Sins of the Lost

by Linda Poitevin

  She looked around the kitchen, at the bananas on the counter that were Seth’s favorite fruit, at the dish of chocolate-covered almonds that he’d bought for her, at the dishwasher needing to be emptied of the dishes from the last meal he had made for them. The meal she hadn’t come home for because he’d been right. She had been torn between him and Aramael, and work had been an excuse—a way to keep her distance. And now …

  Now this was it. This was all she had left. An apartment filled with memories and a life that would let her remember for eternity.

  She dumped the coffee into the sink and reached for the Scotch.

  Chapter 92

  “The Fallen are gathering.”

  Mika’el looked around at Gabriel, who stood in the doorway of his private quarters. He went back to adjusting the scabbard at his side. So. The time for war was come at last. He had never doubted it would, but oh, how he had wished he might have been wrong.

  “Did you hear me?” she asked.

  “I heard.” He picked up his sword and slid it into its sheath. “The others are at the border with our forces?”

  “Waiting for the first strike.”

  “And the Guardians?”

  “Recalled as ordered, except for the patrols. Still no word on where the Nephilim have been hidden.”

  “Then we’re ready.”

  Gabriel said nothing. Mika’el watched her tight-lipped reflection in the mirror. He knew what she was thinking. It was the same thing they all thought, that in truth, they had no idea if they were ready. If they could be. Heaven’s forces had always been driven by the will of the One. Without her—

  Without her, they had no idea what to expect. What they could do.

  What they couldn’t do.

  He picked up a second sword from the table beside him and slid it into a second, smaller scabbard. His fingers closed over it tightly. He turned, donning the familiar persona of military leader as he faced the other Archangel.

  “You know what to do, then,” he said. “I’ll join you shortly.”

  Gabriel’s sapphire gaze settled on the sword in his grasp, then rose to meet his again, clear, calm, determined. She nodded her understanding.

  “I’ll tell the others,” she said.

  ***

  Alex climbed the stairs from the parkade toward Homicide’s temporary new quarters on the ninth floor. A uniformed officer getting into his cruiser had assured her the elevator was working again after the terrorist attack—was that really what they were telling people?—but she’d taken the stairs anyway. It was quieter here. She could pace herself, steady her nerves, give herself time to plan how she would handle the questions, the concern …

  The search for Nina.

  Gripping the handrail, she paused and closed her eyes, listening to the sound of her own breathing, the beat of her heart. Roberts had called the night before to check on her and give her the option of taking another day or two off. She’d turned him down. It was best to throw herself back into the fray where she wouldn’t have too much time to think. Or too much time alone with a bottle of Scotch.

  She began her climb again, turned a corner on a landing. Only four flights left. Four flights to get her focus together and pretend she could do this. Pretend she could—

  A sudden shadow loomed over her.

  Instinct drove her sideways into the protection of the corner.

  “It’s me,” said a familiar voice.

  She remained where she was, her hands braced on her knees, waiting for her heart rate to return to normal. Wondering if her nerves would ever do the same. She glared at the black-winged, black-armored Michael.

  “You scared me half to death!” she snapped.

  “I’m sorry, but I promised we would talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “We have to. There are things—”

  “Can you stop the Nephilim?” she interrupted.

  “No.”

  “Help me find Nina?”

  “No.

  “Undo what Seth did to me?” she asked.

  He sighed. “No.”

  “Then we have nothing to talk about.”

  She moved to go around him, but Michael’s wings opened, blocking her route. She stared at the glossy feathers, near enough to see the barbs along each of them, and then stepped back. Crossing her arms, she waited in tight-lipped silence.

  “Lucifer is gone,” he said.

  “So what? In case you hadn’t noticed, the damage is already done. Eighty thousand women are dead, the babies they carried have disappeared, and he impregnated my niece.” Her voice wobbled on the last bit. She lifted her chin to continue. “Whether he’s here or not doesn’t matter anymore because he already accomplished everything he set out to do.”

  “The One is gone, too.”

  “Again,” she said harshly, “so what?”

  Pure fury flared in the emerald gaze holding hers. For a moment, she quailed. Then she stood taller. Grew angrier.

  “Damn it, look around you, Michael. Look at the mess we’re in—at the mess she left us in. Seth has stepped into his father’s shoes, you’re at war with Hell, Aramael is dead, and I’m going to live for goddamn forever. Where, in all of that, is my reason to care about the being who’s responsible?”

  “The fault wasn’t only hers. We all made mistakes.”

  “Yes, and now the world gets to live with those mistakes. I get to live with them.”

  For a long moment, Michael said nothing. Then he held something out to her that she hadn’t noticed him holding. “It was Aramael’s,” he said. “I had the armory make it over for you so it would be easier for you to handle.”

  Alex stared at the sword in its hardened leather scabbard. Remembered the feel of it slicing through Seth’s flesh, biting into his bone. Crimson washed across her vision. She blinked it away.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “He would have wanted—”

  “I said I don’t want it.” She raised weary eyes to his. “I don’t want anything of his, or yours, or any other part of Heaven, Michael. I’m done. I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to know what is happening in your world or with the fight between you and Hell. I don’t want anything to do with any of you.”

  He continued to hold out the weapon. “If the Fallen come after you, it could save your life.”

  “You assume I want it saved,” she said quietly. Pushing past the sword, past him, past his wings, she resumed her climb up the stairs.

  Michael’s voice followed as she reached the top of the flight and turned another corner. “Free will is a messy thing, Alex. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  Not until she stood on the ninth floor landing did it register that, for only the second time ever, he had called her Alex and not Naphil. She hesitated then, and despite her better judgment, looked down over the railing to where she had left him four floors below.

  The stairwell was empty.

  Heaven’s greatest warrior was gone.

  Alex pulled open the door and stepped into Homicide.

  It was time to find Nina.

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Linda Poitevin’s

  SINS OF THE ANGELS

  Available now from Ace

  Prologue

  It was done. There could be no turning back.

  Caim stared down at the destruction he’d wrought and held back a shudder. They would come after him, of course, as they had the first time. They couldn’t allow him to succeed. Couldn’t risk him finding a way back and opening a door to the others. They would send someone to hunt him, try to imprison him in that place again. His breath snared in his chest and for a moment the awfulness of the idea made him quail inside, made his mind go blank. An eternity of that awful, mind-hollowing emptiness, that nothingness. His belly clenched at the thought. It was a miracle he had escaped, and whatever happened, he couldn’t go back. Could never go back.

  He focused his thoughts, made himself calm. He could do this. He c
ould find the right one and return to where he belonged; it was just a matter of time. A matter of numbers. Caim gazed at the corpse by his feet. It was also a matter of being more careful than this. He crouched and touched a withered fingertip to the crimson that welled from the gash in the mortal’s chest. He rubbed the viscous fluid between thumb and forefinger and studied his work, displeased at the lack of control he saw there. The haste.

  He scowled at the frisson of remembered, wanton pleasure that even now edged down his spine, making his heart miss a beat. He so disliked that side of himself, the part that thrilled at the destruction. He had never wanted this, had tried so hard not to give in to what she had claimed to see. He wished he’d had another choice; that she’d given him another choice.

  But whether he was here by choice or not, he would do well to maintain better control. If one of her hunters had been near just now, his search would have been over before it began. He’d been so caught up in his task, he wouldn’t have felt an approach until it was too late.

  No, to stay ahead of her, ahead of the hunter she sent for him, Caim needed to rein himself in, to contain the blood-lust that clouded his mind. To be disciplined. He lifted his head and breathed in the alley musk, scented with rain and death. He needed to be faster, too. Finding one of the few he could use among the billions that existed now—the task seemed nothing short of monumental.

  He wiped his bloody, clawed fingers on the corpse’s clothing, and then, on impulse, reached over and spread the corpse’s arms straight out, perpendicular to the body, and crossed the ankles over one another.

  Pushing to his feet, he surveyed his handiwork with bitter satisfaction. Perfect. Even if she never saw it herself, she would know of his contempt, know what he thought of the esteem in which her children still held her.

  He drew a breath deep into his lungs and stretched his wings over his head, letting his body begin to fill out again, taking on flesh and warmth. He reveled in the fierce pleasure of his own aliveness; the pull of wet cotton against his skin; the remains of the fierce summer rain dripping from his hair; the thick, sullen night air, unrelieved by the storm that had proclaimed his return. The sheer gratification of feeling.

  Then, folding his wings against his back and casting a last, dispassionate glance at the remains on the pavement, he turned and started down the alley toward the street. His mind moved beyond the kill to other matters. Matters such as finding a place to stay. Somewhere to hide, where a hunter wouldn’t think to look for him.

  Caim emerged from the alley onto the sidewalk and looked up the deserted pavement to his left, then his right. Somewhere—

  He paused. Stared across the street. Smiled.

  Somewhere … interesting.

  One

  That was the thing about a murder scene, Alexandra Jarvis reflected. It would be difficult to drive past one and later claim that you couldn’t find the right place. No matter how much you wanted to.

  She wheeled her sedan into the space behind a Toronto Police Service car angled across the sidewalk. Alternating blue and red spilled from the cruiser’s bar lights, splashing against the squat brick building beside it and announcing the hive of activity in the dank alley beyond. Powerful floodlights, brought in to combat the predawn hours, backlit the scene, and yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the alley’s mouth.

  And, just in case Alex needed further confirmation she’d found the right place, a mob of media looked to be in a feeding frenzy street-side of a wooden police barricade, their microphones and cameras thrust into the faces of the two impassive, uniformed officers holding them at bay. One of the uniforms glanced over as she killed her engine, acknowledging her arrival with a nod.

  Alex took a gulp of lukewarm, oversugared coffee and balled up her fast-food breakfast wrapper. She’d bought the meal, if it could be called such, out of desperation on her way home, as a combined supper and bedtime snack. The nearest she could figure, it was the first food she’d had in almost twenty hours, and she hadn’t made it past the first bite before she’d been called to this, another murder. Even knowing what she’d have to view when she arrived at the scene, she’d gone ahead and eaten it. Working Homicide had that effect after a while.

  She dropped the wrapper into the empty paper bag, drained the remainder of her coffee, and tossed the cup in to join the wrapper. Then she slid out of the air-conditioned vehicle.

  The early-August humidity slammed into her like a fist, rising from the damp pavement and the puddles that lined the uneven sidewalk. Alex grimaced. After a storm like the one that had raged from midnight until almost three, knocking out power to most of the city’s core for the better part of an hour, surely they’d earned at least a brief respite from the sauna-like weather.

  She fished in her blazer pocket for a hair elastic, checked that her police shield was still clipped to her waistband, and raised her arms to scrape back her shoulder-length blonde hair as she kneed shut the car door and started toward the alley.

  The media piranhas, scenting new prey, engulfed her.

  “Detective, can you tell us what—?”

  “Can you describe—?”

  “Is this death related—?”

  The questions flew at her, fast and furious, and became lost in each other. Alex elbowed her way through the throng and shouldered past a television camera, wrapping the elastic around her fistful of hair. If they knew how many coffees and how little sleep she operated on, they wouldn’t be so eager to get this close.

  She patted her pockets in an automatic check. Pen, notebook, gloves … Lord, but her partner had picked a fine time to retire and take up fly-fishing. Davis was a hundred times more diplomatic than she was, and she’d always counted on him to run media interference for her at these times. She hoped to heaven his eventual replacement would be as accommodating.

  “Don’t know, can’t say, and no comment,” she replied, and winced at the snarl in her voice, glad her supervisor wasn’t there to overhear. “We’ll let you know when we have a statement for you, just like we always do.”

  The uniform who had acknowledged her arrival lifted the tape so she could duck beneath it.

  “Yeah,” he muttered, “and the sharks will keep circling anyway, just like they always do.”

  Alex flashed him a sympathetic look and headed down the alley, her focus shifting to the tall, lanky man silhouetted against the floodlights, and to the scene he surveyed.

  Her stomach rolled uneasily around its grease-laden meal. Even from here, she could see the remains of a bloodbath: telltale shadows darkened the brick walls on either side of the narrow passageway; rivulets of the night’s rain, stained dark, pooled on the alley floor; crimson reflected back from puddles lit by the floodlights.

  She flicked a glance at a sodden cardboard box, catalogued it as nothing out of the ordinary, strode deeper into the narrow passageway. A numbered flag, placed by Forensics, marked a blurred shoe imprint in a patch of mud. Another sat beside a door where nothing visible remained, perhaps the site of something already bagged and tagged.

  Alex drew nearer to the scene and inhaled a slow breath through her nose. She held it for a moment before expelling it in a soft gust. If this was the same as the others, if it was another slashing …

  She drew her shoulders back and lifted her chin. If it was another slashing, she would handle it as she did any other case. Professionally, efficiently, thoroughly. Because that was how she worked. Because her past had no place here.

  She stepped over the electrical cables powering the floodlights. Staff Inspector Doug Roberts, in charge of the Homicide Squad where Alex worked, turned. A smile ghosted across his lips but didn’t reach his strained eyes. Alex made out the vague shape of a human body beneath a tarp stretched out just beyond him.

  “Have a good sleep?” Roberts asked. Even raised over the guttural thrum of the generator powering the lights, his voice held a dry note. He knew she’d never made it home.

  Alex produced a credible return smile. “
Nah. I figured the concept was highly overrated, so I settled for caffeine.”

  She ran a critical eye over her staff inspector’s height, noting the two days’ growth along his jawline. Perspiration plastered his short-cropped hair to his forehead and she felt her own tresses wilt in mute sympathy. If the air out in the street had been heavy, here in the alley it was downright oppressive. The man looked ready to drop.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “Ditto on the sleep, but I missed out on the caffeine.”

  That explained it. Given enough java in his or her system, a homicide cop could run almost indefinitely, but without …

  Alex’s gaze slid to the tarp. “Well?” she asked.

  “We won’t know for sure until the autopsy.”

  “But?”

  Silence. Because he didn’t know, or because he didn’t want to say?

  “Chest ripped open, throat slit, posed like the others,” he said finally.

  “Damn,” she muttered. She scuffed the toe of her shoe against a weed growing through the pavement. Four in as many days, with the last two less than twelve hours apart. One of the floodlights gave a sudden, loud pop, and the light in the alley dimmed a fraction. Underneath a loading dock, someone bellowed for a replacement bulb, his voice muffled.

  Alex pushed a limp lock off her forehead, scrunched her fist over it for a moment, and said again, “Damn, damn, damn.” She released her clutch on her scalp. “Is Forensics finding anything?”

  “After the rain we had? We’re lucky the body didn’t float away.”

  “Maybe the killer’s waiting for the rain,” Alex mused. “Maybe he knows it will wash away the evidence.”

  “So what, he’s a disgruntled meteorologist? How does he know it will rain hard enough?” Roberts shook his head. “The weather’s too unpredictable for someone to rely on it like that, especially lately. None of these storms this week were even in the forecast. I think it’s just bad luck for us.”

  She sighed. “You’re probably right. So, has the chief called for a task force yet?”

  “Not yet, but my guess is that it’s about to become a priority. I’ll put in a call and get the ball rolling. The sooner we get a profiler working on this psycho, the better. You have a look around here, then go home, okay? I’ve put Joly and Abrams on point for this one. You’ve been on your feet longer than anyone else on this file so far, and you need some sleep.”