"You know," she said, "for a man who spent five hundred years guarding Hell, you're surprisingly good with flowers."
I looked up at her from where I was kneeling in the dirt. The morning light was in her hair. Her coffee was the kind she could actually drink now, decaf and full of cream, and she had complained about it every single morning for three weeks and drunk it anyway.
I stood up and brushed the dirt from my hands and walked to her and took her hand.
"Turns out," I said, "heaven grows things too."
She leaned into me and we stood together looking out over the garden that had been a battlefield, over the roses that had grown where the darkness had been, over the yard where everything had ended and somehow, improbably, impossibly, everything had also begun.
For five hundred and thirty seven years, I had believed redemption was something earned.
Lila taught me it was something accepted.
And standing there in the morning light with her hand in mine and her heart beating steadily and the whole quiet future opening out ahead of us, I finally understood mercy.
THE END
BONUS EPILOGUE
LILA
The voices coming from under the floorboards woke me, even though the volume was careful and quiet.
A one sided argument was taking place and I heard Azrael say, “Fine, fine! You’re making excellent points.”
I lay there for a moment, realizing the other side of the bed was empty and had grown cold. With that I sat up and slipped from the bed and followed the voices down stairs.
In the predawn light, I found Azrael holding our daughter against his chest. Together, they slowly swayed the way he’d done since we’d brought her home from the hospital.
Our baby girl Tessa, wasn’t having it. She had turned as red as her father’s skin use to be and she was screaming for all she was worth by the time I joined them in the kitchen.
"I understand," he murmured to her, his tone sounding of defeat. "And I hear you."
Baby Tessa cried harder and briefly I watched Azrael’s eyes close.
"But screaming at me isn't going to solve the problem."
Tessa stopped for just a moment, and then she cranked it up a notch higher.
“No," he said, with the patience of someone who had once talked a lesser demon back through a rift and was now being comprehensively outmatched, "I don't think eating the blanket is the answer either."
I leaned against the doorframe, of our home and just watched. Finally, he turned his head and found me there, and the expression on his face stopped me cold.
His eyes said, plainly and without any attempt at dignity, that he was in over his head.
"She hates me," he sighed.
I frowned. “Stop it, she does not.”
"She does." He looked back down at her, then at me. "Lila, I have fought demons. I have survived Hell itself." A beat. "I cannot win an argument with someone who weighs eight pounds."
I laughed at his words and our daughter took notice, her cries stopping instantly. Azrael stared at her and then threw a glance back at me.
The muscle in his jaw moved. “Clearly, she has favorites.”
"Give her here."
He handed her over with the careful reluctance of someone who had been trying very hard to solve a problem and was not entirely at peace with the solution coming from somewhere else. The second she settled against my chest she yawned, a tiny enormous yawn that took over her whole face, and closed her eyes.
