I turned around. "You broke a pool cue."
"It was defective…”
"You have used that specific cue for weeks,” I reminded him.
He paused. “Nope, definitely a manufacturing defect."
I stared at him. The absolute straightforwardness with which he delivered that was somehow the funniest and most infuriating thing I had ever encountered. I crossed my arms and looked up at him in the light spilling through the bar window.
"So what exactly is going on with you?"
The silence stretched long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer. His gaze dropped to my mouth, just briefly, and came back up.
"You should go back inside," he said.
"Answer me."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm trying very hard to do the right thing."
I held his gaze. "And what's the wrong thing?"
His voice dropped into something quieter. "Kissing you again."
I stood there in the cool night air and felt my heart do something completely inconvenient. Then I turned around and went back inside, mostly because if I stayed out there another thirty seconds I was going to do something I couldn't take back.
Again.
When it was closing time,he walked me home anyway.
Neither of us spoke, and when we reached my porch he stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at me.
"Lock your doors tonight," he said.
I sighed. "You always say that."
"This time I mean it differently."
Something in his voice made me turn toward the backyard. The tree line sat at the edge of the property the way it always did, dark and quiet and perfectly ordinary looking.
Except that something moved at the very edge of it, right at the border where the porch light stopped reaching, a shift in the dark that was there and then wasn't.
I looked back at Azrael. The man who had just been jealous over a pool cue, who had counted thirteen days, who had taken my braid apart like it was something he had earned the right to do, was completely gone. The person looking at that tree line now was something older and quieter and far more serious, radiating the kind of focused stillness that made every instinct I had go very, very still right along with it.
I went inside and locked the door without being asked twice, with shivers running down my spine.
6
AZRAEL
Aweek had passed since I’d walked Lila home from Cue’s. I was back on the ward line at dawn, pressing my fingers to the earth at the outer seal the way I had every morning for five centuries, telling myself I was getting back to routine.
Five hundred and thirty seven years of discipline had come undone by one receptionist with terrible financial judgment and an even worse taste in neighbors.
The seals were hold and the warding was intact. Everything was exactly as it should be and I had absolutely no reason to look across the street.
