"Grandpa?"
He looked up, hope springing into his eyes. "Robert?"
I shook my head, because my Dad had been dead for the last five years. “No. It's Ethan. Your grandson."
He blinked slowly trying to recognize me. "Ethan?"
"Yeah." I pulled a chair close and sat down. I set the journal on the table between us.
The change was immediate as his eyes dropped to the cover and sharpened in a way I hadn't seen in two years of visits. His hands started shaking before he even reached for it.
"Where did you get that?"
I whisper low, “Under the workshop. There are three of them."
He grabbed my wrist with a grip that was stronger than it had any right to be. "Burn it."
I went still. "What?"
"Burn every damned page." His eyes were clearer than they had been in months, and whatever was behind them was not comfort. "Promise me."
I hadn't the old man anything. I’d had tried to get answers instead, which turned out to be its own particular kind of cruelty, because his lucidity came in seconds rather than minutes, and every time I got close to something real the window closed again.
"The journals say Malphas grants one wish," I said carefully, leaning forward. "To whoever frees him from the Gate."
His face drained of color so completely that I reached for the call button on instinct. "No."
"The journals are very specific about it."
"He doesn't grant wishes." His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "That's not what he does."
"Then what does he do?"
He opened his mouth. For one suspended moment I was certain he was finally going to give me the answer I had driven four hours for, the piece that would make everything else make sense.
Then his expression softened and drifted and his eyes went to the window.
"Have you seen your grandmother?" he asked pleasantly.
I sat back then and took my grandfather’s face in. It was worn with time, crowfeet and wrinkles. His skin was drooping off the bone; he was wasting away in this place and didn’t even know it.
I drove home with the journal but I didn’t burn any of them.
I was sittingin my truck on the edge of Lila's street now, engine off, watching the lights in the house across from hers.
I hadn’t chose Lila specifically. That was the thing people would misunderstand if they ever knew the whole story, which they would not. I hadn’t targeted her just because.
I had simply been waiting for the right conditions to arrive in the same place at the same time, an unmated Omega, close enough to the Hellgate to matter. I’d needed a compelling enough sacrifice to pull the Guardian out of the isolation he had maintained for centuries.Lila Harthad been the first person who fit every condition simultaneously.
She thought she’d found a bargain.
But it had been me that had made sure that she did. The listing price had been my doing. Not the number itself but the nudge, a word to the right person at the assessor's office, a quiet suggestion to the realtor that the property had been sitting too long and the seller was motivated. I had made sure the inspection came back clean enough not to scare her away. I had made sure nothing went wrong that would have sent her looking elsewhere.
Blackthorn Ridge had always been good at keeping secrets. I was simply using the town's oldest one.
I openedthe journal to the page I had read so many times the paper had gone soft at the fold.
The handwriting was my grandfather's, younger and steadier than anything he had managed in the last decade of his life.
