When an Omega carries the child of a demon guardian, the final ward seal may be broken from within. The one who opens the Gate shall receive one wish from the demon enclosed.
Below it, underlined twice:Malphas always pays his debts.
I had to believe it. I had built two years of careful, patient, methodical work on the foundation of that belief, and if it was wrong then everything I had done to Lila Hart, every manipulation and nudge and quiet interference, meant nothing. Worse than nothing.
I reached into the glovebox and took out the small wooden box I kept there. Inside was a photograph of a little girl, maybe four years old, sitting in a red wagon in a backyard, laughing at something outside the frame. Her hair was the same dark blond as mine. She had her mother's eyes.
Emma had died on a Tuesday in November, three years ago, of a thing that should not have been able to take a healthy four-year-old and did anyway.
I brushed my thumb across her face. "Just a little longer, baby girl." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Daddy's going to bring you home."
I thought back to the farmer's market two days ago. Lila turning pale in the produce aisle, waving off the peaches she had been reaching for. The way she had pressed her hand flat against her stomach for just a moment, quick and unconscious, before she smiled and said she was fine.
And then there had been Azrael, hovering closer than he had been the week before. The way he tracked her movement told me things. Things that maybe no one else could see but I could.
That was the moment I understood the plan was working. The Guardian had fallen, completely and utterly in love with his Omega neighbor.
And in falling, he had given Lila something neither of them had yet understood the significance of.
She had no idea what he had given her.
Given us…
That nightI walked to the edge of the ward line at the back of the property I had been quietly leasing for six months, two streets over from Lila's house. I crouched at the edge of the stone circle and pressed my palm flat against the earth. The ground hummed against my hand, low and patient, the way it always did when I came close enough.
Then the voice came up through the soil, smooth and unhurried and ancient."Has she conceived?"
I swallowed. "I believe so."
A sound moved through the earth that might have been laughter."Good."
I gripped Emma's photograph in my other hand until the edges bit into my palm. "You promised me a wish."
"And you shall have it,"the voice said warmly.
The answer came too quickly and I felt the wrongness of it in the back of my throat the way you feel weather changing. Still, I pushed the feeling down the same way I had been pushing it down for two years. I stood up and looked toward Lila's house, and then toward Azrael's.
I did not see lovers.
I saw mechanisms like a lock and a key that I had moved into place over two years give or take.
I was sorry for Lila Hart. I wanted to be clear about that, at least to myself. I was genuinely, deeply sorry. But I had buried my daughter once, and I would not leave her in the ground because a demon had finally learned how to love.
The Guardian had given me the key.
Now I only had to take it.
10
LILA
Iwoke up feeling like something had gone wrong in the night and neglected to tell me what.
The nausea hit before I even sat up, that low rolling kind that sits at the back of your throat and dares you to move too quickly. I made it to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and stood in front of the coffee maker staring at the carafe with the particular misery of someone whose entire morning routine had just been made inaccessible. The smell alone was enough to send me two steps backward.
I made toast instead. I stood at the counter looking at it and could not make myself take a bite.
Azrael appeared in the kitchen doorway with dirt on his hands and a small trowel, which told me he had been in my flowerbeds again, which he did without asking and which I had stopped objecting to somewhere around the third week.
