earth, low and deliberate, and a voice drifted through the dark space between the trees with the unhurried quality of something that had been watching for a while and had decided the time had come to be heard.
"Everything she touches dies eventually."
I stood completely still in the middle of Lila’s yard with the dead hydrangea behind me and looked at the tree line and felt something settle in my chest that had nothing todo with jealousy and everything to do with five centuries of understanding exactly what lived below that ridge.
Whatever was listening from the dark below the earth was no longer content to simply speak my name in the small hours.
It was making threats now.
And the smile I had been wearing, however reluctantly, since the moment Ethan walked out of her front door was completely, entirely gone.
7
LILA
Iwoke up Saturday morning in a better mood than I had any business being in, and I immediately blamed the sunshine coming through the curtains because that was a much safer explanation than the alternative.
