The backyard was quiet.
The Hellgate was sealed. The stone circle was broken. Ethan lay where he had fallen, and Lila lay in my arms, and the world kept turning the way it always did.
Spinning away, and indifferent and completely unaware that disaster had been averted.
Birds started singing somewhere in the tree line and morning light crept across the ruined yard. It touched the blackened grass and the collapsed flower beds and the splintered porch railing I had repaired three times and would never repair again. I watched it move and did not move with it.
I brushed the dirt from her cheek.
"I'm sorry," I said again. My voice came out wrong, too quiet, too careful, like I was afraid of disturbing something. "I promised I would protect you." I smoothed her hair back the way I had done a hundred mornings, uselessly, completely, because there was nothing else left to do with my hands. "And I failed."
For the second time in my existence, I had lost the person I loved.
The first time had taken me a century to survive.
I did not think I would survive this one.
I had never prayed before.
In five hundred and thirty seven years the thought had not once occurred to me, because Hell had claimed me long before the Divine had any opportunity to.
I had made my peace with that the way you made peace with things that were simply true.
I was not a something that prayed.
I was something that endured.
But I had nothing left to endure with. I bowed my head over Lila’s body and closed my eyes.
"I don't know if You hear demons," I said. The words felt strange in my mouth, unpracticed and clumsy, offered into a silence I had no reason to believe was listening. "I don't know if I deserve an answer."
My hand settled over her stomach, over the life we had made without understanding what we were making, over the thing I had only just been given time to want.
"But if there is any mercy left," I said, “Please, I beg You. Not for me. For them."
Wind moved through the ruined yard. Birds continued to tweet and the morning light continued its indifferent progress across the blackened grass.
Then a SOFT familiar voice said, "Well. About damn time…”
I looked up slowlyand found Debbie and May were walking through the broken garden gate with the unhurried ease of two women. They acted as if Ethan’s dead body wasnt laying twenty feet away, as if I was not sitting in the ruins of everything holding a dead woman in my arms.
They were not afraid.
They were not surprised.
They looked, if anything, like they had been waiting for this particular morning for a considerable amount of time.
Something about them felt different. Not different in a way I could see, but in a way I could feel, the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm, warm and ancient and completely steady.
I understood before I said it.
"Watchers," I said.
Debbie smiled an angelic like smile. "Took you long enough."
May crossed her arms. "Five hundred years isn't exactly quick."
"You're with the Divine." I heard how it sounded coming out, stunned and flat and entirely inadequate for the situation. "You've been here the whole time."
