Seth might no longer be of Heaven, but his presence still packed a powerful punch. Time and again since she’d made her choice, moments like this had dispelled any lingering concern that her feelings for him might simply be tied to his divinity or, worse, a misguided sympathy. What she felt for the son of the One and Lucifer was far more than that … and far from simple.
The specter of his father complicated it further.
Seth’s expression darkened. He knew she’d thought of Lucifer again. He always knew, sometimes before she did. A familiar, automatic apology rose into her throat. She held it back. After this morning’s discussion—following which she still hadn’t made a move to talk to anyone—her oft-repeated words would just rub salt into an already festering wound.
“I just need another ten minutes or so,” she said. “I’m waiting for Henderson to call me back from Vancouver.”
Seth’s shoulders tensed, so imperceptibly that only a skilled interrogator would have noticed. Not for the first time, Alex wished she could turn off that part of herself, that she could take a person’s words and actions at face value and not always be looking for what they hid from her. Such as Seth’s ongoing displeasure.
“Is it about this morning’s case? I thought you said Roberts gave the file to someone else.”
This morning’s case. File. Words that didn’t begin to encompass the details of the day she’d shared with him over dinner. The immensity of a pregnant woman’s murder, the child missing from her belly, Alex’s hollow certainty about who—or what—might have taken it. Seth’s disinterest in the same.
She snuffed out a flicker of irritation. He was still new to this mortal thing. He hadn’t had a chance to develop a connection to humanity yet, apart from her. He just needed time.
She kept her voice even. “He did give the file to someone else. But if the killer is a Fallen One—”
“Then it won’t matter. There’s nothing you or Henderson can do.”
“I can’t stand by and do nothing, either.”
The phone on the desk rang. Seth stared at it, then turned on his heel and left.
***
Alex lifted the receiver on the third ring, when she was certain her voice could be trusted. “Hey, Hugh, thanks for calling me back.”
“It was about bloody time you called me back,” came the unceremonious rejoinder. “When I call you at eight a.m., Jarvis, and again at ten, noon, two, and four, you don’t bloody wait until after nine at night to call me back.”
Refraining—only just—from hanging up on the Vancouver detective who had become her friend, Alex let silence be her answer for a long moment. Then, her voice silky sweet, she inquired, “Done?”
A deep exhale sounded on the other end of the line. She pictured Henderson slumped at his desk, rubbing one hand over his cropped, graying hair.
“I was worried about you,” he said, his voice quieter. “We both were.”
“Both? Hell, don’t tell me you called Riley.” She didn’t care how many good words the Vancouver psychiatrist put in for her with the brass, she still didn’t like her—or her habit of poking at the unseen scars Alex preferred to think of as healed.
“She’s my friend,” Hugh answered her, “so yes, I stay in touch with her, and yes, she’s worried, too.”
“I’m fine, Hugh. I was fine when you called yesterday, I was fine when you called the day before, I was fine when I left Vancouver—”
Henderson snorted.
“—and I’m fine now,” she finished. “Really.”
“Right. You damn near die sticking a knife into your own gut, get buried under a goddamn building, and now you’re living with Lucifer’s son. Of course you’re fine. How could I possibly think otherwise?”
Alex pushed back the images his words conjured. Extracting her nails from her palms wasn’t so easy. “Did Riley put you up to this?”
“I told you, she’s worried about you,” Hugh replied.
“I’m—”
“If you say fine again—”
“Surviving,” Alex said. “I’m surviving. But I have to tell you, conversations like this don’t make it any easier.”
“Well, I guess that answers my next question of whether or not you’re talking to anyone.”
She snorted. “Right. And who do you suggest I talk to? I already have the department shrink watching my every move. If I so much as breathe a hint of what’s going on—”
“You have Seth there. Talk to him.”
Seth, who wanted nothing more than to put his past life behind him and have nothing to do with his parents’ machinations. Who, through no fault of his own, had become another insurmountable barrier in her life—and one of her greatest sources of guilt.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” she said, her voice harsh. “I just want to do my goddamn job.”
“Saving humanity from imploding is a little more than doing your job.”
“Is this all you called for? To harass me?”
“You can be awfully stubborn, can’t you?”
“You have no idea.”
“Fine,” he growled. “But just for the record, you’re the one who wanted to talk to me, remember?”
Alex tried to think past the headache forming at the base of her skull. She considered reminding him he’d actually been the one trying to call her all day, but an argument over semantics would take way too much effort. Massaging her neck, she re-focused her thoughts. “Two things. First, Roberts called me in this morning. We had a woman turn up in a parking lot with her belly ripped open and the baby missing.”
Silence. She listened to the faint ringing of a phone at Henderson’s end. Another long exhale.
“We found one in a Dumpster two nights ago,” he said. “Same thing.”
Alex’s stomach tightened, cramped. She touched the scar that remained from her own brush with a Naphil pregnancy, drew back her fingers as if scorched. “Are you sure?”
“That she was ripped open? Fairly.” Henderson’s attempt at gallows humor fell as flat as his voice. “I spent the better part of last night on the phone with Interpol,” he continued. “There have been four others reported in the last twenty-four hours. One in India, one in the States, and two in China.”
Her gaze returned to the computer monitor and the article she’d been reading.
“If that keeps up, it’ll seriously screw with the bioterrorism theories,” she said. “There’s no group in the world organized enough to steal babies from across the planet. At least, not a human one.”
“Interpol is setting up a task force anyway. They have no choice.”
For a moment, she envied the cops who would be a part of that task force, analyzing, investigating, doing all the things they’d been taught to do in their mortal world. She wondered what it would be like to go back to that state of blissful ignorance. To forget all that had happened, all that was still to come. Would she do it if she could? Even if it meant losing Seth?
“You said there were two things,” Henderson reminded her.
She switched off the monitor, then changed the subject. “Morinville.”
“Yeah, I saw that.”
“You don’t think the scrolls—?”
“A leak? No. Anyone with access to them would have been able to give the press more specifics. This is just pure knee-jerk fanaticism. You have to remember how much practice the Vatican has at keeping secrets.”
“Even the Church has rumors.”
“True, but the press would straight-up say where they’d got that kind of information.” She grunted a concession, then added, “That doesn’t mean something won’t get out eventually, and when it does, we’re screwed six ways to Sunday.”
“Let’s worry about that when—if—it happens. Now, how is Seth doing?”
“Settling in. It’s hard for him.”
“Still not talking about it? Because we could really use some insider information. He does realize the Nephilim could wipe us out, right?”
“He’s also been betrayed by both his parents, used for millennia as a pawn in their twisted little game, and given up everything he ever was in order to put all that behind him,” she snapped. “How happy would you be to rehash your parents’ attempts to kill you?”
“Easy, Jarvis. I was only asking.”
She bit the inside of her cheek, creating a physical pain to distract herself from the one in her heart. It didn’t help. “I know. I’ll keep working on him.”
In between dealing with her own issues.
Henderson cleared his throat, but his voice remained gruff. “It’s late there. Get some sleep, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Murmuring a good night, Alex replaced the receiver in its cradle. The headache had spread, filling her skull, throbbing in time to her heartbeat. She closed her eyes against the pain. Against the fine thread of constant tension that caused it.
Her brain replayed Henderson’s words. “He does know the Nephilim could wipe us out, right?”
Yes, he knew. She just didn’t know how to make him care. Especially when she couldn’t—
Warm hands settled onto her shoulders, massaging at the knots that never went away anymore. She sat quietly, letting Seth’s strength seep into her and chase away the shadows that wanted to gather at her core.
Long minutes later, when his hands left her shoulders to link with her own, she opened her eyes, let him draw her up out of the chair, and followed him to their bedroom. There would be no pressure tonight, no demand for anything she wasn’t ready to give. She knew that, because she knew he cared for her.
And if he cared for her, he could learn to care for others.
He just needed time.
Chapter 9
Lucifer looked up at the sound of a tap on his office door. His aide, Samael, stood in the opening, an aura of apology surrounding him. Lucifer scowled.
“Still nothing?” He tossed down his pen. “Bloody Heaven, how hard can it be to trace them?”
Samael leaned a shoulder against the door frame, his reluctance to venture inside clearly written across his expression, right beside the scars that served as Lucifer’s permanent reminder about who truly ruled Hell.
“I warned you this could take a while,” he said. “They’re Nephilim. Without Guardians we can eavesdrop on, we have no way to trace them other than through the woman.”
Lucifer’s nostrils flared, and the hand he rested on the desk curled into a fist. Across the room, Sam shifted. Lucifer didn’t bother telling him it was the thought of the woman that irritated him and not Sam’s news. He liked the former Archangel this way: a little nervous, a little cautious, a lot respectful.
No, Sam wasn’t the issue. The woman, on the other hand … now, she infuriated him. The defiance, the sheer insolence … His fingers curled tighter. Killing his child, maiming herself so she could not bear another …
He glowered at his aide. “Have we made any progress?”
“We’ve located where the woman works, and we’re watching her around the clock. It’s just a matter of time until she reaches out to her sister.”
“Watching her? Why in bloody Heaven would we sit back and watch? Take her, damn it. Make her tell you where to find the sister.”
“That might not be wise. The Archangels have been watching her, too. At first it was only Aramael, and I thought it was personal, but now Mika’el is hovering over her. We don’t know what his interest is, but if we take her and he wants her …”
His aide’s voice trailed off.
“Bloody Heaven!” Lucifer thrust back his chair and rose, stalking to the window. Weariness wound through him. What was the Archangel up to now? The warrior had been such a thorn in his side. The only being in all of Heaven, other than the One, powerful enough to take him on and not be decimated in the process. First rallying the Archangels to force him across that damnable Hellfire barrier, then derailing his attempt to mold his son, and now returning to interfere yet again.
Bracing a hand on either side of the window, he stared out at the gray, brittle landscape. The gardens that defied his efforts to recreate Heaven had declined yet further. Nothing remained but the withered corpses of what he’d intended. Bitterness filled him, settling like dry dust on his tongue.
For the first time in his existence, disquiet slithered down his spine. A possibility he’d denied for more than six thousand years took form low in his belly, gelled into certainty.
I’m going to lose it, he thought. I’m going to lose it all.
Maybe not now, maybe not even soon, but eventually.
It was inevitable.
For an instant, the realization paralyzed him. Held him as a fly might be held by a spider, passive and unmoving, tangled beyond hope in strands of unbreakable silk. He shook off the suffocating cling of the metaphor. Loss might be inevitable, but it wouldn’t happen yet. Not if he could help it.
Not until he had ensured humanity’s absolute, total destruction. He spun back to face Samael.
“What about the Nephilim? Are we at least ready for them?”
“We’re working on it. The city we chose has been abandoned for a long time. It’s not an easy task readying it without drawing attention to ourselves.”
“You’ve had human interference?”
“Not in Pripyat itself, no. We caused the radiation levels to spike, so they’ve shut the area down tight. The only way in is through checkpoints, and we control those. Making arrangements for supplies without alerting the Guardians has been interesting, but so far we’ve managed. The pregnant humans, however, are another matter. We’ve had to assign a watcher to each of them to prevent them from ridding themselves of the babies.”
“Can we not just move them to the site right now?”
“And end up fighting the war with Heaven in the midst of your unborn army? That might not be the wisest course of action. We’re better off waiting until after the births. We’ll only need a few Fallen to tend the children then, and the rest of us can draw the host away from them. Keep them occupied. Besides, we’re not sure what the radiation levels in the city might do to the mothers. If they became ill, they might not be able to carry the babies to term.”
“But the infants themselves won’t be harmed.” A statement, not a question, and one that dared contradiction.
Samael shook his head. “Not as far as we can tell. We’ve harvested a few over the last week as test subjects. So far they seem to be thriving.”
“And how long before the rest are born?”
“Only a week.”
Lucifer gritted his teeth at the placating tone of his aide’s voice and resisted the urge to throw something at him. Such as his desk. “Fine. Then that’s how long you have to find the Naphil’s sister.”
Fleeting exasperation crossed Samael’s face, and then he nodded. “I’ll see that the trackers step up their effort.”
“No. Not the trackers. You.”
“Me? But I—”
“The others don’t know how important this is. You do. The Nephilim need a leader. They need this child I will father. If their place is as ready as you claim, then you’re free to pursue this for me. Find the Naphil’s sister, Samael. And don’t come back until you do.”
Chapter 10
Verchiel found the One seated beneath an arbor in the rose garden, eyes closed, so still that she might have been one with the wood. Loath to disturb her, Verchiel paused, studying the lines in the beloved face. Lines she was certain hadn’t been there before. Her heart squeezed in on itself. She looks so … fragile.
Her hesitation deepened. Perhaps she should leave, come back later.
“Come,” her Creator said. “Sit with me.”
“If I’m disturbing you …”
A moment’s silence, then the One’s eyes opened, and some of the lines smoothed away from her forehead. She patted the bench beside her. “Not at all. I was just containing my son’s folly. Again.”
Verchiel crossed the sweep of lawn and settled on the seat. “How i
s that coming?”
“It isn’t. Every time I think I have it under control, it finds another escape. I’m not sure how much more the planet can take without self-destructing.”
“And you? How much more can you take?”
“A good question.” The One pulled a spray of roses toward her, inhaling deeply. “I suppose as much as I must. But we’re not here to talk about me.”
Guilt ensnared Verchiel’s voice and held it captive. It was true. She had come in search of the Creator for other reasons. More selfish ones.
The Creator’s hand covered her own in her lap and squeezed. “Tell me.”
“It’s just—” She blinked away the sheen of moisture blurring the garden. “You have always … been. The very idea you can cease to do so terrifies me.”
The One’s hand pressed hers. “Not cease, Verchiel. Alter. I’ll still be here, just not like this.”
“But this—this is how we know you, One, and I don’t know how to go on without that.” Verchiel turned her hand over in the One’s until their fingers linked. “Your counsel, your guidance, your very presence …”
“All of that will still be yours. You’ll just have to pay closer attention. I’ll still be a part of you, as all mothers remain a part of their children. My voice will be in yours if you choose to hear it. My counsel and guidance in your heart if you choose to heed them.”
A tear spilled over onto Verchiel’s cheek. With a rueful sigh, the One reached out her free hand to wipe it away.
“Close your eyes,” she commanded.
Verchiel did.
“Now breathe.”
She inhaled.
“Do you smell the roses? The grass and trees and a thousand other scents that mingle with them?”
A nod.
“Those are my scents, Verchiel. The scents of my skin, my breath, my very essence. Every breath you take, every inhale, every exhale—that is me. The sun warming your skin and the breeze playing with your hair—those are me, too. Holding you, loving you, cradling you close. And the beat of your heart inside your chest? My very life force, made manifest in you.”
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