They sat in a perfect circle near the center of the yard, black and smooth, pressed into the earth like they had been there long before the house was built. There were maybe a dozen of them, each one roughly the size of my fist, arranged with a precision that felt deliberate in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.
I crouched down to get a better look. They were carved with something, thin lines that crossed and curved in patterns I didn't recognize.
Probably an old garden border,I told myself. Decorative landscaping. I reached out to touch the nearest one.
A hand wrapped around my wrist so quickly I barely had time to scream or register what was happening.
I gasped and nearly toppled backward, only to find Azrael's face was inches from mine, his jaw tight. His amber eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that made my heart do something embarrassing. My legs instantly clinched themselves together.
"Don't," he said.
I pulled slightly against his grip, more out of reflex than actual resistance. "Okay, that's twice now you've shown up out of nowhere. You are going to have to start explaining yourself."
His thumb moved across the inside of my wrist, just once, like he hadn't realized he was still holding me. Then he let go immediately and straightened up.
"Stay away from those stones."
I stood and crossed my arms. "Why, is the Hell stuff going to get me again?"
He “sighed deeply. “Trust me."
I could still feel where his thumb had rubbed over my wrist even though he was no longer touching me. “You keep asking me to trust you about a thing you haven't actually proven."
His eyes moved over my face in a way that felt uncomfortably thorough. "I know."
My face contorted and a frown formed. “So…like give me a reason.”
A beat of silence passed between us, long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.
"I'm trying," he said, and his voice had dropped into something quieter than I had heard from him before.
I didn't have anything to say to that, which was a new experience for me, so I went inside and got my keys and decided he was probably one of those guys who was really into local folklore.
Weirdo hottie alert,I thought.
The coffee shopon Main Street was calledHollow Grounds, which I appreciated enormously. I ordered something with oat milk and too many pumps of vanilla and settled into a window seat, and within four minutes the waitress had refilled my water and asked me if I was the new girl in the old Hollow house.
"That's me," I said.
She smiled. "Don't let it spook you. That house has good bones."
A man at the counter turned around on his stool. He had the look of someone who had lived in a small town his entire life and considered that an achievement. "You met your neighbor yet?"
"Azrael?" I said. "We've met. He told me there are demons under my backyard, so."
I said it like a joke, expecting them to laugh along with me, except they didn’t. The waitress and the man exchanged a look that I could not fully interpret, something quick and a little too serious for my comfort.
"He'll keep an eye on you," the man said trying to offer a smile.
"He always does," the waitress agreed, refilling his coffee without being asked.
I raised an eyebrow, deciding to let the weirdness go because the alternative was thinking too hard about it on a Saturday. "He watches all the neighbors?"
"Just the ones in that house," the waitress said, and she said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and then she went to take another table's order and left me sitting there with my oat milk latte and approximately forty new questions and a creeping unwelcome suspicion that the entire town was in on a joke I hadn't been told.
Someone had fixed my porch railing while I was gone.
I stood at the bottom of my front steps and stared at it. The lean was gone. The wood had been reset and secured and the whole thing was as solid as the day it was built. The squeaky front step no longer squeaked. The mailbox, which had been listing at a fifteen degree angle since I arrived, stood perfectly straight.
