“But you have overcome your—” She broke off. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Mika’el’s jaw hardened. Emerald ice glinted in his eyes. He rose from behind his desk to prowl the room with long, restless strides. “I’ve learned to control my bond, Highest, not overcome it. Do not mistake the difference. With every beat of my heart, every breath I take, I feel the loss of her presence. The need—not the desire, the need—to seek her out again. To join with her. It takes all I possess to resist. No human, regardless of her bloodline, has that kind of strength.”
Verchiel hesitated. He was right. She had forgotten the strength of the bond. And now that he’d reminded her, the decision to allow Aramael to return as Jacob Trent seemed a great deal less clear-cut. “My apologies. I didn’t consider the risks.”
“Or the consequences.” Stopping, Mika’el faced her. “If, by some miracle, Aramael and the Naphil do resist the connection, his very presence in her life might prevent Seth from taking back his powers.”
“Do you want me to recall him?”
Rubbing a hand across his eyes, Mika’el sighed. “I don’t know what I want you to do. We still need her protected from Samael, and you’re right that Aramael cannot do so if he can’t follow her.” He fell silent. Then he shook his head. “No. Leave him where he is. I’ll talk to the Naphil again. Even if she’s unwilling to speak to Seth on our behalf, perhaps she’ll agree to stay quiet about Aramael.”
“And Seth? When will you speak with him?”
Another sigh. “After I speak with the woman,” he said. “For all the good it will do.”
Chapter 23
Alex’s shoulders had climbed almost to her ears by the time she steered the car onto Cardno Avenue in the upscale Leaside neighborhood. From the moment Aramael slid into the seat beside her, the tension between them had ratcheted upward with every passing second, every kilometer, because his silence hadn’t stopped her brain from dwelling on the reasons for his presence—or what Seth’s reaction would be if he found out.
A headache throbbed in her temples.
She passed a lineup of news vehicles, waited for a uniformed officer to move the wooden barrier blocking the street, and pulled up beside the mobile command post. The familiar jolt of adrenaline kicked through her as she switched off the engine—every cop’s reaction to facing a crime scene and the ensuing hunt for the perpetrator.
Stepping out of the car, she scanned the street. Not a single person was in sight, despite the mild fall day. No toddlers on tricycles, no nannies with strollers, no one raking the thick, colorful layers of leaves from the lawns. Not so much as a mailman. One might have thought the neighborhood deserted if it weren’t for the parted window coverings up and down the block.
On the other side of the car, Aramael slammed his door.
Alex ignored him, tallying the resources on hand. Two ambulances, crews standing to one side as they awaited their cargo; three marked cars and two unmarked; half a dozen uniforms; a forensics team clad in their head-to-toe bunny suits to prevent contaminating the scene; and the requisite yellow tape. Yards of it.
She hunched her shoulders. Even with all she’d seen on the job, she still had trouble wrapping her head around the idea of a stoning. It would be a long time before the neighborhood recovered from this. If it could.
Aiming for the marked motorhome housing the command post, she strode past the ambulance that had blocked her view of the full scene. Her step faltered. She stopped. A single black bag lay stretched out at the edge of the grass. Two more forensics members stood knee-deep in a gaping hole beside a swing set, sand piled beside them. They plunged their shovels into the ground around a bloodied object.
Long seconds ticked by before she recognized the object as a human head. Horror warred with disbelief until a voice hailed. She tore her gaze from the grisly remains and focused on the command post. Detective Sergeant Mark Bastion stood in the open doorway.
“I see you have your partner back.”
“Looks like.”
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
She shrugged. “It puts me back on the street.”
And maybe if she said that often enough, she’d start to believe it. Nodding at the scene where Bastion’s partner, Timmins, stood to one side scribbling in his notebook, she changed the subject. “So? What do we know?”
“Too much. Not enough.” Bastion sighed. “Two victims, both female. Young, but there’s too much facial damage to accurately determine ages. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy.”
“Do we know yet if the second was pregnant?”
Timmins called from across the playground before Bastion could answer. He held a hand out in a thumbs-up sign at odds with his grim expression: a confirmation rather than an indication of something gone right.
The second woman had also been pregnant.
Bastion made the sign of the cross over his chest. “Christ.”
Alex squeezed her eyes shut until starbursts went off behind her lids. For the first time in her career, she wondered how much longer she would be able to continue. How much longer she could tolerate bearing witness to atrocities like this.
She fought a rising urge to simply leave. To be somewhere else, where people didn’t kill one another in such horrific ways. Where she didn’t have to see with her own eyes just how far downhill humanity had slid. Where women didn’t die in childbirth three weeks after becoming pregnant, or have their babies ripped out of their bellies, or get brutally murdered simply because they were pregnant.
Somewhere safe.
Except safe didn’t exist anymore. It never really had, and it never would again. Not as long as Heaven and Hell were at war over humanity’s very existence.
“We’ll canvass a six-block radius,” Bastion’s voice jolted her back to the present. “There’s not many people home this time of day, so I’ll have the uniforms set up roadblocks to catch them on their way home later. We’ll keep coming back until we’ve talked to every single household. If someone is away, track them down. I want a list of every woman who is or might be pregnant, and I want their well-being confirmed. In person.”
“We should look at churches that serve the area, too,” Alex said. “Places of worship.”
The forensics duo laid aside their shovels and lifted the second body from its sandy killing ground.
The second very pregnant body.
“Christ,” Bastion muttered again. He let out a gust of air. “Nicole is pregnant, you know. Four months. We had the first ultrasound on Monday.”
Alex unlocked her teeth. “Congratulations. That’s wonderful news.”
“Is it?” He turned haggard eyes to her. “Apart from the fact she seems to have avoided this virus thing”—he waved a hand at the playground—“what the hell kind of world are we bringing a kid into?”
She had no answer. Could not, for the life of her, give the reassurance he sought. Bastion swallowed audibly.
“You and your partner—Trent, isn’t it? You do the initial sweep of the immediate neighborhood,” he said. “This street and the one that backs onto the park. The church idea is a good one. We should include cultural centers as well. I’ll get more uniforms down here.”
You and your partner.
Hugging her coat close, she started toward the car. Stopped. “Bastion? Tell Nicole I said congratulations. It’s wonderful news. Really.”
The forensics team laid the woman’s body on a tarp beside the monkey bars.
Chapter 24
Seth stepped into the elevator, shifting the groceries he carried to one arm and reaching with the other for the eighth-floor button. Another man slipped inside as the doors slid closed. Ignoring him, Seth focused instead on his plans for the evening—the next stage in his attempts to fit into Alex’s world, to be what she needed him to be.
Tipping his head back, he stared at the buzzing fluorescent light panel in the ceiling and went over the menu for the dinner he’d planned. He’d kept his
choices simple: grilled chicken with lemon and rosemary, roasted vegetables with avocado and goat cheese, and a tossed salad, all tied together with a chilled Chardonnay and his determination to make good on his word to try harder. If Alex was going to work these insanely long hours, at least he could make what little time they had together as pleasant as—
“I hope she’s worth it.”
He looked sideways at his elevator companion. “Excuse me?”
A bland, golden gaze met his, then dropped to the grocery bag he clutched. “Whoever that’s for. I hope she’s worth the effort.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes. She is.” He went back to watching the light flicker. The elevator lurched past another floor.
“Because too many of them come with all kinds of baggage,” the stranger continued. “Expectations. As if we could ever care about the things they do.”
Seth’s breath stilled. We? Carefully, without moving his head, he slanted another glance at his companion. At the gleam of light reflected on his dark, burnished face, the puckered scar at the corner of one eye … and, for just an instant, the hint of wing-shaped shadows behind him. Seth scowled.
“I told Mika’el—”
“I’m not with Mika’el.” The other man leaned back against the elevator wall. “Just as you’re not with them.”
Not with Mika’el? If he wasn’t with the Archangel, then he was—
His uninvited companion smiled. Cold trickled through Seth’s gut.
A Fallen One. Bloody Hell, he was trapped in an elevator with one of his father’s minions.
In the time it took to inhale, his awareness of his lack of power skyrocketed from a dull, ill-defined ache to an acute sense of loss. He shifted his stance, standing tall and facing the Fallen One head-on. He curled his free hand into a fist. With or without powers, he wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“I’m exactly where I choose to be,” he told the intruder.
“Are you?” the Fallen One asked, nodding at the groceries. “You, the son of Lucifer and the Creator herself, this is where you choose to be?”
“I gave that up,” Seth said through his teeth.
“And you can choose to have it back again.”
The paper of the grocery bag crackled as Seth’s grip went tight. His companion raised an eyebrow.
“You look surprised. You didn’t know? Oh, my. How very awkward. I was so sure she’d have told you.”
The cold solidified. Turned heavy. Don’t. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter …
But it did matter. Seth’s heart twisted. It mattered a great deal.
“Who?” he asked. “Who would have told me?”
The Fallen One eyed him pityingly. “You have to ask?”
No. No, he didn’t because she had started to tell him last night.
“You wanted to tell me something.”
She had started, and then she had changed her mind.
“It can wait.”
She had chosen instead to hide it from him.
“It wasn’t important.”
To lie to him.
Seth shifted his grip on the grocery bag.
“What didn’t she tell me?”
The Fallen One shrugged. “What I just said. You can have it back. The power, the immortality, all of it. It’s all still yours.”
The carton of milk in the bag gave way with a little pop beneath Seth’s grip. Cold liquid bathed his hand and dripped onto his shoe. “I don’t believe you.”
“Yes, you do.” The Fallen One straightened up from the elevator wall as the doors slid open onto the eighth floor’s empty hallway. “You can feel it. You know you can. Right where you left it, waiting for you to reclaim it as your own.”
“You’re wrong. You can’t know—”
Seth found himself pinned against the wall before he registered that the other had moved. Fingers like steel clamped around his throat, lifting him until his toes barely grazed the floor.
“I do know,” his father’s henchman hissed. “Just as your Naphil knows. The Archangel Mika’el himself told her when he came to her asking for her help. Her soulmate has been returned to her, to ensure that she persuades you. The only one who’s still in the dark about this is you. You might want to ask your Naphil why that is.” His grip tightened another fraction. “She’s not like you, Appointed. She is mortal. She cannot love you the way you do her, the way your father loves the One. Already she puts her own kind ahead of her feelings for you. Already she keeps secrets.”
The Fallen One shook him and then, as suddenly as he’d attacked, released his grip. Seth dropped to one knee, gasping. His visitor stepped into the corridor.
“Look around you, Seth, son of Lucifer. See where you are, what you’ve become. What you’ve chosen to become.”
Only when the doors began to slide shut did Seth rise to his feet. He jammed his foot into the opening, gathered the scattered groceries, and, clutching the sodden bag, followed in the Fallen One’s wake. The corridor empty before him. His visitor’s words echoed in his skull. Tangled in his chest.
“Her soulmate has been returned to her.”
Her soulmate. Aramael. Returned.
Seth’s gaze dropped to the groceries in his arms and, nestled among them, a plain, leather-bound book with the number one engraved on its spine.
Chapter 25
“Anything?”
Alex looked up from her notebook as she joined Aramael on the sidewalk. “Do you care?”
His mouth thinned. “It would go faster if you’d let me help.”
“No.”
“Alex—”
“We’ve been over this. Twice. You’re not a cop.”
“No, I’m a bloody Archangel,” he snapped. “I think I can handle asking a few questions.”
Archangel? Her gaze flicked to the massive black wings half unfolded behind him. Michael’s wings had been black, too, and so had the other Archangels’. That must be what differentiated the choirs, the color of their wings. So. Aramael had not only been welcomed back into Heaven for his part in Seth’s attempted assassination, he’d been promoted, too. Wasn’t that just ducky.
She returned her attention to her notes. “I don’t care. You’re not trained, you might miss something, and the answer is still no. Feel free to leave if that’s a problem.”
“Is this how it’s going to be between us?” he asked quietly.
Scowling, she ignored the jab of pain beneath her ribs. “There is no us. There’s me, and there’s you following me.” She stepped around him, coming up short as he moved to block her. “You’re in my way.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“Neither did I.”
The sigh stirred her hair. “I know. And for what it’s worth, I wish it could be otherwise.”
“It can. Leave.”
He shook his head. “You’re too important.”
Her brain shied from all that stood behind the statement. “Fine. Then let someone else protect me.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“You’re hardly the only angel in Heaven.”
“None of the others would protect you as I can.”
“Michael—”
“Mika’el is the one who assigned me to you. He knows the strength of my connection to you. Knows I would risk everything to keep you safe.”
The pain beneath her ribs sharpened, taking away her breath. She clutched the notebook and pen tighter, felt their edges imprinted on her fingers.
“Don’t,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare go there. You made your choice when you went after Seth, Aramael, and I made mine when I saved him. We’re done.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“I. Made. My. Choice.” She crossed her arms, settling into outright belligerence. “We’re done.”
“We’re soulmated, Alex. We can never be done.”
Even if she could have found her voice, she had no words. No argument. No rebuttal f
or the truth her soul recognized even as her mind rejected it. Sudden, infinite weariness pressed down on her. He was right. No matter how much she wanted it otherwise, no matter how certain she might have been—was—in her choice of Seth, Aramael was still right. The bond between them would never go away. She could love another with all her heart—and she did—and still she would feel that tie. That unbreakable connection.
Footsteps sounded along the sidewalk, slowing as they neared. Gritting her teeth, Alex gathered up the few scraps of coherence she still possessed and made herself look away from Aramael’s stormy gray gaze … right into the hard emerald one belonging to Michael.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Chapter 26
Michael.
Shock ricocheted through Alex’s body. Flat-out antagonism followed. Before she could do more than open her mouth, however, Michael cut her off, directing a pointed look at Aramael.
“Leave us,” he ordered.
The storm brewing in Aramael’s expression seethed with a new level of turbulence, and for a moment, Alex thought he might refuse. Then he stalked across the street to the car and leaned against the front fender, hands shoved into his pockets. His wings, half unfurled, twitched with an irritation echoing her own.
She scowled at the Archangel towering over her. “Are you always this overbearing?”
He ignored her. “Have you reconsidered my request?”
“No. I told you—”
“Fine. I will speak to Seth. But not about this.” He jerked his chin toward Aramael. “And I don’t want you to mention it, either.”
“Excuse me?”
“If Seth knows Aramael has returned, it will skew his judgment. I need him to consider my request with a clear head, not one filled by unnecessary emotion.”
“First of all, you don’t get to tell me what to do. And second, I don’t keep secrets from the man I love.” Her emphasis on man was deliberate, a reminder to Michael of Seth’s mortality, the choice he had already made. It went unnoticed.
“Have you told him about me?”
“Not yet, but—”
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