Sins of the Angels

by Linda Poitevin

  Seth settled more firmly against the car and folded his arms across his chest. “You know that won’t work.”

  Alex bit down on the inside of her lip. There was so much more in that statement than she could deal with right now. She lifted her chin. “Maybe not. But it will draw a lot of attention you don’t want and I’ll get away in the confusion. Your choice.”

  “I’m just asking you to wait for a few seconds until Ara—until Jacob gets here.”

  The killer knows about Jen and Nina.

  “No.”

  “Be reasonable, Alexandra Jarvis. You can’t just disappear without telling him where you’ll be. A moment or two won’t make a difference.”

  Two strides took her to within inches of him. Anger rolled through her in waves. Her hand settled on her weapon.

  “That murdering son of a bitch knows I have a sister,” she grated through clenched teeth, “and a niece. And I don’t care how livid Trent will be, I’ll be damned if I stand here while a monster goes after them. So get the fuck out of my way, Benjamin. Now.”

  Black eyes studied her calmly and it took all her strength not to back down from them, not to hide from their toocanny perception. “If he does find them, you can’t stop him. Not alone.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I can.”

  Something dark crossed Seth’s features and she knew he understood her meaning. What she intended. Long seconds ticked by before he spoke again. “I cannot let you sacrifice yourself.”

  “Damn it, Benjamin—”

  He shook his head, cutting her off. “My job is to keep you safe when Jacob cannot. No more, no less.”

  Alex whirled away. She released her grip on the gun and raked hands through hair before settling them on her hips. She stared at the scene she had walked away from and thought about her fellow cops still dealing with the insanity behind the brick walls and plate glass, clinging to the belief that they could find the killer. That they could catch him. Stop him.

  The belief that he was human.

  Her fingers dug painfully into her hip bones. She turned back to Seth, her terror now a quiet desperation. If she couldn’t save Jen and Nina, at least she could be there for them. “They’re the only family I have, Seth. Come with me if you want, but let me go to them. Please.”

  Seth looked away. Hope struggled to life in Alex’s chest. Had she found a chink in that damnably impenetrable armor? She crossed the sidewalk and placed her hand on her bodyguard’s forearm. “Please,” she said again.

  Seth stared down at her hand and a sudden tingle crawled along her skin. A frisson of awareness. Alex felt him tense beneath her touch and she drew back, flustered by his response. Shocked at her own. Heat rose in her cheeks.

  Seth stood without moving for a moment, then shoved his hands into his pockets. Shook his head. “We wait.”

  Her shoulders slumped. Hell. That put her back to shooting him, then.

  Even as the thought crossed her mind, however, Seth looked past her and relief flashed across his face. “Took you long enough,” he said.

  Alex glanced around to see Trent step out from a recessed doorway behind her. He swept a narrow look over both her and Seth and she wondered what he’d heard. How much he’d seen.

  Why it should matter.

  She looked to Seth. “You’re sure it’s him this time?”

  Trent frowned. “This time?” he echoed. “What does she mean, this time?”

  “We had an incident,” Seth told Trent.

  Trent took a threatening step in Seth’s direction, his eyes glittering. “He was here? You let him talk to her?”

  “I didn’t let him do anything,” Seth growled. “As soon as I realized it wasn’t you—”

  “You should have been watching her. I trusted you.”

  Seth straightened up from the car and stepped onto the sidewalk, leaving the car door unprotected. “I kept her safe.”

  “You let him get to her. How is that safe?”

  Alex stared at the car. Did she dare—? Trent’s chest suddenly filled her field of vision, cutting off her escape, and she took a startled step back.

  “Are you all right?”

  His voice, gruff with concern, reached inside her and laid bare the vulnerability Alex had tried so hard to ignore. The terror.

  “Alex?”

  The killer knew about Jen and Nina. Knew, because Alex had told him. Her throat constricted and she gulped for air; felt her mind begin to part company with her body. She crossed her arms, certain that she literally held herself together, that she would fly apart into a thousand pieces if she released her hold. Was she all right? No. She might never be all right again. Strong fingers took hold of her chin, lifted, tightened.

  “Look at me,” Trent commanded softly. “Tell me what happened.”

  In a few brief words, Alex told him of her encounter with the killer who had looked like him. A cold mask of fury settled over his face and the unmistakable rustle of feathers sounded behind his back. She closed her eyes.

  “Did you tell him where your sister lives?” he asked.

  “No.” Her voice cracked on the word. She swallowed. “But he’ll still find them, won’t he?”

  “Yes. But we have a little time.”

  The air wheezed from her lungs. She opened her eyes again. “How little?”

  She could tell that he tried to soften his gaze for her, tried to look reassuring, but he failed. Miserably. For a single heartbeat, terror won and only Trent’s grip on her chin kept her upright. Then she locked her knees. Clung to his words. Stepped away from his touch.

  “I’ll drive,” she said.

  Because a little time was better than none.

  It had to be.

  THIRTY

  Aramael said nothing for the first few minutes of the drive, not sure he could be civil to the backseat passenger. Instead, he contented himself with glaring daggers over his shoulder at Seth, mutely promising their confrontation was far from over.

  He told himself it was Seth’s negligence alone that disturbed him, but he lied. His anger stemmed not just from the averted threat to Alex, but from what he had witnessed when he joined her and Seth on the sidewalk.

  Her hand on the Appointed’s arm.

  Seth’s reaction to her.

  Hers to him.

  Sourness twisted in his belly. He met Seth’s hooded gaze; knew the Appointed read his thoughts. Distrust crackled between them. Aramael turned away again and, with an effort, made himself focus on the “incident” he had missed.

  He shuddered.

  Caim. Here. With Alex.

  His brother had found her. Could have killed her then and there. Could have ended everything with a single swipe of his hand. Aramael felt Alex’s sideways look and knew she sensed his rising tension. The way she sensed everything about him. Soulmates.

  Aramael stared out the window. Caim could have ended everything, but he hadn’t.

  Why not?

  Because of Alex’s sister and niece? But why would he need another Nephilim target when he already had Alex? What game was he playing? Aramael’s thoughts stilled. That was it. Caim played a game. With him.

  How could he not have seen it? Caim had all but spelled it out for him in that phone call to Alex at the office, asking if Aramael felt the same way about her as she did him. Saying he would be watching them, would judge for himself. Because he knew. He knew Aramael had feelings for Alex.

  But still—why not just kill her outright? Why wait? Aramael snarled under his breath. He was missing something, but what? He turned to Alex. “Can we go any faster?”

  Alex reached for a switch under the dash and a siren wailed to life.

  JEN FLUNG OPEN the front door before Alex rang the bell.

  “Thank God!” she exclaimed, grabbing Alex’s arm and hauling her into the brightly lit entrance. “I thought you’d never get here. She’s in the living room. She still hasn’t said anything and she hasn’t moved. I don’t know what’s wrong—” Jen’s babble die
d away as she looked past Alex’s shoulder. “I thought you were coming alone.”

  Alex glanced at the two men she hadn’t been able to convince to remain in the car. A taxi rolled by on the street behind them and turned the corner. “Colleagues,” she said, for lack of a better description, and then added to Trent, “You should come in. It’s not safe to stand in the open like this.”

  The two men joined her in the front entry and Alex peered past Jen into the lamp-lit living room. “I don’t see her.”

  Jen’s face drew tight and she pointed into a corner behind the sofa, just outside the circle of light. Alex made out a drawn-up pair of knees and a curtain of dark hair.

  Nina. Looking small and vulnerable and very, very fragile.

  Alex’s heart skipped a beat. She pitched her voice low. “Has she said anything?”

  Jen shook her head. Bit her lip. “Not a word.”

  “All right.” Alex shrugged out of her blazer and laid it across the back of a chair. “Why don’t you make some tea while I talk to her?”

  “She might need me—”

  “She might need to talk to me first.”

  The sister in Alex ached as she watched Jen struggle with hurt and fear, but she knew from experience that kids her niece’s age tended to be more forthcoming without their parents hovering over them. She wondered if that had been the case when Delaney had spoken to Mitchell Stevens; if Delaney had ever had the chance to do so. Then she pushed away questions that no longer mattered and nudged her sister toward the hallway. “I’ll come get you when I’m done.”

  With Trent and Benjamin hovering in the living room doorway, Alex crossed the room and settled onto the floor beside her niece, near but not touching. “Nina?” she said softly. “It’s Alex.”

  Nina had dropped the “Auntie” title a few months before, declaring herself too old to use it. Alex hadn’t argued, seeing at the time an emerging, confident young woman in her niece. No trace remained of that young woman in the crumpled figure beside her now. The crumpled, bloodstained figure. She took in the details of her niece’s appearance and felt her heart jump into her throat. Blood had soaked both of the girl’s running shoes and all of what Alex could see of her jeans, and had dried to a crust in strands of Nina’s hair. What the hell?

  She bit her lip, trying to decide who Nina most needed her to be right now, cop or aunt, and then looked up as a darker shadow fell over her.

  Trent scowled at her. “You didn’t tell me she’d seen him.”

  “What?”

  “Your niece. You didn’t tell me she’d seen Caim.”

  Caim? Alex frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Jen called me because she arrived home like this and wouldn’t say what—” The rest of her words piled up in her throat, mixed with bile, choked off all possibility of sound. She stared again at her niece. Jesus, no.

  She took in Nina’s runners a second time and then examined the rest of her niece, from the girl’s legs to the huddled shoulders, the matted hair. That was a lot of blood. An awful, frightening amount of blood. The kind of blood that came from multiple bodies. Multiple victims. Then she remembered the one with the tattooed arm sleeves and piercings who had seemed vaguely familiar … and how she had seen the girl in Nina’s company once when she’d picked up her niece from school. Every cell in Alex’s body went still with horror. Denial.

  No.

  Of its own volition, her hand reached for Nina, slid beneath her chin, forced the girl’s head up and around to face her. She looked into the familiar, bright blue eyes and saw—

  Nothing.

  The same nothing she’d seen when she had looked into Martin James’s eyes yesterday. Sweet Jesus, no. The parting of Alex’s mind from her body, begun outside the mission, became a little more pronounced. A little more defined.

  Trent’s hand closed over her arm, tugged her hand away from her niece. Nina’s head lolled forward again. Trent raised Alex to her feet, his face set in grim lines.

  “It’s time to talk.”

  “Nina—”

  “Seth will stay with her.” Trent shot a glare at the other man that dared him to object.

  Seth hesitated for a fraction of a second, then looked at Alex. He nodded. “Go,” he said quietly. “You’ve earned your answers.”

  ALEX WATCHED TRENT prowl the perimeter of her sister’s dining room. Once again he had the look of a predator about him, but this time one that was caged and desperate to find a way out. One she would have preferred not to provoke, if she’d had the choice. But with Jen and Nina now at risk, no choice remained. If she wanted any chance to keep her sister and niece safe, she had to know what was going on. All of it.

  Even if it involves wings.

  She retreated into a corner of the dining room, crossed her arms, hunched her shoulders, and tried to ignore the doorway that yawned invitingly to her left. Trent stopped pacing. Alex swallowed.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  She studied the oak floor at her feet. “I’m sure.”

  “There can be no turning back. No way to undo—”

  He stopped midsentence as she raised her gaze to his. Gray eyes stared into hers, so many thoughts and emotions churning in them that she couldn’t begin to sort them out. Somehow she found it comforting to know he suffered as much angst about this as she did.

  She nodded. “I’m sure.”

  Trent watched her in silence for a second and then nodded. “Very well. My name is Aramael.” He lifted his head. “And I’m an angel.”

  As much as Alex had expected the words, they still rocked her world to its very foundation.

  She had known for a while now that something out of the ordinary was happening; that she could no longer deny her partner was more than he seemed and the killer more than they thought. This afternoon, when the killer called, she had turned her back on any last lingering doubts about her sanity. But still—

  An angel?

  She bit down on her lip. Couldn’t he have been something else? Anything else? An alien, maybe? Hell, she would have preferred he declare himself to be Supreme Tooth Fairy.

  But her very own, couldn’t-get-much-more-fuckingcrazy-than-this angel? A tremor began in her chest. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe she had followed in her mother’s footsteps after all, and this was just part of it. Part of the insanity. Maybe—

  “You’re not her, Alex.”

  Her head snapped up and she stared at Trent—Aramael—whoever the hell he was. “How do you know about—?”

  “It goes with the territory.”

  Of course it did. Silly her. She flexed her fingers, stiff from the tension that seemed to own her, and studied him. He was dressed in the same suit he’d worn when she first met him—how had she not noticed that he never changed?—and he looked so … normal. So not like she imagined an angel might look. No heavenly glow, no shining white robes. He didn’t even have wings at the moment, for God’s sake.

  Her other thoughts piled up behind the last one like a train wreck. If he was an angel, then God—? Heaven—? She reached for the back of a chair to support herself. So many questions. She didn’t know what to ask first. Or what to avoid.

  “Sit,” her former partner said. “I’ll start at the beginning.”

  Alex did as he suggested, mostly because she no longer trusted her own legs to support her, and in less time than she would have believed possible, what little remained of her reality was turned on its head. She learned of the One’s creation of a human race, nurtured throughout its evolution, and of Lucifer’s intense envy of the One’s attachment to those humans. Of the splitting of Heaven and the formation of Hell. Of the downfall of those angels who chose to follow Lucifer. The resulting noninterference pact. The appointment of a handful of those who remained loyal to the One as Powers when not all of the Fallen would abide by the agreement.

  Learned, absorbed, and then sat in silence for a long, long time after he finished.

  Footsteps appr
oached on the wooden floor and stopped in front of her. “Well?”

  She stared at his feet, humanly clad in leather dress shoes, and then lifted her gaze and flinched from a glimpse of fiery golden wings. “What kind of angel are you?”

  “Not the nice kind. I’m a Power, an angel of the Sixth Choir. And a hunter of the Fallen Ones.”

  “So the serial killer is—?”

  “One of those who followed Lucifer. Yes.”

  A buzzing started in her ears. One of Lucifer’s followers. A Fallen Angel. Stalking her. Stalking Jen and Nina. Alex fought down the urge to hyperventilate and drew on the shreds of her training. Being a cop might not help if she came up against Caim, but it could at least keep her thinking. Maybe keep her and Jen and Nina away from him long enough for Aramael to do his job.

  So think, damn it.

  She frowned. “Wait a minute. If you’re an angel, can’t you just do some kind of miracle thing and find him?”

  “I wish it worked like that, but I can only sense him in his demonic form, the one he becomes when he attacks a mortal.”

  “Demonic—” The buzz in Alex’s head became louder. Shit. “What about the rest of the time? Can he look like whoever he wants?”

  Trent—no, Aramael, he’d called himself. Would she ever get used to that? Aramael flexed his hands at his sides. “He can make you think he looks like someone else, but his true form is the one you saw tonight,” he said. “Caim is my brother, Alex. My twin.”

  The dining room door swung inward and Alex jumped in her seat, then stared at her sister. Jen’s gaze darted from her to Aramael and back. “Alex? Nina—”

  “She’s with my colleague,” Aramael said brusquely.

  Discontent fluttered across Jen’s brow.

  “She’s fine, Jen.” Alex forced the reassurance through stiff lips. “We’re just discussing the situation.”

  Discussing the total upheaval of everything I held to be true in life.

  “Did Nina say something? Have you called someone?” Again Jen’s eyes did the darting thing. “You haven’t, have you? Why not? What’s going on, Alex? Has Nina—Oh, God—” Her grip went rigid around the edge of the door. “Did she hurt someone?”