I stood up as anger feel every part of my being. I began to ache from love and loss.
I wanted revenge and I would have it.
I stopped being the demon that Lila had loved. I had kept that version of myself carefully in place since the morning she stood on her porch and told me I was committed to a bit, the quiet neighbor with the ancient books and the single coffee mug, the one who fixed porch railings and carried groceries and learned, for the first time in five hundred years, what it felt like to belong somewhere. I had been that person because she made it possible and because I had wanted, more than anything, to be something she was not afraid of.
I let it all go.
The black wings burst from my back first, then the fire, then the full weight of what I was. A sword of pure hellfire formed in my hands. I was what Hell had made me before it exiled me to this mountain ridge. I was the thing that had kept the Gate sealed through earthquakes and incursions and every dark thing that had ever pressed against the boundary of this town. Malphas looked at me across the ruined yard with borrowed eyes and smiled.
"Guardian,"he whispered gleefully.
I hit him before the word finished. The fight moved through everything Lila had built.
Her porch came apart under the force of it. The fence we had leaned against and talked across in the early evenings exploded outward. The oak tree at the corner of the property caught fire.Every place where something good had grown in the last weeks was unmade in minutes, and I felt each one as I fought through it, not as distraction but as fuel, the specific grief of someone destroying the thing they were trying to protect and unable to stop.
Malphas was strong in a body in a way he had never been as a whisper through the gate, with Ethan's Alpha strength layered beneath his own, and he knew how to use both. I took the hits I had to take to landed the ones that mattered.
Then Ethan broke through.
One moment, one fracture in the possession, and Ethan's own eyes looked out at me from his face. The person behind them was already far gone. I could see it in the quality of his gaze, the way a candle looks in the last second before it goes out, everything concentrated into one final point of light.
"Guardian." His voice was barely his own.
I went still for just a moment and listened.
"Kill me," he said.
Malphas slammed back into control and smiled at me with Ethan's mouth. I understood that Ethan had known somewhere beneath the grief and the planning that this was always where his road ended.
He had known and he had done it anyway because he had buried his daughter and could not find another way to reach her. I drove the flaming blade through his chest.
Malphas screamed with a sound that had no business coming from a human throat. Fire from the blade began to consume the vessel that had once been a man and the Gate began to close. The crack sealing from the edges inward, the runes fading, the glow dying from the stones one by one until the yard was dark and still and smelled of rain and overturned earth and nothing else.
I let the weapon go before it hit the ground, the flame dying immediately.
She was exactly where I had left her, curled on her side in the center of the circle, one hand still resting against her stomach. I gathered her into my lap and her head fell against my chest and her blood was on my hands, the same hands that had planted flowers in her yard and tucked her hair behind her ear and held her while she slept and made promises I had believed I could keep.
"I'm sorry, Lil,” I murmured, tears began to pool in my eyes.
In five hundred and something years, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried. Lila remained still, and didn’t stir because of the tears hitting her face.
"I promised you." My voice did not sound like mine. "I promised you."
I brushed her hair back from her face the way I had done a hundred times, carefully and completely unnecessarily. It was the only thing I knew how to do in that moment. Her hand was still curved against her stomach, still there, still protecting something she had not yet had time to understand she was carrying.
I pressed my forehead to her hair and closed my eyes.
The Hellgate was sealed. The ward would hold. The town above it was safe and sleeping and entirely unaware of what had been spent tonight to keep it that way.
None of it mattered now, though.
Because I had promised her, and I had not saved her.
My mate was dead and lifeless. And, I wanted to join her wherever her soul might have gone.
EPILOGUE
AZRAEL
