She’d been about to say your parents, but her brain still tended to dance around the fact that she was living with the son of —well. It was just easier not to think about the idea, let alone not voice it.
“Why the change of heart?”
His mouth twisted. “This isn’t going to go away, is it? Your job, you trying to save the world …”
“No. It’s not.”
“Even if you know it’s a hopeless cause.”
“Even then.”
“Then that’s why. If this quest of yours is going to consume your days—and, frankly, many of your nights—I might as well help. At least it will let me be near you, that being the whole reason I chose to be here and all,” he added dryly.
“You’re sure.”
“You want answers. I can help you get them. I’m sure.”
The weight of Mika’el’s visit grew heavier, pressing down on the relief she wanted to feel. The gratitude. She drew a breath. No more secrets. She had to tell him. “Seth—”
“Alex—”
They both stopped. She mustered a smile. “You first.”
A muscle flickered in front of his ear. His dark eyes looked away. “There’s just one thing. Did you mean what you told Jennifer? About Aramael?”
She searched her memory but came up blank on specifics. “I’m not sure what—”
Seth cut her off. “You called him the soulmate you can never have. Is that how you think of him?”
The roughness of his voice scraped across her heart. He’d overheard? Damn it. “No! Lord, no, Seth. I was angry and trying to make a point and—”
“Do you regret choosing me?”
She put a hand out to him. His arm, already rock-hard, contracted beneath her touch. She gripped harder. “I will never regret choosing you, Seth Benjamin. Ever.”
“Then you do love me?”
She looked up into a pain that sliced to her very quick. Viciously, she pushed away the guilt that plagued her, the doubts that haunted her. She remembered the agony of standing in a Vancouver alley, certain she had lost him. Remembered how his name had been the first she’d thought of when she regained consciousness. Remembered and wanted—needed—to believe. In herself, in him, in them.
“With all my heart,” she said.
For a moment, he didn’t move. Then he folded her into his arms, his chin atop her head. “Me, too,” he said.
Silence fell between them. Seth’s hand moved rhythmically against her back, making slow, gentle circles. Closing her eyes, she focused on the steady rise and fall of his chest, the thud of his heartbeat, his warmth merging with hers. However badly the evening had ended with Jennifer, she preferred to focus on all the things that had gone right. Seth’s attempt to bridge the gap between them, his efforts to belong, and this … one of those precious, priceless moments where the world seemed to fall away and leave the two of them suspended in a secure, protected bubble.
“It’s your turn,” his voice rumbled beneath her ear.
“What?”
“You wanted to tell me something.”
Michael.
Her throat closed. She couldn’t. Not now. Not after that.
“It can wait,” she said. “It wasn’t important.”
His hand resumed its massage, but the bubble enclosing them had already begun to shrink.
Chapter 20
“Any questions?” Alex shrugged into her coat and then reached for her scarf. Seth beat her to it, folding it in half, looping it around her neck, tucking the ends through the fold. Exactly the way she did it. She stretched up to kiss him.
“Apart from remaining skeptical about this whole Internet thing mortals have created, you mean?” He shook his head. “I still don’t see the point in relying on a tool that contains so much misleading—or wrong—information.”
“You just have to filter out the garbage. The real-time capacity is invaluable. It’s the best way we have to figure out where the babies have disappeared to—and who took them, on the off-chance that it isn’t the Fallen Ones after all. If humans are behind this, at least we can intervene.”
“And if it is the Fallen?”
She took down the strongbox from the closet shelf, unlocked it, and took out her service pistol. Slipping its magazine into place, she glanced at Seth. “You’re sure they’d still be here, in this world? Lucifer can’t take them?”
“To Hell? I’m sure. He wouldn’t even if he could. Their presence would sully his realm.”
She blinked at the idea that Lucifer, of all beings, could consider humans—or half-humans—dirty. Thrusting aside the incongruity, she slid her weapon into its holster at her waist and replaced the box on the shelf.
“Call me if you find anything?”
Seth arched a black brow. “Will you answer if I call?”
Heat crawled across her cheeks. “I will,” she promised.
Walking down the hall toward the elevator, she made another promise, this one to herself. Come Hell or high water, she would talk to someone today about her intimacy issues. She had no idea how she’d dance around the whole angel/demon thing in such a conversation, but she’d find a way. She had to. If Seth was willing to work at this, he deserved at least the same effort from her. They both did.
And maybe doing so would finally make telling him about Michael easier, too.
***
Alex’s good intentions lasted right up until she stepped out of the office elevator and into chaos.
She leapt out of the way as two of her fellow detectives pushed past her, boarding the elevator she’d just left, and dodged three others headed for the stairs. All were gone before she had a chance to formulate a single question. From behind the Homicide door, voices competed with the shrill of telephones.
Then, above all else, the roar of Staff Inspector Roberts. “Where the hell is Jarvis?”
She pulled open the door. “Here,” she called, waving her hand for Roberts’s attention. “I’m here.”
Roberts’s gaze met hers, relief warring with something dark and awful in its depths. “My office,” he said. “Now.”
She headed across the office, catching snippets of conversation as she passed by desks. Enough to know that there had been an incident in the Leaside neighborhood, not enough to figure out that incident had been. Joining her supervisor, she closed the door against the commotion. Roberts paced the tight space behind his desk. Filing cabinet to wall, window to desk.
“There’s been a stoning.”
His voice was so quiet, Alex didn’t think she’d heard right. Was certain she couldn’t have.
“Excuse me?”
“A stoning,” Roberts repeated. He stopped to stare out the window, holding apart the slats of the horizontal blind covering it.
She shriveled inside. “A stoning. As in—?”
“As in an honest-to-God, straight-out-of-the-fucking-good-book stoning.” Roberts released the blind with a metallic clatter and turned to her, his face ashen. “Two of them, actually. Women. Buried up to their necks in a playground in Leaside.”
Alex’s hands curled at her sides. Horror rose in her. Words to describe it didn’t exist. Things like this just didn’t happen here. Not in Toronto. Not in a civilized world.
“At least one of them was pregnant,” Roberts continued hoarsely. “They haven’t pulled out the other one yet.”
“Where do you want me?”
“Now that you have a partner again, on scene. Bastion has point, report to him when you get there.”
Partner? What partner?
“Thank you for that, by the way,” her staff inspector said. “I still don’t know who he is exactly, and I would have preferred you give me a heads-up, but I’m happy to have him back. Bringing someone new into Homicide in the middle of all this”—he waved an encompassing hand—“would have been a nightmare.”
A brick slid down her throat and landed with a sickening thud in her gut. She swallowed twice before she found a semblance of her voice.
“Trent. He stopped by a few minutes ago—” Roberts broke off. “You didn’t know.”
He continued speaking, but the buzzing in her ears drowned him out. Trent. Jacob Trent, a.k.a. Aramael, angel of the Sixth Choir, the Powers. Aramael, who had killed his twin to save her and had endured exile for his sin; who had been sent to assassinate Seth and then, at the last minute, chosen to help her save him instead. The room tilted sideways.
“Jarvis.”
She jolted back to the present and found her supervisor scowling at her.
“You caught all that, right?”
“Um …”
Get a grip, Alex.
“No,” she said. “I mean yes, I caught it. But no, I didn’t know he was back.”
“And? Tell me you can do this, Detective. I know the two of you don’t see eye-to-eye, but I need you on the street and I can’t put you out there without a partner.”
Aramael, back as my partner.
Fuck.
She looked out the window into the main Homicide office, half empty now. The remaining faces were all familiar. Joly, Abrams, Penn, Smith.
No Aramael posing as Jacob Trent.
She unglued her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “Where is he?”
“He said he’d wait in the coffee room.”
She straightened her shoulders, drawing on the strength she was learning she possessed. Wondered, briefly, how much longer that strength would hold out.
She strode toward the door.
“Detective.”
Pausing, her hand on the doorknob, she looked over her shoulder.
“You can’t fall apart,” Roberts said. “Not now. We can’t afford to lose you.”
She went in search of an angel.
Chapter 21
Alex tried to keep her stride purposeful, but placing one foot in front of the other on the way to the coffee room proved to be an all-consuming exercise in determination.
Aramael. Was he still in exile? Had he, by some miracle, been taken back into Heaven? Either way, what the hell was he doing here? She’d chosen Seth over him. Had made that choice clear. Hadn’t seen so much as a feather from him since. So why now, and why like this? Why as her goddamn partner again?
She stopped for the office cleaning lady and her cart. The tiny woman’s usual nod and smile hardly registered. Alex waited for her to pass, focused on the simple act of remaining upright and not taking shelter under her desk. It didn’t matter why Aramael was here, only that he left. Roberts could be as pissed as he liked. She wouldn’t work with him again. She couldn’t.
And she’d tell him so as soon as she unglued her feet from the floor.
Shit.
The cleaning lady moved out of her path. Alex looked through the coffee room window at the angel standing inside with his back to her. Her vision blurred, tunneled, narrowed. Everything around her faded into the background. Everything but him. She took in the dark, unruly hair, the breadth of the shoulders straining beneath the suit he wore, the familiar, balanced poise with which he carried himself. And the wings.
Her eyebrows twitched together.
Black wings.
Aramael’s wings were golden.
Cold pooled in her belly, emerged on the palms of her hands. She thought of how easily Lucifer had fooled her once, taking on the visage of his own son. Remembered how Aramael’s twin, Caim, had assumed the identity of the priest he had killed. She flicked a glance toward the door and the escape it offered. If she moved fast, and if she was very, very lucky, she might be able to get out before whoever this was—whatever it was—noticed.
And then what? Go home to Seth? Tell him she was being stalked by someone who had taken on Aramael’s persona? That she’d neglected to tell him yesterday about Michael’s visit? That she had once more become entangled with the ones he wanted so very much to leave behind?
She shifted her weight, held hostage by indecision tempered with the first stirrings of panic. Then she froze. The angel in the coffee room had turned. She knew without looking. Felt his attention on her, his will reaching out to her, his desire enveloping her. She fought against its pull.
This was no impostor, no other pretending to be her soulmate. It was him. It was Aramael.
Jaw set, she turned her head to meet the turbulent gray gaze, felt it reach inside to her most private places …
And coldly shut it down. No. Not this time. Not anymore.
She crossed the last few feet to the coffee room and stepped inside. Hands in pockets, her would-be partner regarded her warily.
“Alex.”
Aramael, her heart whispered.
She ignored it. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re being watched by one of the Fallen. Mika’el sent me.”
So Heaven had taken him back. “Watched—why?”
“We’re not sure, but the watcher is a former Archangel and Lucifer’s top aide. He wouldn’t be involved unless it was something important.”
The very mention of Lucifer’s name turned her mouth dry. Bitter. “All right, then try this. Why do you care? I’m hardly important in the grand scheme of things. What does it matter if Lu—” She pressed her lips together. Christ, she couldn’t even bring herself to say the name. “What does it matter if this Fallen One does want me for some reason?”
“You know why it matters.”
Alex’s heart skidded sideways. She ruthlessly brought it to heel. That wasn’t what he’d meant. This wasn’t personal, not if Mika’el was behind it. No, it was about Seth. She lifted her chin.
“Then you’re wasting your time, because I won’t ask him to do it.”
“Not even with all that’s at stake?”
“Apart from Seth himself? I don’t care.”
Aramael frowned. “Your entire—”
“Today, Jarvis!” Roberts’s bellow cut between them, a reminder of the job waiting for her.
She put a hand to the back of her neck, wrestling with this latest collision of her two realities. A Fallen One stalking her again. Aramael, shoulder to shoulder with her in the car. Roberts’s obvious relief at her having a partner. Seth, oblivious to the machinations going on behind his back.
A stoning, not in some far-off country prone to religious fanaticism, but here in Toronto. Her city. Her home.
Eighty thousand Nephilim babies about to be born and molded into Lucifer’s ultimate army against humankind.
A world teetering on the brink of chaos. Maybe even the brink of extinction.
All that, and she wanted to turn away the only angel volunteering to ride shotgun with her?
Yes.
No.
“Jarvis!” Roberts roared.
Damn it to hell and back.
Twice.
“Fine,” she snarled. “I don’t have time to argue. I drive, you shut up.”
Aramael opened his mouth. She held up a hand.
“I’m not kidding. One word about Seth or Michael or whatever new disaster you claim is looming on the horizon, and I will dump your ass at the side of the road. Are we clear?”
It didn’t matter that they both knew she had no way to carry out her threat, it simply felt good to set the parameters. It felt even better to have him nod acquiescence. She turned on her heel and headed for the door.
Chapter 22
“You’re certain no one else saw you?” Samael slipped the slim, leather-bound book into the pocket of his coat.
Raziel, one of only a handful of female Fallen, arched an eyebrow at him. “A dozen or more saw me,” she said. “As they always do when I take his tea things in or retrieve them.”
“You know what I mean.”
“He was nowhere in the area.” Her eyes narrowed. “You still haven’t told me why you want it.”
“No, but I did tell you it was better that you didn’t know.”
The pert former Cherub smiled. “And you know I’m not very good at minding my own business. That’s why you li
ke me so much.”
Samael stared down at the Fallen One. Raziel had remained in Heaven as his informant when he’d left to follow Lucifer, until it had become too dangerous for her. Uniquely unobtrusive, she had a way of blending into the background so that others failed to notice her, failed to realize she listened in on conversations meant to be private. It made her useful in the extreme, and she was right. He liked her a great deal for it. He didn’t for an instant, however, consider her infallible.
“I’ll let you know when I’m ready for the next one,” he said. He started down the alley toward the street.
“What if I don’t want to help again?”
He looked over his shoulder. Raziel watched him with a cool expression, her spikey-haired head tipped to the side. She was the first to look away.
“Same old Samael.” She gave a quick laugh. “Fine. I’ll be waiting.”
***
“You let him what?”
Verchiel tried—but failed—to hide a flinch. Mika’el was an imposing figure at the best of times, even when seated, but Mika’el irritated? She took a tiny step away from the temper brewing.
“I let him take on the mortal persona of Jacob Trent,” she repeated. “He was right. There was little chance he could follow her movements, let alone anticipate them, without being at her side. Her job is too unpredictable.”
The Archangel glared at her. “And I wasn’t consulted because … ?”
“Because you were otherwise occupied at the time, and because, frankly, this was an administrative matter.” Verchiel drew herself up. “You cannot be everywhere at once, Mika’el. Not even the One can do that. Nor can you take responsibility for all the decisions that need to be made.”
“I’m perfectly willing to leave certain decisions up to others,” he growled, “but allowing Aramael to make his presence known to the woman? Allowing him to be with her? You’ve seen their connection. Surely you see the risk this poses.”
“I’ve also witnessed her rejection of him. She chose Seth, remember?”
“Has the Cleanse made you forget the strength of the soulmate bond? She can choose whomever she likes. It will never negate what was forged in Heaven itself.”
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