But it was awake.
And it knew she was here.
I turned back toward the house across the street. The porch light remained burning, steady with no flickering. The bedroom window stayed dark. She was in there sleeping, blissfully unaware, with her houseplants and her sticky notes and her braided hair and her absolute refusal to take a single thing I said seriously.
Something cold and certain settled in my chest.
I turned back toward the tree line.
Not her,I thought, toward whatever was listening from the dark below the earth.
Not a chance.
3
LILLA
Ihad convinced myself by morning that the demon conversation had not happened. Demons weren't real. But I had decided my actual takeaway from last night was that my new neighbor had an extremely dark sense of humor and an even stranger way of breaking into houses to deliver it.
It was the only logical explanation. I had driven two hours, unloaded half my life from a hatchback, and fallen asleep on an air mattress at ten o'clock like someone's grandmother. Sleep deprivation did strange things to a person. It made you imagine impossibly attractive neighbors saying impossibly strange things in your kitchen. It made cabinets seem like they opened on their own. It made whispers under the floorboards sound deliberate instead of architectural.
I made my coffee, pulled my hair into a braid, and stepped out onto the porch in my oversized sweatshirt and leggings feeling very reasonable about all of this.
Then I looked across the street.
Azrael fine ass was shirtless and had my mouth water immediately as I took in the sight of him.
He was crouched down beside his motorcycle in the driveway, working with the focused efficiency of someone who had done it ten thousand times. My eyes tried to drink in the strange dark markings that swept across his shoulders and down his arms, shifting faintly whenever he moved.
Clearly tattoos,I thought, licking my lips as if my tongue wanted to dart out and have a taste.
At first he wasn't looking at me but it was as if he sensed my prescience and turned to stare at me.
He straightened up quickly, wiped his hands on a rag, and looked at me across the quiet street with an expression that gave absolutely nothing away. He just looked like he had all the time in the world and intended to use some of it on me specifically.
I took a long sip of my coffee before giving a slight holler. "Do all demons work shirtless?"
Something moved at the corner of his mouth and he hollered back. "Do all Omegas ask this many questions before breakfast?"
I snorted before sipping again. "Only the ones with creepy neighbors who break into their kitchens to talk about Hell."
He shifted his weight once more. “Neighbor?"
"You're watching me."
"I was watching the tree."
I looked at the empty space between us. "There isn't a tree between us."
He looked at the same empty space. "Exactly."
I went back inside before I said something I couldn't take back, mentally filing him under harmless but extremely committed to his weird neighbor bit.
My backyard was stunning, which felt deeply unfair given everything else the property had put me through in the last eighteen hours.
Wildflowers grew in tall clusters along the fence line, purple and white and yellow against the dark tree line beyond.Towering pines bordered the back of the property, their roots lifting gently from the earth in places, and the morning light came through them in long slanted beams that made the whole yard feel like something out of a painting.
I was genuinely considering whether I could put a reading chair out here when I saw the stones.
