"Hm?"
"I don't think this place feels haunted anymore."
He was quiet for a moment. "No?"
"No." I looked up at him. "I think you scared away all the ghosts."
He looked down at me with something in his expression that I still did not entirely have a word for, warm and steady and a little bit like the way people look at things they cannot quite believe are real.
"Only the ones I could," he said quietly.
I kissed him, slow and easy, the kind of kiss that had nowhere it needed to be, and he kissed me back the same way, and the swing moved gently and the fireflies drifted and for one long suspended moment everything in my world was exactly right.
Then he stopped.
It was sudden enough that I felt it before I understood it, his arms loosening, his breath catching, his whole body going still in a way that was different from his usual stillness. He pulled backjust enough to look at me, and the expression on his face was one I had never seen before, something stripped of all the careful control he usually kept in place.
"Lila."
I frowned. "What?"
He didn't answer right away. He looked at me the way he looked at the ward line when something had shifted in it, reading something I couldn't see, his eyes moving over my face slowly.
"Lila," he said again, very quietly.
"You're scaring me a little."
He took one slow step back, just enough space to look at me fully, and when his eyes met mine they had the quality of someone standing at the edge of something enormous.
"You're pregnant," he said.
I laughed automatically, the kind of laugh that comes out when something catches you completely off guard. "No I'm not."
Azrael didn’t smile but he also did’nt look away. He simply looked at me, steady and certain and completely serious, like a man watching the world rearrange itself into a shape he had not dared to imagine.
Wait a damn minute,I thought as the world came crashing down around me.
11
LILA
Azrael’s eyes had not left my facefor a full five minutes at least. His posture remainedthe same and the coffee cup in his hands remain unused. The coffee inside of said white cup had to have grown cold. I tried raising a brow casually at him, and then I tried to give a small laugh.
"You can smell it?” I asked flatly.
"Yes."
"You can smell that I'm pregnant."
"Omega pregnancies change the scent within days of conception. It's distinct." He paused. "Unmistakable."
I looked at him for a long moment. Then I picked up my purse, found my keys, and drove to the pharmacy three blocks away without saying another word. I was so quick inside of the store you would have thought I was the Flash.
I came back with a box and held it up between us.
"Go home," I said.
"Lila…”
