“I’m not a kind of anything. I’m as human as anyone else on the planet, and I’d never even heard of the Nephilim before—” Her voice hitched a little as she caught back words all too bound up in memories. Before I met Aramael. Before Caim held me and made me call for my soulmate from a place of pain I hadn’t even known existed. “Before all this,” she finished.
“At this point I suppose you may be right, although your line will always carry the taint of their blood.”
“Thanks so much.”
He shrugged. “It’s a simple fact, Naph—”
“Alex,” she said. “Just call me Alex.”
“Defender of man,” he murmured.
“What?”
“That’s what Alexandra means. Oddly appropriate, don’t you think?”
Alex had no idea how to respond. The street opened before them, a dozen feet away.
“I am Mika’el,” the angel continued. “Michael, if you prefer.”
Alex’s foot caught on a chunk of broken pavement. A strong hand closed around her arm, preventing her from sprawling headfirst in the filth.
She stared at his hand. Swallowed. Looked up—way up—to the angel. “Michael as in—the Archangel Michael?”
He nodded.
Seriously? Alex pushed back a strand of hair. Her knowledge of angel lore was limited at best, and she wasn’t even sure how much of the lore was accurate to begin with, but wasn’t Michael supposed to be—
“The most powerful warrior in Heaven, yes.”
Alex took a step back and nearly fell over the same chunk of pavement. She righted herself and knocked away his helping hand. “Please tell me you can’t read my mind,” she growled.
“Only your face,” he said. “Based on my knowledge of humanity’s legends about me, your look of panic made your thoughts transparent enough.”
An explanation somehow lacking in the reassurance she’d wanted. Turning, Alex led the way onto the sidewalk and toward the next alley.
“So which do you prefer, Mika’el or Michael?” she asked the Archangel she’d called a son of a bitch only a short while before.
He considered the question as if surprised she’d asked. “Michael,” he said at last. “I prefer Michael.”
“And are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Heaven’s most powerful warrior.”
She didn’t know what was more telling, his prolonged silence or the harsh “yes” that followed, but his antipathy toward the label could not have been more obvious. Nor could the unspoken warning not to question further have been more clear.
They traversed the next alley without speaking. It occurred to her that Michael hadn’t answered her question about his distaste for the Nephilim, but in the face of her increasing edginess, it didn’t seem important enough to pursue. Where the hell was Seth? What if he wasn’t even down here, and they wasted their time? Twice she pulled her cell phone from the clip at her waist and flipped it open to be sure she had service and hadn’t missed a call from Henderson. Nothing.
Then, halfway down the block to yet another alley, the phone rang. Alex had it open and against her ear before its second trill. “You found him?”
“No sign yet, sorry,” came Henderson’s voice. “I’m just checking on you.”
“Oh, hell. I forgot to call you.”
Henderson waited, then said dryly, “Apology accepted. Where are you right now?”
Alex squinted, searching for a street sign. “Hastings. A little west of Abbott. You?”
“Heading your way from Main. You still have our friend with you?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Then I’ll talk to you again in a half hour. When you call me.”
The call went dead and Alex met her companion’s questioning look. “Henderson,” she said. “Checking in.”
Michael nodded.
The cell phone rang again.
“Now I have him,” said Henderson.
THIRTY-TWO
“What do you mean she’s not human?” Elizabeth Riley asked, staring at Melanie Chiu’s baby. The three-day-old girl sat in a playpen, unsupported, and waved a rattle at her gleefully, two pearly white nubs visible on her bottom gum. Uneasiness trickled down Elizabeth’s spine, but she stubbornly thrust it away. “What the hell is she, if not human?”
Dr. Gilbert, the on-call pediatrician, thumbed through several pages of a chart as if searching for an answer. Then she flipped the chart closed and handed it to Elizabeth with a sigh.
“See for yourself,” she offered. “She’s half human, but we’ve never seen anything like the other half of the DNA. The lab is going crazy trying to identify it. A lot of labs are.”
Elizabeth shot her a sharp look. “A lot of labs?”
“Around the globe.” Gilbert toyed with the ponytail draped over one shoulder. “All the babies born from the accelerated pregnancies are testing with the same type of DNA and we haven’t been able to find anything that remotely matches it. We thought at first it was just a mutation, perhaps caused by something viral, but it’s more than that. It’s completely foreign. Some governments are isolating the babies for study, which means our information pool could dry up in a hurry. I’m already getting the brush-off from certain quarters.”
“You can’t be serious. That sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.”
“A bad one,” Gilbert agreed. “Especially when you add in the rumors of aliens. UFO sightings have quadrupled in the last week.”
“Wonderful,” Elizabeth muttered. “If we keep this up, we will have mass hysteria on our hands.” She gave Chiu’s baby a final once-over and then turned away. “Let me know if they figure out what’s going on, will you?”
Out in the corridor, she took her cell phone from her pocket and dialed Hugh’s number, waiting while the call went straight to voice mail. The tone sounded and she spoke, her message terse. “Half the Chiu baby’s DNA has never been seen before. I’m still not buying your theory, but—oh, hell, just call me when you get this, will you?”
She hung up, closed her eyes, and leaned against the wall letting the sounds of the maternity ward wash over her. Newborn wails, a woman’s laugh, the squeak of rubber shoes down the linoleum hallway. Then, gathering her resolve, she marched toward the elevator and her office. While Gilbert might be getting the brush-off, Elizabeth had a good twenty years on the pediatrician and wasn’t above using her seniority to get what she wanted. And what she wanted right now was answers. She didn’t care if she had to call in every favor ever owed to her, she was getting to the bottom of this.
VERCHIEL PAUSED AT the greenhouse door, braced herself, and then pushed inside. The One looked up from trimming a bonsai tree, her expression of welcome fading as Verchiel approached.
“More good news, I see.”
“Apologies, One, but I thought you should know this.”
The One’s hands stilled in their task for a second, and then she continued pruning.
“Seth?” she asked quietly.
“No. He’s still missing. It’s the Nephilim children. The mortals have identified them as not fully human and have begun studying them.”
“At their level of science, that is to be expected.”
“Some governments have involved themselves in the studies.”
Snip. Snip. Snip.
“Are any of the children old enough to have shown their abilities yet?”
“Not yet.”
“But it is only a matter of time.” The One stepped back to study her handiwork, her head tipped to one side. “Only a matter of time before they realize what the Nephilim are capable of and begin to think of them as potential weapons. Before they try to turn those weapons against one another.”
“That’s what we’re afraid of.”
The silver head nodded. “Thank you, Verchiel. You were right to come to me.”
Verchiel hesitated for a moment and then, realizing she had been dismissed, inclined her head and departed. A fe
w steps away from the greenhouse, the sound of shattering glass made her duck to one side as the One’s pruning shears sailed past to land in the shrubbery. Verchiel stared after them for a long time before she transferred her gaze to the gaping hole in the greenhouse’s formerly pristine side.
Witnessed the hunched shoulders of the figure within.
And felt the edges of Heaven itself unravel a little bit more.
HENDERSON HAD HIM. They had him.
Alex’s heart leapt into her throat. “Has he seen you?” she demanded.
“No. He’s talking with someone. Male, tall, blond. Looks like they’re arguing.”
“Where are you? Is it faster for us on foot or should we go back to the—” Alex jumped as the phone was plucked from her fingers. She opened her mouth to object, but Michael held up an imperious hand and she subsided, listening to his instructions in confusion.
“Make sure you’re standing somewhere they can’t see you,” he told Henderson. “Then look around at where you are and notice the details. All of them. The buildings, names, cracks on the sidewalk, everything you can. Hold the images in your mind and stay focused—good. I have it. We’ll be there in a second.”
Michael snapped the phone shut and handed it to her. “This may be unpleasant,” he said, “but it’s the fastest way.”
“What…?” Alex’s words died on her lips as Michael’s wings unfolded behind his back. Pitch-black, with almost twice the span of Aramael’s, they were at once breathtaking and humbling, magnificent and terrifying.
And they were moving forward as if to ensnare her.
Alex stumbled back, but Michael caught hold of the hand she put up in defense, using it to pull her toward him. She landed against his chest with a force that knocked the wind from her lungs. Before she could catch her breath to protest, his arms wrapped around her, holding her tight against him.
His wings followed, closing over her head and enveloping her in a cocoon of feathers. Then Michael’s body turned molten, becoming a liquid heat that poured through her, changed her, became her…And the entire world fell away in a rush of vibration. An absence of anything she had ever known. Ever been.
Alex had barely registered her lack of self when she stumbled at the sudden feel of pavement beneath her again. She felt herself thrust upright, the protection of angelic wings torn from her, their loss brutal. Ice crystallized in her veins.
Henderson stared at her as if she were an apparition, reaching to steady her when she stumbled against him. “Christ, Jarvis,” he muttered, his pallor assuring her he had seen everything. Including Michael’s wings. “What the hell was that?”
Alex opened her mouth to respond, but her voice seemed not to have followed her to where she stood now. Pressing her lips together, she shook her head.
“Where?” Michael demanded of Henderson.
“The other side of the street, about a half block down. By the bench.”
Michael looked in the direction indicated and inhaled sharply. He went still for a moment, then drew tall, seeming to increase in size. A scowl darkened his face.
“Lucifer,” he spat. His powerful wings unfurling behind him again, he shot Alex a steely look. “Stay here.”
Alex shook off Henderson’s hands and the residual disorientation. Lucifer? That couldn’t be good. Through sheer force of will, she made her throat muscles respond again, albeit in more of a croak than actual speech. “I’m coming with you.”
A ferocious glare stopped her in her tracks. “I said stay.”
A shiver went through her. Not fear, exactly, but something very like it that made her want to give in to the command. She shoved the urge aside. Seth was out there and, judging by the look on Michael’s face, he would die unless she went to him.
He might die anyway, but she couldn’t think about that.
She caught hold of the Archangel’s sleeve. “That wasn’t our deal, Michael.”
“Michael?” Henderson half choked behind her.
Alex ignored the other detective. Couldn’t have answered if she’d tried as Michael’s gaze lifted from her hand on his sleeve.
“Circumstances have changed, Naphil.”
Holding tight to her determination, Alex lifted her chin. “We had an agreement. I get twenty-four hours before you make a decision.”
Hard fingers grasped her wrist and Michael jerked her into the shelter of the building at the edge of the lot. Taking her chin in his hand, he twisted until she looked down the street.
“Do you see him?” he snarled. “Do you see your precious Appointed? And the one standing with him?”
Alex found Seth first, his familiar figure standing tall and straight, his hands tucked into the pockets of the jeans she’d bought for him just yesterday. Then her gaze went to the man with him, taller even than Seth, blond hair shining under the streetlight above, making him seem almost luminescent.
She tried to nod, couldn’t against Michael’s grip. Whispered instead, “I see.”
“That,” Michael said, “is Lucifer. The one being we could not allow to gain access to the Appointed. His presence changes everything, Naphil, and it makes any agreement between us null and void. Do you understand?”
Alex stared at the luminous man down the block and her heart shriveled in her chest. Lucifer. Seth’s father and would-be destroyer of all humankind. She could only imagine what poison he had fed Seth, how he had tainted their one chance at preventing the coming war.
Taking her silence as compliance, Michael released her. “Good,” he said. “Now stay.”
Wings half-open, he stepped out of the lot and stalked toward the duo beside the bench. Alex’s gaze shifted to Seth.
Seth, whose identity and destiny had been stolen from him by a traitor. Seth, who had saved her life and shown her such gentleness, such compassion. Who stood now, arms crossed and body half-turned from the father he should never have known, oblivious to the approach of one sent by his own mother to—
Alex stiffened. Stared.
Seth, who displayed the body language of one who rejected both what he heard and the person from whom he heard it.
“The Archangel Michael?” Henderson croaked behind her.
Alex didn’t answer.
She was too busy chasing the Archangel in question.
THIRTY-THREE
Lucifer heard the rustle of feathers in the same instant he felt the Heavenly presence—both too late. He knew it even before he whirled and found the Archangel, black wings spread wide, not two dozen strides away. More than close enough to have already seen him.
Shock tightened his throat. Swift fury, self-directed, followed. How could he have been so careless? He’d known they would be watching over the Appointed, damaged as Seth was—damn it to Heaven, he’d been the one to warn Samael of the risks. Had told his aide to keep away from Seth, not to do anything to jeopardize their plans…and now he himself had ruined everything. Bloody Heaven, how stupid could he be?
Forfeiture.
After all this time, all this effort, the mortals were going to survive. Even if he refused to withdraw from their realm as promised, they would survive. Because no matter how many his followers managed to take out before Heaven stopped them, they would never eliminate them all. There were just too many.
Sickness filled him. Not even the Nephilim could help. The angels would know of the infants by now and, with the agreement broken, would do everything in their power to keep the Fallen away. The army he had created would remain untrained. Impotent.
Useless.
“Who is that?” Seth asked at his shoulder.
Lucifer grimaced. “A messenger,” he said. “For me. Wait here.”
He walked to meet the Archangel, a small start of surprise kicking through his veins as he moved close enough to recognize him. Mika’el? Since when had he returned to the One’s side?
“You have broken your agreement with the Creator,” the Archangel announced when Lucifer reached him.
Lucifer let his gaze
travel over Heaven’s warrior with a deliberateness that made Mika’el stiffen and gave Lucifer time to hide his own bitter turmoil.
“Well, well. If it isn’t the prodigal son.”
Mika’el scowled. “You will hand the Appointed over to me.”
“Seth is free to go wherever he likes,” Lucifer said with a shrug. “I have no hold over him.”
“You have tainted him.”
“I educated him.”
The Archangel’s scowl deepened. “Interference contravenes the terms of—”
A small whirlwind of human flesh burst past the black wings and planted its feet wide on the pavement between them, back to Lucifer, facing Mika’el. Lucifer stared at the creature, tasting its presence and then raising an eyebrow. Nephilim blood. Faint, but still in its veins.
“You gave your word,” it snarled at the Archangel.
Lucifer’s other eyebrow shot up. Not just any Naphil, but one with an apparent death wish. He waited to see how the Archangel would respond.
Mika’el glared at the Naphil, fury blazing from his eyes. “I told you to wait.”
“And I told you I’d help you find Seth only if you didn’t harm him,” the creature snapped back. “You gave me twenty-four hours. You agreed.”
Lucifer’s brows snapped together. Harm Seth? He reached out to shove the creature aside, but Seth beat him to it, stepping into the fray and taking the creature’s arm.
“Alex? What are you doing here?”
Seth looked down at the creature with concern, his grip on it gentle as he drew it aside, and understanding dawned in Lucifer. So this was the mortal Seth had fallen in love with, the woman who stood in the way of him reaching his son. But what had she meant about harming Seth?
He stared over the woman’s head, meeting the Archangel’s guarded gaze. His watchfulness. Lucifer’s breath stilled.
She wouldn’t.
Mika’el’s expression hardened.
She couldn’t.
The Archangel glanced at the woman, fury flashing through his eyes. Fury and—despair? Betrayal slammed like the fist of Heaven itself into Lucifer’s gut.
Sins of the Son: The Grigori Legacy Page 21
