"What are you doing here?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.
He looked at me for a long moment with that sad smile still in place, and something moved through his expression that looked, genuinely and disturbingly, like remorse.
"I came to apologize," he said.
I did not move. "For what?"
The silence stretched long enough that I heard a bird call once from somewhere in the yard. Ethan looked down at the porch boards, then back up at me, and the remorse in his face deepened into something that looked like it had been there for a very long time.
"For choosing you," he said.
The words did not make sense in the order he had put them. I turned them over twice and they still did not make sense, and the hair on the back of my neck was standing up in a way that had nothing to do with the morning air.
"I don't understand," I said carefully.
He did not explain. He stepped off the porch slowly, not toward me but sideways, moving in a wide unhurried arc toward the side of the house, toward the backyard gate. There was nothing aggressive in the movement, nothing rushed, and that was somehow worse than if there had been.
"You were simply," he said, pausing at the gate latch, his voice carrying the resigned quality of someone finishing a thought they had rehearsed many times, "the right Omega…”
My back found the porch railing.
"What?" The word came out thin.
He looked toward the backyard. Toward the stone circle at the center of the yard that I had been told not to touch on mysecond day in this house. His expression had gone distant, like someone looking at something they had been waiting a very long time to see.
"I waited," he said quietly. "Longer than you'd believe."
He lifted the gate latch.
I opened my mouth to say something, to call for Azrael, to do anything, and the ground moved.
The ground moved beneath my feet, deep and deliberate and nothing like anything natural, coming up through my soles like a warning from something that had been waiting a very long time and had finally decided to stop.
The black stones at the center of the yard began to glow.
Ethan looked at them and something crossed his face that might have been relief and might have been grief, and I understood in that moment, with the specific clarity that comes just before something terrible, that he had been planning this for a very long time and that I had never been anything other than a piece of it.
I turned toward the street and screamed Azrael's name….
12
AZRAEL
Something was wrong before I even understood what it was.
I had been sitting in the chair by the window, watching her porch after pacing for way too long. That was when the feeling started. There was no vision, or particular sound…
Just a wrongness moving through me from the inside, the specific cold of something that was supposed to be there and wasn't, the way you register a missing step in the dark before your mind has named what your body already knows.
I set down my coffee.
The mating bond that had begun to live inside of me me the way my heartbeat did, constant and warm and so thoroughly present seemed to have just stopped existing.
It was simply gone.
It had been there since the morning after the claim, a steady thread running through everything, connecting me to her the way the ward line connected me to the Gate, fundamental and permanent and not something that changed.
It had gone out like a candle.
