“A psych—you mean Elizabeth Riley? Wait a minute. She contacted you, and you still made me suffer through a week of meetings with Bell?”
“I contacted her,” Roberts corrected, “and yes. CYA, Detective.”
Cover your ass.
Alex thought back over the excruciating hours of verbal sparring she’d endured as the department shrink tried and failed to elicit details about things she would never—could never—tell him. To her mind, Roberts’s ass could go straight to hell for making her go through that.
That, however, was an opinion best kept to herself. She surveyed the parking lot. With the question of her sanity out of the way, it was time to get down to business—and to her first murder scene since their serial killer more than two months before. A killer that had turned her entire reality upside down when she’d learned he was a Fallen Angel. She hunched her shoulders and gripped her coffee a little tighter.
A handful of personnel dismantled the powerful floodlights used to light the scene. Roberts had called her in late on this one. Odd. She shot him a sideways glance.
“So what do we have?”
“A goddamn mess.”
Noting the thin line of his mouth, she raised a brow. “Can we be a little more specific?”
Roberts pointed toward an ambulance across the lot. “In the body bag. Female, Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five years of age.”
“And?”
“She was pregnant. The baby is . . . gone.”
Gone. An innocuous enough word, if it hadn’t been for Roberts’s slight hesitation before speaking it. Gone. Gone how? Gone as in she’d given birth and the baby was missing? Gone as in the baby had died with its mother?
Or gone as in this was the reason Roberts had called her?
As in Seth was right and this had to do with them.
Tossing her still full cup into a nearby Dumpster, she took a deep breath. “Right. Let’s have a look.”
Roberts’s hand on her arm stopped her before she’d taken more than a step. “It’s bad, Alex.”
“I’m—” The word fine died on her lips. Had those haggard lines always been around his eyes? That gray tinge under his skin? She stared at him, then nodded once in acknowledgment of the warning.
Roberts released his grip.
Alex walked toward the ambulance, passing the mobile command post, a forensic technician packing up equipment, two others winding up extension cords and shutting down generators. She tried to steel herself for what she knew was coming, but what had once been an automatic defense felt rusty from disuse. Whatever awaited her, it was going to be rough.
With Roberts at her side, she reached the ambulance and waited for the coroner to unzip the body bag strapped to a gurney.
Heavy-duty black plastic parted to expose a young woman’s face, its unnatural pallor speaking to massive blood loss. Silently, grimly, the coroner pulled open the rest of the bag. Alex’s gaze traveled down the body. Settled on the raw, gaping hole where the abdomen should have been. Where a baby would have been.
If it hadn’t been ripped out of its mother.
Not cut.
Ripped.
Brutally, viciously torn.
Alex’s stomach heaved.
Chapter 4
“You cannot avoid me forever, Mika’el.”
The careful neutrality of Verchiel’s voice made the words all the more accusatory. Mika’el paused in the task of honing the sword laid across his lap. He stared down at the gleaming metal, its edge now beyond lethal. It hadn’t needed sharpening, but the rhythmic act of sliding stone over metal had been calming. Mindless. Requiring no conscious thought as long as he continued.
Given a choice, he would have continued for eternity.
He laid the broadsword beside him on the garden bench. Then he leaned back and stretched his arms wide along the backrest. “I’m not avoiding you, Highest.”
“Fine. Then you can’t avoid yourself forever.”
He grimaced at the diminutive, crimson-robed female in the arched entry of the rose garden where he’d taken refuge. “You’re very astute.”
Verchiel, Highest Seraph and executive administrator of Heaven, shrugged. “I’ve had my share of practice at reading angels,” she said. A reference, no doubt, to her past position as handler of the volatile Powers—particularly Aramael. “My point—”
Mika’el waved her silent. “Your point is that you want to know what the One told me yesterday.”
“She holds you responsible, doesn’t she? But she knew—”
“She knew I would task Aramael with Seth’s assassination,” Mika’el cut in. “All that happened after—the Nephilim army, permitting Lucifer to manipulate me, my plan to strike the first blow and plunge Heaven into war again—all of that I kept from her.”
“We kept it from her because if we’d told her—”
“Then she would have stopped Lucifer the only way she could, and we would have lost her.”
“Surely she cannot blame you for trying to protect her.”
He played idly with the whetstone in his hand, moving it between his fingers. “She can if she prefers not to be protected.”
Silence met his words, broken by the faintest whisper of a breeze passing through the stone-walled garden, the lazy drone of a bumblebee, the call of a distant bird, Verchiel’s swallow.
“She wants to end herself?” the Highest asked at last. “You must be mistaken.”
“Not end,” he said. “Alter. She wants to go back to what she was before she divided herself into so many pieces—or at least closer to that state. She’s worn out, Verchiel. Weary of the struggle between her and Lucifer, of trying to maintain balance in the universe, of being the All to so many souls. She’s given so much of herself that there’s nothing left. She tried to tell me before, but I didn’t want to listen. And now my actions might have made it impossible.”
Leaving his sword on the bench, he stood and paced the gravel path. “If we—if I hadn’t interfered,” his voice was harsh in his own ears, “she could have done what she wanted to do all along. She could have eliminated Lucifer as a threat and left us to deal only with the Fallen. We would still have faced a difficult battle, but we would have prevailed. We would have saved humanity.”
Verchiel’s head moved in convulsive denial. “Without the One? How will we live without her?”
Mika’el stopped to watch a honeybee buried in the pale pink folds of a rose, its buzzing at a frenzied pitch. The internal chaos he’d held at bay by endlessly sharpening his sword, by refusing to think, had begun swirling inside him again. How would they live without the One? He had no idea, but she had made it clear they had no choice. Their time with her had run out. It was up to him to lead the way.
But not to lie.
“We don’t,” he answered Verchiel. He met her shock with the grim implacability that had carried him through six millennia of alienation from his Creator. “We learn to survive. One day at a time.”
Another silence fell, this one filled not with shock but with their shared, fathomless anguish. Not even the birds intruded. After what felt like an aeon but could only have been a few moments, Verchiel softly cleared her throat.
“You said your actions might have made it impossible. Because of the Nephilim?”
His eyes closed. Involuntarily, briefly. He made himself open them. He wouldn’t hide from the Highest. Wouldn’t keep secrets. Not anymore.
“Them—and Seth.”
“Seth? But he gave up his immortality, his power . . . what threat can he possibly—?” Verchiel broke off as a shudder, barely perceptible, rippled through the ground beneath their feet. She stared down, then lifted startled, questioning eyes to Mika’el’s.
“That kind of threat,” he said, rising to his feet and replacing his sword in its scabbard at his waist. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a mess to clean up before Lucifer realizes what’s happened and finds a way to use it to his own advantage—if he hasn’t already.”
&
nbsp; Chapter 5
A swirl of dust and litter lifted from the street and traveled toward the parking lot, bringing with it the exhaust fumes from the early morning traffic. From behind Alex came the solid thunk of the ambulance doors closing, then the steady footfall of Roberts’s approach. He stopped at the edge of her vision and cleared his throat.
“Well? Is it what I think it is?”
That depends, a part of her—one that still believed in keeping secrets—wanted to hedge. A greater part of her knew there was no point. Not with Roberts. With someone else, perhaps, but not Roberts. He’d seen too much, guessed at too much, and he needed to know. He deserved to know.
“If you’re asking whether I think this is related to our serial killer, the answer is yes.”
“Our killer died two months ago.”
Almost taking her out in the process, despite her Heavenly soulmate’s best efforts. The scars across her throat prickled with memories. “Yes.”
“So there’s another one?”
More than one. More than you can imagine.
“It looks that way.”
Massaging the back of her neck with fingers made icy by the November wind, she struggled to find the words she needed to tell her supervisor that the bizarre pregnancies happening worldwide had nothing to do with the virus being postulated by the medical community—or the bioterrorism theories rampant in the media.
She tried to remember what she’d told Hugh Henderson when it had become impossible to put off the Vancouver detective any longer. How she’d explained that Heaven and Hell were real, and Armageddon itself was about to unfold. But Roberts forestalled her, his tone brisk.
“All right. As soon as the preliminary autopsy confirms what we’re thinking, I’ll pass the file on to Bastion. Are you going home again or straight to the office?”
Her fingers curled into the hair at the nape of her neck. She stared at her supervisor. “Excuse me?”
“I asked if you’re—”
“I heard, but that’s it? That’s all you want to know?”
“It’s all I need.”
Her mouth flapped three times before she found her voice again. “A woman’s baby is ripped—not cut—ripped from her, and you don’t have any questions other than am I going home or straight to the office? What the hell, Staff? You must realize we’re not dealing with a human killer here. You need to know—”
“Stop.”
She did, if only out of sheer surprise.
“I don’t need to know anything, Detective. In fact, the less I know, the better. Because regardless of who—or what—did this, as it stands right now I have no choice but to investigate the homicide as I would any other. And if I’m going to place you back on active duty, I need deniability. Has Detective Jarvis ever mentioned hallucinations to you? No. Has she reported hearing voices? No. Does she appear mentally sound? Yes.”
The buttons of Roberts’s wool peacoat strained under the sudden thrust of his hands into his pockets. “As good a cop as you are, your career is hanging by a thread right now. The rest of the world wants a rational explanation for what’s going on. Our bosses want a rational explanation. So if you go around spouting off about killers who aren’t human, I either have to back you up or shut you down. If I back you up, I get shut down and we’re both finished. Whatever the hell is going on, neither of us will be of any use without a badge behind us. Are you getting this?”
If I back you up. Not when. If.
Because it didn’t come down to whether or not the rest of the world wanted to believe her, but whether or not he did.
The truths she’d wanted to speak gathered in the back of her throat, piling one on top of another until they threatened to cut off her breath. She hadn’t realized until now, until this very moment, how much she needed to share her burden. To tell someone here in Toronto, because Henderson was just too damned far away in Vancouver, about all the things no mortal should have ever known.
The broken pact that had triggered war between Heaven and Hell; a Nephilim army, eighty thousand strong, growing in the bellies of human women; Heaven’s attempt to assassinate the One’s own son when his love for a mortal woman, for Alex, had threatened the existence of humankind.
Archangels. Lost soulmates. Rape at the hands of Lucifer.
She nudged at a pebble near the toe of her shoe. “Can I ask you something?”
Roberts waited.
“If you didn’t want to know, why call me?”
“I called you for confirmation, Detective. Because I do know. Maybe not everything, but enough.” Her supervisor opened his car door. “There’s a meeting this morning. Ten a.m. I expect you there.”
* * *
Mika’el stared down from the rooftop at the woman in the parking lot below—and at the Archangel watching her from the shadows of a building.
Aramael.
Damn it to Hell and back again.
At first, when he hadn’t found the Naphil at either her apartment or office, he’d been at a loss as to where else to look. With any other human, it would have been a simple matter of contacting his or her Guardian, but those of Nephilim descent had no Guardians, making them essentially untraceable—especially in a city of several million. Then, about to give up and post a watch at the two most obvious locations, he’d sensed Aramael’s presence.
The coincidence had been too great to ignore.
And now he’d confirmed his suspicions. Aramael, newly promoted from exiled Power to Archangel, had lied to him about having severed the connection between him and Alex. Mika’el tipped back his head and stared at the still-dark sky. He should have expected this. He of all angels should have known that one’s soulmate, Naphil or otherwise, could not be so easily dismissed.
His years away had made him careless. It was time—past time—to get his act together. The One needed her son back, and Mika’el needed to know he had a united force of Archangels at the ready.
With a last glance streetward, he stepped back from the roof’s edge and out of the human realm.
He’d start with Aramael.
Chapter 6
Raymond Joly looked up at her from the couch as Alex walked into the coffee room.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said, his enormous mustache giving an upward twitch indicative of a grin. “It’s about time you got off your ass and back to work.”
“He said as he lazed on the couch,” she retorted, walking between him and the newscast he’d been watching, headed for the counter. She indicated the television with a lift of her chin. “More good news?”
Joly thumbed the remote control, and the screen went blank. Linking fingers behind his head, he leaned back. “Earthquakes in the Middle East, a massive hurricane that hit more Caribbean countries than I knew existed, flooding in Australia, and a volcanic eruption off the coast of Japan. Oh, and pregnant women lining up by the thousands to demand DNA tests for this virus they still can’t identify. Shall I continue?”
There was more?
“I’m good, thanks,” she told Joly.
“I know this stuff happens all the time, but I swear it’s getting worse,” he muttered. “It’s like somebody hit the self-destruct button on the bloody planet. So I heard Roberts called you in on our thing this morning. What did you think?”
“I thought it looked like someone got killed.”
“You know what I mean.”
She did, but she wasn’t going to answer. Not after that speech from Roberts. She took down a mug from the cupboard and reached for the coffeepot. Joly heaved himself off the couch with a grunt. Joining her at the counter, he held out his own cup, and she poured for them both. Her colleague leaned back against the counter, one ankle crossed over the other, and stared down into his coffee while she stirred cream and sugar into hers. The silence moved beyond a lapse in conversation to being obviously deliberate.
She dropped the spoon into the sink with a clatter. “If you’re waiting for me to—”
“It’s not
about the case.”
“What, then?” she asked, settling against the counter beside him.
“Nothing, really.” Joly shrugged. He slurped at the coffee from under his handlebar mustache. “It’s just . . . Vancouver. What the hell happened out there, Jarvis?”
“You’ve read the report.”
“I have,” he agreed. “I’ve also got a cousin who’s married to one of their emergency response members.”
Hell. Sometimes the thin blue line was a little too thick for comfort.
“He won’t talk about what he saw that night—”
Good.
“—but that Sunday he got up and went to church.”
Alex flashed him a look and found him studying the floor at his feet.
“Garth is—was—the staunchest atheist I’ve ever met in my life,” he said. “Our discussions on the issue of faith rarely end well, at least according to my wife, and now he’s going to church and taking his kids to Sunday school. My cousin is freaked. So I repeat: what the hell happened out there?”
She wondered how he would react if she told him. Just blurted out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the—
“Your career is hanging by a thread,” Roberts’s voice echoed in her memory.
She scowled at her coffee. Hell, who was she kidding? Even without Robert’s warning, she’d become so adept at keeping secrets at this point that she wasn’t sure she knew how to let them go.
Bastion poked his head into the room. “Meeting’s in two minutes,” he said, then gave Alex a nod. “Good to have you back, Jarvis.”
Alex detached herself from the counter.
“You haven’t answered me,” Joly said.
She turned when she reached the door. “You know what happened, Joly? Shit happened. A lot of it.”
Joly’s mustache twitched. “What kind of answer is that?”
“The only one you’re getting.”
* * *
Alex took a place against the wall in the conference room, returning various greetings. She’d wondered how it might be, coming back after all that had gone down, but apart from Joly’s questions . . .
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