I did not move a muscle. "I'm a little distracted."
"By what?" His voice rumbled again and he had my shit purring.
"The six foot four guy breathing down my neck."
I felt more than heard the slow exhale that might, under the right circumstances, have been a laugh. "How's that going?"
"Terribly," I said, and somehow sank the shot anyway.
Eventually, after a few games and minor flirting, we walked back to the house in the kind of quiet that didn't need to be filled. Which was new. Azrael was not, I was learning, a person whotalked to fill space, and I found that I didn't mind it the way I usually did with silence.
"How old are you?" I asked, somewhere between the pool hall and my street, mostly joking.
"Older than your house," he said.
I laughed but again, he didn't. I looked at his profile in the dark and the laugh faded a little around the edges.
"You're committing hard to this act,” I replied.
He didn't answer, which struck me as a strange but I didn’t push it. We stopped at the end of my driveway and I was trying to think of something to say when I noticed his expression change. Something shifted behind his eyes, and every muscle in his body went still ias if he’d identified some sort of threat. His gaze moved to the tree line beyond my backyard and stayed there.
"Lila…”
The way he said my name made the hair on my arms stand up. "What?"
His eyes didn't move from the darkness beyond the trees. "Stay out of your backyard after sunset."
I looked toward the tree line. It was dark and still and completely ordinary looking. There was absolutely nothing back there to be afraid of.
I looked back at him.
He was already watching the darkness, like he expected it to move, and for the first time since I had met him, the joke didn't quite land the way it usually did.
4
AZRAEL
Ihad spent five hundred and thirty seven years mastering self control.
I knew what it felt like to hold a ward line steady through an earthquake. I knew how to maintain a containment seal through a demonic incursion that lasted eleven days without sleep. I had once talked a lesser demon back through a rift using nothing but patience.
Control was not something I had ever struggled with.
Then Lila Hart had bought the house across the street from me and I wanted to touch every fucking inch of her body.
Wind my finger through her French braid…
Now every morning started the same way. I would be on my porch with my coffee and my book, telling myself I was monitoring the Hellgate's energy signature. It seem strongest in the early hours when the boundary between realms was thinnest. That was the reason I was outside. That was the reason my attention kept drifting across the street to where she stood on her porch in an oversized sweatshirt with her coffee mug and her French braid, talking to herself about something I was too far away to hear.
She talked to herself constantly. She also talked to her houseplants, to the mailman, and once, that I had witnessed, to a squirrel that had gotten onto her porch railing. The squirrel had not responded, but she had seemed satisfied with the conversation anyway.
She had thanked the mailman yesterday. Like she had actually stopped what she was doing, walked to the end of the driveway, and thanked him by name.
Who did that?
I turned a page I had not read and told myself I was watching the tree line.
Then, the fucking seal had flickered on a Tuesday. It was subtle, the kind of shift I might have missed if I had not been running daily checks since the night she arrived. I had found a faint irregularity in the warding that smoothed itself out within seconds and left the containment intact. It wasn’t anything too dangerous, or anything that required immediate action.
