Sins of the Angels

by Linda Poitevin

  Her partner was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, “What did he say to you?”

  “He said he had Christine—”

  “What else?”

  She licked dry lips. From the corner of her eye, she saw him track the movement. Torment flared across his face and sudden heat joined the energy still radiating from him, finding an answer low in her belly. Focus, damn it. She edged away.

  “Alex.” Trent’s voice stopped her mid-sidle. “What else did he say?”

  Alex folded her arms across herself. Wished herself somewhere far, far away. Gritted her teeth and made herself answer. “He called me Naphil. Wondered how he was going to get past you to me.”

  “And?”

  Heat scorched her cheeks. “He wanted to know why I allowed you in my life if I wasn’t looking for your protection, and if you felt the same way. He said that when we do find Christine, he’ll be watching you to judge for himself.”

  Silence.

  “You don’t want to ask questions.” A statement.

  “No.” The word came out as a bare thread of sound. Alex cleared her throat. “No. I just want to find Christine. And the killer.”

  “As do I.”

  Alex thought about the voice mail message Christine had left for her, the clue that had to be in the fraud detective’s words, if she could only decipher it. If they could only decipher it. She tightened her arms around her stomach and reached deep for the fortitude she needed for this next part. The part where she did what had to be done if they were to ever find their killer: she turned, faced Jacob Trent, and finally accepted him as her partner.

  “Then let’s do it,” she said.

  ARAMAEL SWALLOWED A snarl and heaved his pen across the room. “We’re wasting time. This is getting us nowhere.”

  Alex looked up from the files she’d spread across the conference table, frustration stamped in the stubborn, weary lines of her face. “You have a better idea?”

  He shoved back from the table and prowled the room’s perimeter. “You know I don’t, but there must be something more than this”—he waved his hand—“this endless going over and over the same things. You can’t tell me this works. That this is how you hunt.”

  “Rather successfully, actually.” She tacked yet another annotated sticky note onto the wall among dozens of others. Flashed him a look of profound annoyance. “This is real police work, Trent. Meticulous, grinding, dry as dust, and nothing like the movies. But it does work, so until you figure out an alternative, suck it up.”

  Aramael drew himself to his full height, towering over her. “Excuse me?” he breathed. He didn’t care how much of a bond he felt with this woman, no one spoke to a Power like that.

  But Alex showed not the slightest sign of intimidation. “You heard me. And for the record, we don’t hunt, we investigate, and if you have nothing to contribute, then go find something else to do.”

  He actually felt his wings begin to unfurl, his indignation was so great. He glowered at her, searching for words that would even begin to express his irritation, and then felt himself falter when she looked away from him. He stared down at her in surprise. She had never backed down before. Why—?

  She reached for a file and his gaze locked on her hand. Or more precisely, on the tremble in her hand. His anger drained from him in a rush. She was afraid. He berated his stupidity. Of course she was afraid. She’d spoken to Caim, had seen what he was capable of, knew the threat against her was real. She was terrified, and with good reason.

  Aramael turned and stalked to the other side of the room. What an unholy mess. What a fucking, unholy mess. His hands twitched with frustration and pent-up energy. Energy that should be aimed at his brother in fury and retribution, but instead longed to be directed toward Alex in comfort and reassurance and all manner of things he dared not contemplate.

  He heard the soft clearing of her throat behind him. Gathered himself. Made his hands unclench. Turned.

  Alex stared down at the table. “You can stop him, right?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then, even though she couldn’t see, he nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “When we find him, I can stop him.”

  Because the alternative was unthinkable, and not just for the reasons Heaven imagined.

  She weighed his words, and he saw her want to believe them. But when the door opened and her supervisor came into the room, followed by several other detectives, doubt still shadowed her eyes.

  “Well?” Roberts asked.

  Alex shook her head. “Nothing. You?”

  “Dick all.” Roberts stared at the sticky-note-covered wall. “Where the fuck is the connection? With this many vics, there has to be something. These people wouldn’t all just go off with some random stranger, not with all the media coverage on this thing. We can’t even get a decent profile on the son of a bitch.”

  “Maybe we’re making it more complicated than we need to,” one of the other detectives muttered. “If it is as random as it looks, maybe we just ask who all these people would go with.”

  “You mean, like someone they trusted,” Alex said, coming alert and straightening up from the table.

  “Uniforms,” someone else offered. “People trust uniforms.”

  A sudden thrill of interest buzzed through the room. Ideas spilled over one another.

  “A cop.”

  “Firefighter.”

  “Armed forces.”

  “Paramedic.”

  “Priest,” Alex said.

  The room went silent and Aramael, along with all the others, turned to Alex. She looked stunned. Sickened. Horrified. “The bodies. They were all posed like a crucifix. Delaney was dating a priest.”

  The moment she said it, Aramael knew it to be true. Caim would love the irony, would take enormous pleasure in the idea of thumbing his nose at Heaven in that way.

  “A Catholic priest?” Roberts asked.

  “She didn’t know. He’d been accused of fraud, but the complainant never followed up and Delaney decided to close the file.” Alex pressed her hands to her temples. “Shit, that’s what her message was about. Why didn’t I see this before?”

  Roberts’s face had turned a brick red. “She was dating a priest accused of fraud?”

  “The flowers,” Alex muttered.

  “The what?”

  She lifted her head. “The flowers. When Delaney dropped the flowers this morning, we’d just started the meeting. Someone—Ward.” Alex whirled to face another of the men. “You’d just given the ID on two of the vics, father and son.”

  “Stevens. Arthur and Mitchell. Arthur Stevens was the complainant on a fraud file Delaney had. Bastion was trying to get hold of her this afternoon to follow up on it.”

  A handful of seconds ticked by while those in the room processed the information. Worked through the implications. Then Roberts strode toward the door.

  “Find Bastion,” he directed the man named Ward. “Get that fraud file from him. I want the name and address of the priest on my desk in five minutes along with a warrant. Alex, call tactical.”

  SETH PULLED OUT a chair across the table from Verchiel, swung it around, and straddled it. “You’ve been hiding,” he said cheerfully.

  He watched the Dominion turn over her papers and cover the page of the record she had been reading. An old record, he noted. Very old.

  “Not hiding,” she said. “Just busy.”

  “Too busy to respond to your messages? I’ve been trying to reach you for some time now.”

  “My apologies.”

  “You haven’t asked why.”

  Verchiel rested an elbow on the table, cradling her cheek in her hand. “I know why, Seth. I just don’t know that I have the answers for you.”

  “Or for Aramael, apparently.”

  She looked away. “Or for Aramael.”

  “You know he has feelings for the woman.”

  Seth watched Verchiel twist a strand of hair around a finger, saw the tiny lines between her b
rows deepen. He probed a little further. “There is a difference between not having answers and not sharing the ones you do have, you know.”

  “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

  “No. Aramael deserves better than this. If you don’t have answers for me, then I will find them elsewhere.”

  Verchiel’s expression reflected an inner struggle, and then hardened as she seemed to reach a decision. “What do you want to know?”

  “What went wrong?” he said. “Why does Aramael have feelings for the woman? Why can she see him?”

  Verchiel’s hand twitched atop the papers in front of her. Seth reached across the table to place his own hand beside hers and, after a moment’s hesitation, the Dominion withdrew. Seth slid the papers aside and pulled the thick sheaf of fragile, yellowing papers toward him. “What page?”

  “All of them.” Verchiel nodded toward a stack by her elbow. “Those, too.”

  “I don’t suppose you could summarize for me?”

  “I’m not done yet. I’ve barely started, in fact, but if I’m reading these right, Aramael and the woman—” Verchiel took a deep breath. “I have no idea how it happened, but there’s a possibility they may be soulmates. It’s really the only possible explanation for the connection between them.”

  “Angels don’t have soulmates.”

  “Not now, no. But we did once. In the beginning, when Lucifer sat at the One’s side, all of angelkind loved and were loved, and we knew great happiness. We were sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers …” The Dominion’s voice trailed off.

  After a moment, she roused herself. “Then the One created the mortals, and Lucifer’s descent began. He was so very jealous. So resentful of the time and attention the One paid to them. At first the One tolerated his interference; I suppose she thought he would come around, but it only became worse. Lucifer persuaded the Grigori to share knowledge with mortals that they weren’t prepared to handle. Humans began to fight among themselves, to use their new skills to gain power over one another. Wars broke out. Then Lucifer encouraged the physical unions between Grigori and mortal, and the Nephilim were spawned.”

  Seth held still, sensing that she wasn’t done. So far the story was a familiar one all of Heaven knew, but the yellowed paper in his hands suggested there was more to be learned.

  As if she’d read his mind, Verchiel smiled tightly. “You know all this, of course. We all do. The One cast out the Grigori and Lucifer, one-third of the host followed, war ensued between us.” She nodded at the paper he held. “The rest of the story is in there. All of it. The pain of battling our loved ones, of losing so many of them to Lucifer, very nearly destroyed us, and so the One did the only thing she could. She removed our free will, took away our responsibility for our own actions, made it her decision that we go against our mates, our children and siblings. And she removed our memories of love. Our capacity for it.”

  Far away, in the bowels of the room that housed the entire history of angelkind and mortals alike, Seth heard the thud of a book dropped to the floor. Listened to its muffled echo die away.

  At last he spoke, surprised at the gruffness in his voice, “Familiar stories, even those. But you speak of those events as if you remember them.”

  Verchiel’s eyes clouded. “I’ve always remembered. It’s distant, muted, but I know what it was like to love, to have a soulmate. I know the pain Aramael will endure in losing the woman.”

  “Even if you’re right, you’re hardly responsible.”

  “Aren’t I? If I’d stood up to Mittron, refused to send Aramael after Caim a second time, I might have prevented any of this from happening.”

  Surprise stirred in Seth. “But you would have been disobeying an order—an action like that would require free will.”

  Verchiel blanched. Looked ill. “Yes. It would.”

  Seth sat back in his chair and tapped a finger against his top lip. “How long have you known?”

  “Mittron—” She paused. “Mittron was my soulmate. I thought that my ambivalence toward his authority was because of our familiarity. I’ve only just realized it is more.”

  “Are there others like you?”

  “I don’t know. If there are, they wouldn’t talk of it.”

  “I suppose not.” Seth fell silent. Verchiel might be an anomaly, but with nearly three hundred thousand angels in Heaven, it was unlikely she was the only one who struggled with this. Which begged the question of how many others had harbored the same secret, and for how long? Not to mention how it had happened in the first place.

  He touched the stack of papers. “And this? What is it you’re looking for in this?”

  “I don’t know yet. Connections, I suppose. Reasons.”

  “Was it not the Highest who saw to the Cleanse?”

  Verchiel folded her hands on the table, knuckles white with strain. “Yes.”

  “So I’m guessing he didn’t sanction your research?”

  “No.”

  Seth rose from his chair, turned it around, and pushed it into place at the table. He slid the papers across the desk toward Verchiel. “Keep looking. I want to know more. Tell Mittron I set you to the task, and that I’d like to know what he plans to do about this mess.”

  Verchiel looked startled. Horrified. “You want me to tell the Highest Seraph he is to—”

  “Report to me? Yes. Tell him I said I’m pulling rank on him. It’s about time someone did.” Seth began strolling back the way he’d come through the rows of documents that made up the archives, then he paused and turned back to Verchiel. “You need to tell Aramael.”

  “He won’t take it well.”

  Seth held back a snort. Verchiel had no idea. “Probably not,” he agreed. “But it may be our only chance to temper what we can no longer control.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Alex watched three projectiles punch through the painted-over plate-glass window. Loud pops followed in their wake, and then the brief, brilliant glare marking them as flash grenades. Another smaller explosion followed at the mission door as the charge set by the tactical unit blew apart the lock. Before the puff of smoke had even formed, the unit went into action, the first through the door bearing a shield that would protect him and those following from whatever lay on the other side. In seconds, all the team members had passed through the doorway and into the building.

  She waited, gun in hand, crouched to one side of Father William McIntyre’s street mission. The bricks pressed into her back. A few meters away, Trent paced the sidewalk. He had refused to don a bulletproof vest; refused to join the team waiting to penetrate the building; refused to let Alex out of his sight.

  Roberts hadn’t seemed to notice. Alex hadn’t argued.

  The earpiece she wore crackled to life.

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  Alex tightened her grip on her gun, her palms clammy with anticipation. No difficulties encountered so far. No surprises. No killer. No Christine.

  From inside, she heard the crash of wood giving way. The rattle of heavily equipped Emergency Task Force members moving forward in another rush. Silence. Alex straightened up, her intestines slithering over one another to form a knot in her belly. Her throat tightened. Where were they? Why didn’t they say something?

  As if she’d conjured it, the team leader’s voice sounded in her ear. Tight, shaking, hoarse. “Holy fucking hell. You guys better get in here. Now.”

  The smell of blood hit before she cleared the doorway. The gut-emptying stench of rotting meat came next. Alex gagged and buried her nose in her sleeve. Odor became taste as she breathed through her mouth and fought a wave of nausea. What the hell was in here? She waited for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the dim light, and then made herself take stock of her surroundings.

  A half dozen cheap, waiting-room-style chairs sat against one wall, a desk, littered with broken glass from the grenades’ entries, faced the entrance. No blood. No bodies. She focus
ed on a door hanging from its hinges in the opposite wall. Flashlight beams crisscrossed the darkness beyond, but not a sound emerged, not even the clump of boots. As if everyone there moved on tiptoe.

  A fine, creeping quiver crawled along Alex’s skin. She lowered her arm. There had to be two dozen street-hardened cops in the place. Cops who had seen it all. Why the hell was there not so much as a whisper from any of them?

  Light flared suddenly in the other room as someone found a switch. A bare instant later, one of the tactical team members, stone-jawed and pasty, bulldozed through the doorway and onto the sidewalk. Alex heard him retch and the quiver along her skin became a tremble in her gut, her lungs, her heart. Death’s scent permeated her every pore, wove its way into her soul, became an icy slag-heap of fear. She looked again toward the room beyond the lobby. Toward what the killer had invited them to find, what he hinted would happen to her.

  No. Not hinted. Said.

  A hand touched her arm. She jumped and looked up into her partner’s flinty eyes, saw the uncompromising promise there: He won’t get you. For a moment, she almost believed him. Then she looked toward the room beyond the lobby.

  Eleven bodies to date, and now this. Christine missing, the toughest cops in the city silenced and brought to their knees. She wanted to trust Trent to protect her, but how could he? How could anyone be safe from this monster?

  She stepped away from Trent’s hand and into the other room, and saw what had made the tactical team go so silent. Understood why one of their own had bolted from the scene. Might have followed, but shock and disbelief paralyzed her feet.

  Alex reached for the support of the wall, remembered she stood in a crime scene, and caught back her hand. She struggled to take in the mayhem before her. The gore. Blood was everywhere: splashed across walls, spattered on the ceiling, pooled on the tile floor, tracked into every corner by cops’ booted feet. Its scent rose to clog her throat; its vivid crimson flooded her vision. Air became fire in her throat, her chest. For an instant, every memory, every fear that had ever tormented her loomed in her mind and blotted out the real with the remembered. She crossed her arms and dug her fingers into her ribs in an attempt to hold herself upright, to stave off the urge to crumple onto the floor and fold in on herself and give up.