Debbie shrugged. "Been that way since before your horns came in."
May laughed. Even I, sitting in the wreckage of everything, felt something loosen slightly in my chest at the sound of it.
I looked down at Lila and then back to the two angels standing before me. “Can you save her?"
The lightness left Debbie's face. She crossed to where I sat and crouched beside Lila, and the expression she wore was not the Debbie I had come to know in Cue’s. The loud and warm and entirely ordinary woman who had decided Lila was her daughter. This was something older than that, something that had been watching this town and everyone in it for longer than I had been standing guard over the Gate.
"Yes," she said.
The air went out of me. "But?"
May nodded. "There's always a but."
Debbie stood and folded her arms and looked at me with the expression of someone about to make an offer they had spent a long time preparing.
"Here's the deal," she said.
May sighed quietly looking at her companion. "You always make it sound like you're selling used cars."
Debbie ignored her completely. "You want Lila back. You want your baby." She counted on her fingers. "Then here's what's being offered. You surrender your immortality. Your infernal birthright. Your horns, your fire, your endless life, your place in Hell." She paused and let May continue.
"You'll still guard this place," May said second. "But for the Divine now. You'll live as a man. You'll age. You'll hurt." She smiled. "You'll probably throw your back out around fifty."
I looked at Lila's face, and her hand that was still resting against her stomach.
I asked only one question. "Will she live?"
Debbie nodded. "Yes."
"Our child?"
May smiled. "Yes."
"Done," I said.
Debbie blinked. "I wasn't finished."
I dropped a kiss on my mate’s head. “I didn't need you to be."
Her expression softened in a way I had not seen from her before.
"You know," she said quietly, "five hundred years ago, this would have been a punishment."
She looked at Lila and then back at me.
"Today it's your choice."
I looked at the woman in my arms, at the dirt on her cheek and her hair spread across my lap and the hand that had stayed curved against her stomach through everything, still protecting something she hadn’t had time to understand.
"One lifetime with her," I said, and my voice broke cleanly in half on the last word, "is worth more than eternity without her."
The fire left me first.
Then the markings, fading from my skin slowly, like ink washed away like sins in warm water.
The horns receded and he darkness that had lived behind my eyes since the day I was made went quiet. And then, for the first time in five hundred and thirty seven years, I felt cold.
Real cold, the human kind, settling into my skin and my bones and my hands where they held her.
