He was ancient and enormous and entirely himself, and something about seeing it, seeing all of it at once, made the last several weeks rearrange themselves in my mind into a shape that was suddenly, completely legible.
This mother…this motherfucker…this motherfucker isn’t human…my thoughts were humming all over the place.
The displaced stone at the edge of the circle slid back into place on its own. The ward sealed itself and I understood, somehow, that that was what I was watching, though I could not have explained how I knew.
The fire faded slowly. The horns receded. His skin returned to bronze. The markings settled back into the pattern I had memorized and called tattoos for two weeks because it was easier than the alternative.
Then he lifted his head and looked directly at my window and our eyes met.
He knew that I’d just seen everything.
The laundry basket slipped out of my hands. I heard it hit the floor and the clothes scatter across the hardwood and I did not look down. I couldn’t look away from him. He stood in the backyard in the fading evening light and looked back at me and his expression was the quietest and most unguarded I had ever seen on his face, like a man who had been carrying something carefully for a very long time and had just felt it shift.
"Oh my God," I whispered.
Across the yard, he closed his eyes. Just once, very briefly and I knew he’d probably been wondering if this might ever happen.
I stepped back from the window.
My heart was doing something loud and complicated and my brain was running about four conversations simultaneously, none of them reaching a conclusion. I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the clothes on the floor and thought about the cabinet swinging open on the first night, and the stones in the circle, and the way he had looked at the tree line like he was waiting for something to come through it, and the way the whole town looked at him like he was something they trusted without needing to understand.
The impossible had not been hiding in the woods.
It had been living across the street the entire time, watering my flowers and fixing my porch rail and carrying my groceries and tucking my hair back behind my ear like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I looked at the window.
I looked at the floor.
I picked up a sweater and held it and tried to decide what a reasonable person should do about finding out the neighbor they had slept with was a demon.
Maybe I needed like an exorcism?
8
AZRAEL
Ihadn’t slept.
I had however, spent the night, the way I spent most difficult nights, by sitting in the chair by the window with a book. Even thought I wasn’t reading it, not really, because my attention remained on the house across the street. Lila’s light had gone out around midnight. But around three am, it had come back on and it had stayed on after that.
My thoughts had drifter to the past briefly. I had once faced execution, in a century I preferred not to think about. I had faced exile. I had stood at the edge of the Hellgate and looked into something that had no bottom and felt nothing that resembled fear. None of it came close to sitting in a chair waiting for Lila Hart to decide whether I was worth fearing or loathing.
She knocked on my door around seven a.m. and I almost welcomed the sound before I realized that might spell the end of whatever it was between us.
I closed my eyes for just a one moment before twisted the door knob and opening my front door.
Lila walked straight past me without a greeting and without a smile. She walked into my living room, turned around, andlooked at me with her arms crossed and her chin up and her expression giving absolutely nothing away.
"You have exactly one chance to explain yourself," she shrugged.
"Fair enough,” I took a break and closed the door gently behind me.
And so…I told her everything.
I told her what I was, where I had come from and what it meant to guard the Hellgate. I explained to Lila about living in the town of Blackthorn Ridge before it had even had a name. That I had lived here for about five hundred and thirty seven years doing daily maintenance and and being isolated.
I explained that I was forever bound to this side of the Earth, and the only thing keeping the hellgate in her backyard closed.
