Beside her, Seth switched on the lamp. She squinted against the glare.
“You are now. I’ll text you the address. You have twenty minutes to get your ass down here. Pick up coffee on your way.”
“Wait—”
The phone went dead. Alex stared at it, trying to gather her muddled thoughts and sort through her myriad unanswered questions. How many victims? Why call her? Was everyone else tied up on other cases? She thought back to the mass murder wrought by Caim and shuddered. Please don’t let it be another like that …
Setting the phone down, she turned to find Seth propped up on one arm, his black eyes watchful.
“My supervisor wants me at a scene.”
“Did he say what it is?” Seth’s voice took on the hint of a growl, the way it did whenever they spoke of her job.
“Beyond a homicide? No.” Slipping out of bed, Alex stripped off her pajama bottoms and reached for the panties and slacks she’d hung on the back of the door in anticipation of her meeting with Roberts later that day. A meeting that was supposed to determine whether or not she could return to investigative duties.
She assumed it was canceled now.
“But you think it has to do with them,” Seth persisted.
Them. Angels, Fallen Ones, Heaven, Hell …
His parents.
A whole other world paralleling her own, controlling it, threatening its very existence. Her fingers clamped onto the duvet. No. Michael had told her she was done with all that. He’d assured her the worst she would face would come from her own world, from humanity’s knee-jerk reaction to its own fear. Which, given what she’d come to expect of her fellow mortals, would be bad enough.
Still …
She shook off the creeping tentacles of doubt and continued dressing. “I’m sure it’s just an ordinary homicide,” she said. “Not that any homicide is ordinary, but—” She broke off. Sighed. “You know what I mean.”
“But what if it’s not? What if it is them? I want to come with you.”
“We’ve been over this.” She slipped into her blouse and then dropped onto the edge of the bed, reaching to stroke the hair, dark as his eyes, back from Seth’s forehead. “This is my job. It’s what I’m trained to do. Even if it is them, there’s nothing—”
She stopped, but not before Seth’s eyes hardened into obsidian.
“Nothing I can do?” he finished.
She bit back her denial. They both knew that’s what she’d been about to say. Just as they both knew it was the truth.
Silence stretched between them, thick with arguments already had and words scrupulously avoided. They’d been over this same territory at least once a day since their return from Vancouver a week ago, their ongoing disagreement adding to the tensions between them.
Seth was right. They couldn’t continue like this. She couldn’t continue like this.
She curled her fingers around his. “I know this is hard,” she said. “I’ll try to find someone I can talk to, all right? Just … give me time. I’ll get past this.”
Seth turned his hand palm up and linked his fingers with hers. For a long moment she let his love, his strength, seep into her. Then she rose, dropped a kiss on his lips, and left.
Chapter 2
Aramael drew back from the rooftop edge as the door of the apartment building across the street opened. A woman stepped into the night, blond hair glinting briefly in the glow of the light above the door. A tiny thread of awareness tugged deep inside him. Alexandra.
He didn’t need to see her features to be certain. He just … knew. The way he knew when she slept or woke. Or when she moved from one room to another in the apartment she shared with Seth Benjamin.
The thread inside him drew tight.
All things he wasn’t supposed to know anymore because he wasn’t supposed to care. He’d assured Mika’el that he didn’t, that any connection between him and Alex had been severed.
But here he was. Day after day, night after night, using his patrols of the earthly realm as an excuse to stay near, to check on her. To torture himself with the tiny, too intimate glimpses into her life without him. The life she’d chosen with another.
At first he’d told himself he only wanted to be sure she was all right. That she suffered no ill effects from her run-in with the second most powerful being in the universe. On his third night standing in this same spot, however, he’d given up the pretense. For him, the soulmate connection remained. He knew now that it always would.
Mika’el would be furious if he found out.
So would Alex.
Flexing the massive black wings at his back, he wondered briefly if he would ever become accustomed to their weight, so much greater than that of the Power’s wings he’d once worn. Then he launched himself into the air above the city.
***
Seth watched Alex’s car roll out of the apartment parking lot and onto the night-emptied street eight stories below. Letting the curtain settle back across the window, he turned to face the apartment. Just him, the furniture, and who knew how many hours before her return. He flicked a glance in the direction of a soft tick, tick, tick.
Him, the furniture, and that damnable wall clock, ever so helpfully keeping count of those hours.
He lowered himself onto the sofa, elbows resting on knees, and traced a thumb across his bottom lip. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. None of it. Not after what they’d been through together, not after he’d brought her back from the brink of death—twice—and sure as Hell not after they’d chosen each other the way they had.
He’d given up all he had been, all he’d been destined to do. For her. For mortality.
For this.
He surveyed the room, lit by a single floor lamp standing alone in one corner. A rental property, it exuded not a hint of the woman he loved. Alex claimed she hadn’t had time to deal with rebuilding after Aramael and Caim’s battle had burned her former home to the ground, but Seth knew better. He saw in the hardness of her eyes there was more to it. She might not have said so—might not have admitted it to herself—but the real reason she hadn’t rebuilt was because she didn’t see the point.
And he couldn’t argue with her.
Not with what he knew was coming.
It was bad enough that Lucifer and the One insisted on going to war, a war that would inevitably spill over into the mortal realm. But if Lucifer had been telling the truth about the eighty thousand Nephilim his followers had bred…
Closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose. The human race didn’t stand a chance. It was just a matter of time until every mortal soul on the planet was wiped out, including Alex—and now that he’d given up his immortality, him.
Which was why none of this was how it was supposed to be. Alex trying to stem an unstoppable tide, him staring at a featureless beige wall, both apart for hours at a stretch instead of spending their time together, away from all of this. Away from her job, the constant threats, the relentless insanity gripping the universe. None of which he could do a bloody thing about.
Dissatisfaction gave a sinuous roll in his belly. Perhaps he’d been too quick to—
He opened his eyes, cutting his thoughts short. No. His former powers had no bearing here. He’d given them up because he didn’t want them, damn it. Because he’d wanted no more part in the endless battle between his parents. He’d chosen Alex over all of that. Had chosen … he stared at the featureless room again.
He’d chosen this. Of his own free will.
It was time he made the best of it.
Chapter 3
“Two sugars, no cream.” Alex handed one of the disposable coffee cups to the tall, overcoated man standing beneath a streetlamp.
Doug Roberts, staff inspector for Homicide Section, took the cup from her with a grunt of thanks. His assessing gaze swept over her from head to toe, then traveled back up to meet hers. “You look sane enough.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Voice of Doom has
been trying to convince me otherwise for the past week.”
She raised a brow. “Bell?”
“The highly qualified Doctor Bell,” Roberts corrected. “In whose esteemed opinion, you’re ready for the loony bin.”
“What the hell is with that guy? Why is he so determined to trash my career?”
“It’s more about his own career. And his ego. He’s pissed that I’m allowing you back to work based on the judgment of an unknown psychiatrist on the other side of the country.”
“A psych—you mean Elizabeth Riley? Wait a minute. She contacted you, and you still made me suffer through a week of meetings with Bell?”
“I contacted her,” Roberts corrected, “and yes. CYA, Detective.”
Cover your ass.
Alex thought back over the excruciating hours of verbal sparring she’d endured as the department shrink tried and failed to elicit details about things she would never—could never—tell him. To her mind, Roberts’s ass could go straight to hell for making her go through that.
That, however, was an opinion best kept to herself. She surveyed the parking lot. With the question of her sanity out of the way, it was time to get down to business—and to her first murder scene since their serial killer more than two months before. A killer that had turned her entire reality upside down when she’d learned he was a Fallen Angel. She hunched her shoulders and gripped her coffee a little tighter.
A handful of personnel dismantled the powerful floodlights used to light the scene. Roberts had called her in late on this one. Odd. She shot him a sideways glance.
“So what do we have?”
“A goddamn mess.”
Noting the thin line of his mouth, she raised a brow. “Can we be a little more specific?”
Roberts pointed toward an ambulance across the lot. “In the body bag. Female, Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five years of age.”
“And?”
“She was pregnant. The baby is … gone.”
Gone. An innocuous enough word, if it hadn’t been for Roberts’s slight hesitation before speaking it. Gone. Gone how? Gone as in she’d given birth and the baby was missing? Gone as in the baby had died with its mother?
Or gone as in this was the reason Roberts had called her?
As in Seth was right and this had to do with them.
Tossing her still full cup into a nearby Dumpster, she took a deep breath. “Right. Let’s have a look.”
Roberts’s hand on her arm stopped her before she’d taken more than a step. “It’s bad, Alex.”
“I’m—” The word fine died on her lips. Had those haggard lines always been around his eyes? That gray tinge under his skin? She stared at him, then nodded once in acknowledgment of the warning.
Roberts released his grip.
Alex walked toward the ambulance, passing the mobile command post, a forensic technician packing up equipment, two others winding up extension cords and shutting down generators. She tried to steel herself for what she knew was coming, but what had once been an automatic defense felt rusty from disuse. Whatever awaited her, it was going to be rough.
With Roberts at her side, she reached the ambulance and waited for the coroner to unzip the body bag strapped to a gurney.
Heavy-duty black plastic parted to expose a young woman’s face, its unnatural pallor speaking to massive blood loss. Silently, grimly, the coroner pulled open the rest of the bag. Alex’s gaze traveled down the body. Settled on the raw, gaping hole where the abdomen should have been. Where a baby would have been.
If it hadn’t been ripped out of its mother.
Not cut.
Ripped.
Brutally, viciously torn.
Alex’s stomach heaved.
Chapter 4
“You cannot avoid me forever, Mika’el.”
The careful neutrality of Verchiel’s voice made the words all the more accusatory. Mika’el paused in the task of honing the sword laid across his lap. He stared down at the gleaming metal, its edge now beyond lethal. It hadn’t needed sharpening, but the rhythmic act of sliding stone over metal had been calming. Mindless. Requiring no conscious thought as long as he continued.
Given a choice, he would have continued for eternity.
He laid the broadsword beside him on the garden bench. Then he leaned back and stretched his arms wide along the backrest. “I’m not avoiding you, Highest.”
“Fine. Then you can’t avoid yourself forever.”
He grimaced at the diminutive, crimson-robed female in the arched entry of the rose garden where he’d taken refuge. “You’re very astute.”
Verchiel, Highest Seraph and executive administrator of Heaven, shrugged. “I’ve had my share of practice at reading angels,” she said. A reference, no doubt, to her past position as handler of the volatile Powers—particularly Aramael. “My point—”
Mika’el waved her silent. “Your point is that you want to know what the One told me yesterday.”
“She holds you responsible, doesn’t she? But she knew—”
“She knew I would task Aramael with Seth’s assassination,” Mika’el cut in. “All that happened after—the Nephilim army, permitting Lucifer to manipulate me, my plan to strike the first blow and plunge Heaven into war again—all of that I kept from her.”
“We kept it from her because if we’d told her—”
“Then she would have stopped Lucifer the only way she could, and we would have lost her.”
“Surely she cannot blame you for trying to protect her.”
He played idly with the whetstone in his hand, moving it between his fingers. “She can if she prefers not to be protected.”
Silence met his words, broken by the faintest whisper of a breeze passing through the stone-walled garden, the lazy drone of a bumblebee, the call of a distant bird, Verchiel’s swallow.
“She wants to end herself?” the Highest asked at last. “You must be mistaken.”
“Not end,” he said. “Alter. She wants to go back to what she was before she divided herself into so many pieces—or at least closer to that state. She’s worn out, Verchiel. Weary of the struggle between her and Lucifer, of trying to maintain balance in the universe, of being the All to so many souls. She’s given so much of herself that there’s nothing left. She tried to tell me before, but I didn’t want to listen. And now my actions might have made it impossible.”
Leaving his sword on the bench, he stood and paced the gravel path. “If we—if I hadn’t interfered,” his voice was harsh in his own ears, “she could have done what she wanted to do all along. She could have eliminated Lucifer as a threat and left us to deal only with the Fallen. We would still have faced a difficult battle, but we would have prevailed. We would have saved humanity.”
Verchiel’s head moved in convulsive denial. “Without the One? How will we live without her?”
Mika’el stopped to watch a honeybee buried in the pale pink folds of a rose, its buzzing at a frenzied pitch. The internal chaos he’d held at bay by endlessly sharpening his sword, by refusing to think, had begun swirling inside him again. How would they live without the One? He had no idea, but she had made it clear they had no choice. Their time with her had run out. It was up to him to lead the way.
But not to lie.
“We don’t,” he answered Verchiel. He met her shock with the grim implacability that had carried him through six millennia of alienation from his Creator. “We learn to survive. One day at a time.”
Another silence fell, this one filled not with shock but with their shared, fathomless anguish. Not even the birds intruded. After what felt like an aeon but could only have been a few moments, Verchiel softly cleared her throat.
“You said your actions might have made it impossible. Because of the Nephilim?”
His eyes closed. Involuntarily, briefly. He made himself open them. He wouldn’t hide from the Highest. Wouldn’t keep secrets. Not anymore.
“Them—and Seth.”
“Seth? But he gave up
his immortality, his power … what threat can he possibly—?” Verchiel broke off as a shudder, barely perceptible, rippled through the ground beneath their feet. She stared down, then lifted startled, questioning eyes to Mika’el’s.
“That kind of threat,” he said, rising to his feet and replacing his sword in its scabbard at his waist. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a mess to clean up before Lucifer realizes what’s happened and finds a way to use it to his own advantage—if he hasn’t already.”
Chapter 5
A swirl of dust and litter lifted from the street and traveled toward the parking lot, bringing with it the exhaust fumes from the early morning traffic. From behind Alex came the solid thunk of the ambulance doors closing, then the steady footfall of Roberts’s approach. He stopped at the edge of her vision and cleared his throat.
“Well? Is it what I think it is?”
That depends, a part of her—one that still believed in keeping secrets—wanted to hedge. A greater part of her knew there was no point. Not with Roberts. With someone else, perhaps, but not Roberts. He’d seen too much, guessed at too much, and he needed to know. He deserved to know.
“If you’re asking whether I think this is related to our serial killer, the answer is yes.”
“Our killer died two months ago.”
Almost taking her out in the process, despite her Heavenly soulmate’s best efforts. The scars across her throat prickled with memories. “Yes.”
“So there’s another one?”
More than one. More than you can imagine.
“It looks that way.”
Massaging the back of her neck with fingers made icy by the November wind, she struggled to find the words she needed to tell her supervisor that the bizarre pregnancies happening worldwide had nothing to do with the virus being postulated by the medical community—or the bioterrorism theories rampant in the media.
She tried to remember what she’d told Hugh Henderson when it had become impossible to put off the Vancouver detective any longer. How she’d explained that Heaven and Hell were real, and Armageddon itself was about to unfold. But Roberts forestalled her, his tone brisk.
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