Aramael put a hand toward her and she slammed it away. “Don’t. You’ve done enough damage. Could you not see how fragile he is? Could you not have lied, just this once? For him? For the world?” She blinked back tears of fury and despair. “For me?”
“He would have known,” he said softly. “He couldn’t help but sense what I feel for you.” A gentle hand brushed a tear from her cheek. “What we feel for each other.”
Alex waited for the jolt that should have come with his touch, with the words she had longed to hear only a day ago. Instead, she found hollowness where her heart should have been. She tried to replay what he’d said, thinking she might have been too stunned to respond, but instead of her soulmate’s voice, she heard that of the Archangel Michael.
Sometimes the soulmate you’re destined to have isn’t the best match for you. Sometimes lives are too separate. Too much has happened on each of your individual paths, too many responsibilities get in the way…too many choices are made by one that the other cannot agree with.
Alex shuddered as the truth of the words settled into her soul…along with the truth of the rest of what he’d said. “Seth needs you, Naphil. More than Aramael ever can or will.”
Curling her nails into her palms until pain lanced through her hands, she reached deeper than she thought possible for a strength she never knew she had. Beyond anything that might have been and all that could never be, until she reached what simply was. Then, with a quiet finality, she raised her gaze to Heaven’s Power and said, “Felt, Aramael. What I felt. Past tense.”
Shock stared back at her from his eyes, becoming first denial and then raw agony as seconds stretched into an eternity. The soulmate she had denied swallowed. Once, twice, a third time. Then, without word or sound of any kind, he vanished.
After another eternity, Alex turned away from the emptiness left behind him. “Now what?” she asked Michael.
“I want you to remain here, in case Seth comes back.”
“I can leave him a note.”
“It’s best if you stay. He knows where you are.”
He’ll come back if that’s what he wants. If he isn’t damaged too badly already.
Alex glanced out the window at the vast city, the vaster world beyond, where Seth could be anywhere. “Michael, if he thinks—”
“I’ll check back when I can.”
And yet another angel vanished from her world.
“HE’S LEFT THE apartment.”
Lucifer raised an eyebrow at Samael. “Already? I wasn’t expecting it to happen quite so fast.”
His aide shrugged a shoulder that still moved crookedly after their encounter. “Perhaps it was just time for things to work in our favor.”
“That’s what I love about you, Sam. Ever the optimist. We’re sure his watchdog is nowhere near?”
“Positive.”
“What about Mika’el and the others?”
“Very much occupied in looking for him but not even close.”
Lucifer shook his head. “I really didn’t expect him to make it this easy. Far be it from me to spurn such a gift, however.” Strolling past the desk, he took a peppermint from the dish, clapped Samael cheerfully on the shoulder, and headed for the door. “You have my back, Archangel. Remember you’re guarding it with your life.”
SETH STARED DOWN into the dark, swirling waters below the bridge. Traffic flowed behind him in a steady hiss and swish of rubber against wet pavement, oddly calming in its rhythm. He glanced to the right, at the still-lit windows spread across the city, marking tens of thousands of buildings sheltering hundreds of thousands of mortal lives. Mortals who struggled with the same feelings he did, who fought internal wars on a daily basis, wrestling with joy and agony and a hundred other emotions that could, in a heartbeat, turn their lives upside down.
As Aramael’s words had done to him.
“She will always be my soulmate.”
He tightened his fingers around the rail and waited for the twist of pain to subside. Was the Power right? Were he and Alex intrinsically, eternally mated to one another? Was that why she had held Seth at arm’s length with such unflagging steadfastness, because she felt as Aramael did and just didn’t know how to tell him?
But if that were so, if her connection to the Power was still so complete, why would she have intimated desire for Seth? Why would she have hinted she might want a relationship with him if she didn’t think it possible?
He scowled at the city lights and the inhabitants hidden behind them. It was beyond his understanding how they survived turmoil such as this without driving themselves insane. He might be doing them a favor if he chose Lucifer’s path. At least he’d be putting them out of their misery.
Except it wasn’t that easy because he’d also be depriving them of their joy, the utter contentment they felt, as he did, in those brief moments where the universe itself seemed to smile on the complicity between them and the ones they loved. The moments that made everything else fade away into inconsequence.
Such a moment might be his again if he were back with Alex now, instead of standing out here. One way or another, he had to face her, to find out whether or not Aramael’s truth extended to her. He needed to apologize for ditching his Guardian and disappearing the way he had, because she was almost certainly furious with him over that.
Sighing, he stepped away from the rail and strode toward the city center until he reached the shelter of an archway over the sidewalk where, taking advantage of being hidden from traffic, he could step from the bridge into the apartment where Alex would be waiting.
THE APARTMENT DOOR opened and then closed, but no voice hailed. Alex paused, halfway out of the shirt she had worn for too many hours that day. Henderson was working overtime—Seth? The steady footfall of steps moved toward her room. Thank God.
Even before she’d completed the thought, her heart did a series of barrel rolls, effectively wiping out her relief. So much stood between them. Where did they even begin? The knob turned on the bedroom door and she hastily slid her arms back into the limp blouse she’d been about to discard. Doing up the buttons, however, became an impossibility when the door swung open. Her fingers became thumbs and she clutched at the fabric, expelling a hiss of air.
Seth stood in the doorway, filling the space with his height and the breadth of his shoulders, his face in shadow. Silent. Staring. Clutching her blouse closed with both fists, Alex pried her tongue from the roof of her mouth.
“You’re back. I was worried.”
He leaned against the door frame.
The fragments of a thousand questions ran through Alex’s mind, none settling into completion. There was too much she wanted to know. Too much she needed to say. She took a deep breath.
“Are you all right?”
Without responding, Seth’s shadowed form straightened again and began a measured pace toward her. Alex’s pulse turned staccato.
“I know what Aramael told you,” she said. “I want to talk to you about it. About us.”
The lamp beside the bed flickered and went out, plunging the room into dark relieved only by the glow of city lights coming through the uncovered window. Alex’s breath lodged in her throat. Fingers tightening on the edges of her shirt, she blinked, trying to find Seth’s shadow. It advanced toward her, each step causing another kick of her heart against her ribs.
Seth stopped, inches away, and uncurled her fingers, one at a time, from the fabric she gripped.
“We should talk,” she tried to say, but her tongue had turned to stone and she could only wait as Seth’s hand curved behind her neck, grasped her hair, and tugged back her head. She stiffened for an instant, taken aback by the edge of aggression, but then his mouth was at her throat, his body against hers, and his hands in so many places she couldn’t keep track. Couldn’t think past the sensations jolting to life along her every nerve, her every fiber. The truth that had finally dawned when she had faced Aramael and heard his words and known, with utter and absolute certaint
y, that Michael was right. Seth needed her.
As much as she needed him.
The blouse dissolved beneath his touch, sending a rush of cool air along heated skin. She placed her hands against Seth’s shoulders, but his grip on her only tightened.
“Seth, wait. Slow down. Not like this.”
Catching both her hands in his, he pushed her against the wall and bent his head to her breast. Alex’s eyes closed and she gasped, arching against him. His tongue flicked, teased, tormented, moved to the other side. Heat began to build in her belly, filling her with its heaviness, its demand.
She pulled her hands free, clinging to him now, need overriding all else. Seth’s mouth trailed up her throat and along her jaw and then, at last, claimed her own—
In a kiss that tasted of peppermint.
Alex froze.
She’d given Seth a peppermint at the hotel two days ago. He’d spat it out almost instantly. Hated the way it burned his tongue. Hated the taste.
Seth wouldn’t taste of peppermint.
Oh, fuck.
The mouth—not Seth’s—pulled back from hers, moved to her ear. “Something wrong?” it whispered.
Alex fought down the panic snaking through her gut. Mind racing, she made herself hold still and endure the hot breath. If she stayed calm, if she caught him off guard and went for the eyes first—
Hard fingers snagged her arms before the idea completed itself. Pulled her from the wall. Flung her onto the bed. Caught her legs when she would have kicked and rolled away.
“This would have been so much more pleasant for you if you’d stayed cooperative,” said her attacker. A Fallen One.
One like Caim.
He sat down beside her and brushed back her hair with gentle fingers. The peppermint scent enveloped her, clogging her nose. The sickness of terror filled Alex’s belly, rose into her chest, spread through her limbs. Her heavy, immovable limbs.
Seth-who-wasn’t-Seth smiled in the light coming from the window. He touched his hand to her forehead. “Sleep,” he whispered. “It will be over soon.”
The world went dark.
FORTY
“You son of a bitch.”
The snarl reached through the haze in which Alex drifted and jerked her back into consciousness. Raising a hand to her clouded head, she blinked, staring at the ceiling above her, trying and failing to get her bearings.
A low, nasty chuckle reached her ears.
“Did you really think you had a chance?” a voice demanded. Aramael’s voice, but with a snarled edge to it Alex had never heard before. “Soulmates are forever, Appointed. Surely you’ve figured that out by now.”
No. That was wrong. They’d talked about this already.
Alex rolled toward the voices and lifted her head. “Aramael? What are you doing?”
Two heads swiveled toward her. Aramael’s, his gaze cold as it swept over her, and Seth’s, fury blazing from eyes as black as the night. Alex choked on the air suddenly stuck in her throat. Her stunned gaze traveled Aramael’s height, taking in the disheveled hair, the unbuttoned shirt and unbuckled pants. She looked down at herself. At her nudity, all too evident amid the tangled bedcovers. The last of her confusion fell away, leaving utter clarity in its wake.
“No.” Grabbing the sheet, she pulled it around herself as she bolted from the bed. “Seth, it’s not what you think—”
“It’s exactly what you think, Seth,” Aramael mocked.
“He’s lying. It’s not him, Seth. It’s not—”
Seth knocked away the hand she put out to him. Alex swayed on her feet, made herself remain upright. Forced herself to meet his gaze.
His hurt.
His betrayal.
The beginnings of his hatred.
“You asked me to trust you,” he said, his voice raw with anguish, “and I did. I trusted you with my soul.”
“Wait,” she said, desperation lacing her voice. “Listen—”
But as she reached for him again, the sheet slipped, exposing her nakedness, and Seth’s gaze turned vicious. “Go to hell,” he said. “Both of you.”
And then he was gone—and so was the false Aramael—and only Alex remained, alone in the silence, the stillness. At first, she stared at the space where Seth had been, too shocked to take in the impossible, too stunned to react. Slowly, memories began to filter through.
Memories of Seth-who-wasn’t-Seth.
A Fallen Angel’s hands.
His heat.
His breath.
Horror and revulsion filled her as every fiber of her being recoiled from the remembered sensations. Staggering into the bathroom, she vomited, wretchedly, violently, into the toilet.
Then, feeling the violation of her body in its tenderness and knowing what had happened after the Fallen One had rendered her unconscious, she threw up again—and again, and again, until there was nothing more. Nothing left. She curled into a ball on the floor amid the tangled sheet that had fallen from her and wept slow, silent tears of defeat. Fractured images surfaced, flashes of her father’s body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. The knife in her dying mother’s hand. Caim’s many, many victims. Her own niece’s mutilation. Father McIntyre’s rotting body hanging from an inverted cross. Caim’s hand tearing out her throat, ripping through her chest.
All that she had lived through, all she had survived, only to come to this…rape at the hands of a Fallen Angel. The utter inability to defend herself against it.
Alex curled tighter.
And then, like a life raft in the midst of a sea, came the thought of Seth. Seth, who deserved so much more than what he’d just witnessed. Seth, for whom she would do anything if she could only erase the betrayal she’d seen in his eyes.
Even if it meant opening her own soul to yet another onslaught.
Drawing the sheet around her shoulders, Alex took a deep, shuddering breath and called for her soulmate.
“AND THAT,” SAID Hugh, linking his fingers behind his head and regarding Elizabeth steadily, “is as much as I know.”
Elizabeth dropped her gaze to the pad of paper before her. She’d doodled over the same lines so many times the pen had gone through three sheets. “And you believe it,” she said.
“I’ve seen it, Liz. With my own eyes. Wings and all.”
Rising from the desk, Elizabeth crossed to the bookshelves and straightened a volume out of line with its shelf-mates. “If you were anyone else, I would be arranging a room for you right now. You know that.”
Hugh chuckled, a sound oddly lacking in humor. “Are you kidding? There are moments when I think I should be committed. But it doesn’t make what’s happening any less real.”
“How many know?”
“You. Me. Alex. I think her staff inspector suspects.”
Elizabeth looked over her shoulder to see him grimace and scrub a hand over his closely shorn hair. “And you felt it necessary to bring me in on this why?”
“If the angels are right and this is just the beginning, we need to start getting ready.”
“If there are angels,” she retorted, “and they’re right, then how the hell do we get ready? We don’t even know what to expect. Will there be supernatural beings slugging it out on the streets? Are these Nephilim children a threat? Are we going to be involved in the fighting ourselves? How do we prepare for something we don’t even understand?”
“Sure as hell not by sitting around on our asses pretending there’s nothing wrong.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “I know I’m asking a lot, Liz. I get that. You’ll be putting your reputation on the line. I get that, too. But I could really use your help here. If you add your words to mine, people will start listening. They’ll have to.”
Elizabeth stared at the clip on his tie, a polished strip of onyx set in silver. More than ten years, she’d known this man, first as a patient and then, gradually, as friend and colleague. She had seen him at his most vulnerable and incoherent following his wife and son’s murder-suicide, had support
ed his painful attempts to reclaim his life, and never once doubted his basic sanity. His innate groundedness. But now?
Hugh’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from the case at his waist, his voice impatient as he answered. “Henderson.” He listened for a moment and then, gray-faced, took Elizabeth’s coat from the rack, scooped up her keys from the desk, and pushed her out the door. By the time she formulated a protest, they were in front of the elevator and Hugh was folding the phone shut again.
“It’s Alex,” he said. “She’s been raped.”
FORTY-ONE
Stepping into the apartment, Hugh took in the angels gathered in his living room. He recognized Michael and the one Alex called Aramael, but the third, a crimson-robed woman, was a newcomer. He glanced over his shoulder at Liz.
“You ready for this?” he asked.
She pushed past without answering, taking up a place against a wall. Closing the door, Hugh went to join the group, his gaze taking in the empty kitchen to the left and Alex’s half-closed bedroom door to the right before settling on the Archangel Michael. “How is she?”
Alex emerged from her room, her face tight. Pale. “I’m fine,” she said. “But Seth isn’t. The Fallen One took on Aramael’s appearance as Seth walked in, and Seth thought we—that Aramael—” Her voice, flat to begin with, quivered. She stopped, swallowed, and then met Hugh’s shock with a steady gaze. “Seth thought Aramael and I had slept together. He’s disappeared again and this time we could be in serious trouble. We need to find him before—before—”
“We need,” Hugh interrupted, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, “to get you to a hospital.”
“I’m not hurt.”
Physically. The word hung in the air over them all.
“We need a rape kit, Alex. You know that.”
Alex laughed at his words. Genuinely. With an edge of bitterness, yes, but without the hysteria Hugh would have expected. The hysteria that should have been there.
The sound brought the surreal and the real crashing together into a single, radically altered world as nothing else had been able to for Hugh. Not the disappearing Seth, not the bizarre conversation with Staff Inspector Roberts in Toronto or the weirder one with Alex in the coffee shop, not the introduction to an Archangel or learning of six-thousand-year-old scrolls hidden by the Church…not even the telling of the tale to Liz.
Sins of the Son: The Grigori Legacy Page 26
