CHAPTER 54
“Where is Mika’el?”
Emmanuelle pulled Scorpion to his feet, ignoring his look of surprise at the ease with which she tugged his two hundred and thirty-plus pounds upright. Still reeling from Gabriel’s news, she didn’t immediately turn back to answer the Archangel’s question. Gabriel’s gauntleted hand dropped onto her shoulder.
“I asked where Mika’el—”
Emmanuelle swung around, grasping Gabriel’s wrist and holding it away from her. “You forget to whom you speak, Archangel.”
“I know exactly to whom I speak,” Gabriel corrected. “You left, Emmanuelle, and you didn’t come back. Your mother—”
“My mother”—Emmanuelle’s hand tightened, bending the gauntlet’s metal beneath her fingers—”is not the issue here.”
Gabriel’s sapphire eyes flashed, and for a moment, Emmanuelle didn’t think the Archangel would back down. What would Emmanuelle do then? Fight her? Jaw aching with the effort, Emmanuelle made herself release the other’s wrist. She turned away, trying to pull her thoughts together, ignoring the pulse of fury directed between her shoulder blades as she might an annoying mosquito. Gabriel’s anger faltered.
As it should.
Emmanuelle gave an inward wince. Damn. Her escalation to godlike expectations hadn’t taken long, had it?
She pointed at Bethiel, still standing in the open doorway. “You. Can you find Mika’el?”
“I should be the one—” Gabriel began.
Emmanuelle cut her off without so much as glancing at her. “Forget it. You’re staying to tell me what’s going on.” She raised an eyebrow at Bethiel. “Well?”
The former Principality looked like he might raise an objection of his own, then he shrugged. “I think I know where he might be.”
“Good. Find him, and bring him back here. The woman, too,” she added as an afterthought.
Bethiel hesitated. Then, sketching what could only be termed a sardonic salute, he disappeared. Emmanuelle turned her attention to Scorpion. He had remained stoutly at her side, but the convulsive movement of his Adam’s apple belied the belligerent look he leveled at Gabriel.
“Wait inside with the others,” she told him. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Scorpion’s scowl deepened, and Emmanuelle touched his arm.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
Like Bethiel, he hesitated an instant more, then stomped across the deck to the house, his heavy footsteps echoing through the otherwise quiet dawn. Emmanuelle waited until the door closed behind him, then she drew a deep breath and faced Gabriel. The Archangel stood with feet planted wide and gauntleted hands resting on armored hips.
“You left us,” she snarled. “And you didn’t come back. Not even when your mother—when the One—” She broke off and spread her arms wide, the metal of her gloves glinting in the early morning light. “You had to have felt it happen, Emmanuelle. You had to have known.”
“I felt a shift,” Emmanuelle admitted. “But that was all.”
“And you couldn’t open yourself up for thirty seconds to at least see what was going on?”
“I was done with Heaven, Gabriel. Done with my parents and their endless battles. I didn’t want to know what had happened.”
“You selfish, pretentious—” The Archangel bit off whatever she’d been about to say, her teeth snapping closed. She stalked to the other end of the deck, as far from Emmanuelle as the railing would allow. There, she braced her hands against the wood and let her head sag. So many emotions churned from her that Emmanuelle couldn’t even begin to sort through them.
She was too out of practice.
She’d been gone too long.
She’d forgotten too much.
Panic licked at her. What was she thinking? She couldn’t step into the void left by her mother. She knew nothing about overseeing the likes of Heaven, nothing about leading a fight against Hell, and nothing about caring for two entire realms. There was no way she could do this.
Scorpion’s offer sidled into her mind. “We forget the whole thing. Put it behind us. We rest up here today, get on the bikes tomorrow, and hit the road. Simple as that.”
Scorpion.
Jezebel.
Wookie.
All the others.
All of humanity.
“Choices have consequences.”
The deck bucked beneath her feet as a rumble rolled through the Earth. Gabriel straightened and spun around. Emmanuelle met her alarm, her resignation, her weariness.
Her own heart plummeted.
“Seth,” she said.
The red-haired Archangel lifted her chin, her sapphire eyes flashing a challenge.
“Seth,” she agreed. “So what’s it going to be, Emmanuelle? Are you in or out?”
Bloody Hell.
*
Alex took the mug Michael held out to her, curling both hands around its warmth. Michael retreated to stand by the French doors, one shoulder resting against the frame, arms crossed. Silence sat heavy between them. The same silence that had prevailed since she had pulled away from him in the bedroom—raw and beaten and emptier than she’d ever been in her life. Emptier than should have been possible if one was still able to function.
The mug in her hands trembled, and she tightened her grip. Closed her eyes.
“Alex—” Michael began.
She cut him off, her voice harsh even in its whisper. “You shouldn’t have pulled me back. I’ve done enough for you. You should have let me go.”
“You have done enough,” he said quietly. “And I didn’t pull you back.”
Her eyelids snapped open. She scowled at him. “Don’t. Don’t lie to me. I felt you.”
“I only held you, nothing more. I knew you were going mad, and I didn’t try to stop it.” Michael sighed and rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I just didn’t want you to be alone when it happened.”
She held the emerald gaze, blinking back the sharp prickle of unwanted tears. “So if you didn’t stop it, what did? Is it because of what Seth did to me?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Immortality doesn’t guarantee sanity.”
“Then why, damn it? Why am I still here?”
“I suspect only you can answer that.”
Her fingers tightened on the mug, and she fought the urge to pitch it at his head. Fuck, but she was sick of obscure answers. She turned her gaze to the window and the darkened garden beyond.
“Why didn’t you want me to be alone?” she asked wearily. “Why did it matter?”
Long seconds ticked past without answer. So many that she finally looked back to him. Self-loathing filled his expression. She frowned.
“Michael?”
A muscle in the corner of his jaw worked. His eyes closed. Pain etched itself into the lines around his mouth. The heart she hadn’t thought capable of further feeling gave a flutter of unexpected compassion. Alex hesitated, then leaned forward and touched the corded muscle of his forearm. He flinched but didn’t pull away. A ragged exhale escaped him.
“Because so very much of this is my fault,” he said, his voice as rough as it was quiet. “Because my faith in the One blinded me to Emmanuelle’s warnings. Because I’ve asked you to do things no angel should ever ask of one who is only…”
He trailed off, and she finished bitterly, “Only human? But I’m not, am I? I’m…”
She couldn’t finish, either, because she didn’t know what she was any more than Michael did. Not anymore. Hell, she’d been broken and cobbled back together so many times, she didn’t think the One herself would have known what she was.
But it sure as Hell wasn’t only human.
Michael’s voice gentled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It matters only that you were mortal, and in my arrogance, my certainty that I was right, I interfered with your choices. I’m the reason you are where you are right now, Alexandra Jarvis. I’m the reason you’ve lost so much. Will lose so much. And for that
, for all of that, I am profoundly sorry.”
She waited for the expected anger to stir in her. The refusal of his apology to spill from her lips. The familiar accusations to follow. None of those things happened. Instead, through her own despair, she saw the slump of powerful shoulders, the droop of magnificent wings, and her breath caught.
Compassion fluttered again in her breast. What must it be like to carry the weight that he did? The responsibility for not just one, but two, entire races—two worlds? Her gaze traced the hopelessness around Michael’s mouth, the worry etched into his brow.
Her fingers slid down his forearm and linked with his.
“Don’t,” she said. “You forget I could have said no. At any one of a thousand times, I could have made a different choice, a different decision. We both made mistakes, Michael. We all did.”
He stared down at their hands.
“I did it for myself,” he said.
“Pardon?”
His emerald gaze lifted to hers. Held it without flinching, without hiding. “I held you for myself. Because I needed to remember that I’m more than the war between Heaven and Hell. More than the sum of bad decisions and poor choices. For once, just for a moment, I needed to be an angel, and not a destroyer.”
Down the hall in the bedroom, Alex’s cell phone rang.
CHAPTER 55
ALEX PICKED UP THE cell phone on its seventh ring. She’d counted as she stood up from the couch beside Michael and walked the short distance to the bedroom. Counting had kept her feet moving. Kept her from going back to Michael and—
And what? Wrapping her arms around him? Cradling his head against her shoulder? Telling him everything would be all right? Even if that were true—and they both knew it wasn’t—he was an Archangel. Heaven’s greatest warrior. Soulmate to Emmanuelle, daughter of Lucifer and the One.
She thumbed the answer icon.
No, Michael didn’t need the paltry comfort of a screwed-up Naphil, immortal or otherwise. And she most definitely did not need to be feeling—
“Jarvis,” she said into the phone.
Silence responded. Then labored breathing.
Alex took the phone from her ear and glanced at the display. She frowned. “Hugh?”
A gasp. A groan.
The skin over Alex’s entire body went tight. Cold. The first lashings of panic whipped through her belly.
“Hugh? What’s wrong? Where are you?”
“Alex…”
A bare croak of sound.
Alex fought back a terror that threatened to devolve into hysteria. She struggled for calm. Authority. Air. “Tell me where you are. I’m on my way. I’ll call for backup.”
She stumbled for the door and pulled it open. Michael met her on the other side. The labored breathing in her ear continued.
“Hugh, for God’s sake—”
“Alex…Seth…run.”
The line went dead. Alex’s knees buckled. Strong hands caught and held her upright.
“Hugh,” she whispered.
Oh, God…Hugh.
*
“Alex? Alex!”
Michael’s voice came from a long way off, hollow and harsh.
Alex inhaled. Clamped her teeth together. Hard, until they ached. Darkness beckoned at the edges of her mind. She shook it off. She wouldn’t lose it again. Couldn’t. Not while Hugh needed—
Hugh.
Elizabeth.
“Alexandra Jarvis!”
This time Michael’s voice was accompanied by a shake of her shoulders. Alex’s head snapped back, jolting her into the immediate. She stared at the phone still gripped in fingers white with strain. Hugh and Elizabeth. She lifted her gaze to Michael’s, to the fierceness there, the sadness that underlined it. Her stomach rolled again.
“We have to go to them,” she whispered. “We have to…”
Her voice trailed off even before Michael’s head shook.
“It’s too late,” he said. “Seth—”
Hugh’s last words to her echoed in her mind, drowning out Michael’s voice.
“Alex…Seth…run.”
Seth.
Alex sucked in another breath. “Seth is coming. Here. For me.”
“Not just Seth,” Michael responded grimly. “Him and a small army. The angels are holding them off, but we need to leave. Now.”
“No.” She shook her head. Reached past the grief tangled around her heart for the calm she needed. Calm to speak the only words she could. The only words left. “No,” she whispered. “You go. Leave me here.”
Michael’s hands tightened on her shoulders. He shook his head. “You going to him won’t stop him. Not anymore.”
Alex flinched from what she knew to be the truth and, for a moment, quailed from her decision. But the calm she sought grew out of the grief she couldn’t escape, and together they became the only decision she could make. The only choice that remained.
“I know.” Alex put a hand on Michael’s arm as he made to step back. “But it might buy you some time.”
Michael went still, staring down at her fingers. Silent seconds slipped by, broken only by the sound of their breathing. Hers rapid and shallow in her ears, his ragged. She steeled herself, waiting for his agreement to seal her fate. Then the emerald eyes closed.
“I won’t leave you to him, Alex,” he said. “I can’t.”
Her hand trembled. She dropped it to her side and curled it into a fist. You’re not helping, she wanted to tell him. Please don’t make this any harder, she tried to say. Instead she stared at the powerful warrior before her, seeing, for the second time that night, the lines of defeat etched in his posture. A ripple of misgiving slid through her.
Michael’s shoulders straightened, and his gaze met hers, bleak with despair, hard with resolve.
“I’m going to have to do something unforgivable soon,” he continued quietly. “Something I won’t be able to come back from. It will likely destroy me.”
Alex’s breath hissed out, and he held up a hand to ward off her objection.
“Before I do,” he said, “I need to know I’m capable of more, that I’ve been able to do something good. I need to know you’re safe, Alex. I need to know I’ve saved you from Seth.”
Mouth flapping soundlessly, she stared at him. Tiny electric shocks of alarm traveled over her skin, raising the hairs along her arms and the back of her neck. What in hell—?
Before she could muddle through the confusion of her thoughts to form an actual question, wind gusted from the bedroom behind her, slamming into her back and throwing her against Michael. Glass shattered behind her, signaling the demise of Elizabeth’s windows and the arrival of—
“Bethiel!” Michael snarled above her head.
Alex blinked against his chest, acutely aware of three things: blood trickling from wounds inflicted on her arms by the battle-ready wings sweeping forward to protect her; the sheer relief coursing through her veins at hearing Bethiel’s name and not Seth’s; and the strong, steady beat of the heart beneath her cheek.
Alex pushed away from Michael and fought her way out of the feathered cocoon, turning to face the new arrival and the dawn filtering through the missing window. Down the street, a dog barked, a note of hysteria lacing its voice.
“You were supposed to stay with Emmanuelle,” Michael said.
“She sent me to get you. And the Naphil.” Bethiel jerked his chin at Alex. “Gabriel is with her. The war has come to Earth.”
CHAPTER 56
MIKA’EL STRODE DOWN THE length of the deck to where Emmanuelle and Gabriel waited. The two could not have been more different—or more alike. One petite, dark-haired, and clad in leather, the other tall, with brilliantly red hair, sheathed in armor. Both impossibly strong and hard-headed.
The next few thousand years would be interesting.
He met Gabriel’s sapphire gaze. “Give us a minute?”
“Seth—” She stopped, her eyes traveling between him and Emmanuelle. She nodded. “I’ll be in
side.”
Mika’el waited until the door closed with a thump. Then, wordlessly, he stepped forward and gathered his soulmate into his arms. Emmanuelle resisted for a moment, then, with a long, quaking sigh, she buried her face against his chest. Her heat reached through the armor to wrap him close.
So long.
It had been so very long.
And now…
Now.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Closing his eyes, he buried his lips against her hair, inhaled her scent. He wondered if she knew she smelled like the roses of her mother’s garden. She’d always smelled that way. Like roses and sunshine.
Like Heaven.
Like a promise.
He drew back and looked down into the swirl of her iridescent eyes. “I knew you were right about them,” he said. “I knew they would destroy one another, but I thought if I tried hard enough, if I believed—”
Emmanuelle placed gentle fingers over his lips.
“And maybe if I’d chosen to stay instead of running away,” she said, “maybe then things would have been different as well. Or maybe none of this was ours to control, Mika’el. Maybe it needed to play out as it has, mistakes and all. Maybe…”
She took a breath and reached up to cup his face in both her hands.
“Maybe we accept the consequences of all the choices that have been made by everyone, and we try to save this world. And ours. Together.”
Mika’el looked over her head. She went still.
“Mika’el?”
Slowly, he shook his head. He brushed the hair away from her forehead. Looked into the iridescent, purple-silver eyes.
“We can’t,” he said. “Not together. Not like you mean.”
Emmanuelle stepped back. Her face had gone stiff. Wary. “I don’t understand.”
“Even if we win, even if we push back the Fallen and you fight your brother and triumph, the damage to this realm will be enormous,” he said quietly. “It will take every strength humanity possesses just to recover.”
He willed his soulmate to grasp his meaning the way she once would have without making him speak the words. But too much time had passed, or perhaps too much of everything else, and Emmanuelle’s eyes held no understanding, only questions.
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