She stared at me for a long silent moment.
Then she burst out laughing. It was a full on and completely unguarded, kind of laugh that had her slapping her knees. I stood there in the middle of her kitchen, while she laughed her silly for at least three minutes and waited for it to pass.
"Demons," she repeated, when she could speak again. "There are demons in my backyard?”
"Beneath it, technically…”
"Beneath it." She nodded slowly. "And you know this because..."
"Because I have lived next door for a very long time and I am telling you."
"Right." She tilted her head. "And you are what exactly? The neighborhood demon expert?"
Biting at my lip, I nodded, “Something like that."
She studied me for a moment with those warm brown eyes, and I had the distinct sense she was deciding whether to take me seriously or find me entertaining. She had been doing exactly that since the moment I walked across the street this afternoon, and it was, I was finding, a deeply irritating quality.
"I think," she said pleasantly, "that you need less caffeine."
"I think you need to take this seriously,” I shot back.
"I think you walked into my house uninvited at ten o'clock at night to tell me there are demons under my backyard." She picked her mug back up. "I think that's a lot of information to process on my first night as a homeowner."
"The backyard," I said heading towards the door. "After dark. Stay inside."
"Uh huh,” she mock saluted me.
A frown formed on my face, “I mean it."
"I can tell." She smiled at me, small and genuine and completely unbothered by any of this. "Good night, neighbor."
I left then and I sat on my porch for a long time after that.
Her lights moved through the house slowly, warm yellow squares shifting from room to room across the dark front of the building. I tracked them without meaning to, from the living room to the hallway, up the stairs, and into the upstairs bedroom where the light stayed on longer than the rest before finally going dark just before eleven.
She wasn’t going to listen to me. I had known that within forty seconds of our first conversation, when she had looked at me across the street and laughed instead of being sensible. She was going to wander outside after dark. She was going to ask questions I was not sure I was ready to answer. She was going to be warm and funny and completely unbothered by things that should have bothered her, and I was going to have to manage the Gate and whatever it was doing in response to her presence and apparently also manage her, which was not a variable I had accounted for in five centuries of otherwise uncomplicated work.
She had smiled at me when I told her there were demons under her yard.
I thought about it longer than I should have.
The bedroom window stayed dark. The porch light she had left on burned steadily against the night, small and warm and so completely ordinary. I picked the Cardinal's contract back up and stared at the same page I had been reading before she arrived.
I didn’t retain a single word of it.
I set it down, stood up, and reminded myself I had work to do. Wards to reinforce. A perimeter to check. A containment assessment to complete before morning. Five centuries of it, and not one night of it had ever required me to sit on my porch failing to read a fourteenth century blood contract because a woman in fuzzy socks had smiled at me.
I was halfway across the yard when the ground shifted.
Not physically. Humans would not have felt it at all. It moved through the infernal layer beneath the earth, through the warding and the seals I had spent centuries maintaining, and it came up through the soles of my feet and settled at the base of my skull like a sound heard from the wrong end of a very long corridor.
My name, in a voice that did not belong to anything living. Not spoken, not quite. Something older than language, something that had been waiting in the dark below the Hellgate long enough that patience had stopped being a strategy and become simply its nature.
Azrael.
I went completely still.
The seals still held. I’d checked them immediately, the way you check a lock after hearing something in the dark. Every ward was still intact. Every layer of containment exactly where I had placed it. Whatever was down there was not getting through, not tonight and not anytime soon.
