“And that’s what I get for leaving you to be raised by your mother.”
Alex stared at the winded son of the two most powerful beings in the universe. Then at the line of Archangels facing her. All brushed aside without effort, their powers inconsequential in the face of Lucifer’s manipulations. Numbness began to replace the horror in her veins. Mind-deep, soul-deep, core-deep numbness.
Perhaps the idea had been brewing for a while in her subconscious. She didn’t know. Didn’t care. And didn’t dare stop to think about it. She just lifted the knife in a hand that felt as dead as the rest of her and turned away so Seth wouldn’t have to watch.
Lucifer spoke to Michael now, his voice autocratic. Final. “Give my regards to our Creator, Archangel. And tell her the next move is up to her.”
Sliding past the Light-Bearer’s shoulder, Michael’s gaze met Alex’s. It widened the barest fraction, just enough to make Lucifer spin around as she plunged the knife up to its hilt in her belly, aiming low, toward where she knew Lucifer’s monster grew inside her. Blood spurted over her hands an instant before white-hot agony drove her to her knees on the filthy pavement.
Lucifer strode toward her, fury blazing from his eyes, and six Archangels moved as one to come between them. To hold him at bay while the blood spilled from Alex and pooled on the pavement, draining her life with it, and that of the Nephilim child within her.
Alex’s hands slid from the knife as Lucifer’s luminescence flared again, stretching high over the Archangels’ own. Energy sizzled through the alley once more, dancing along her skin—skin that already felt as if it belonged to someone else as she began to grow smaller inside her own body.
“Touch her and I swear you will beg to return to Hell before I am done with you,” Michael grated.
Lucifer snarled an answer, but his words sounded muted, muffled. Alex felt a distant surprise. Shit, this was happening fast. She must have nicked an artery.
She began a slow slump to the side. An arm slid beneath her and cradled her against a warm chest and a strong, steady heartbeat. Looking up into Seth’s sick horror, she tried to smile, but couldn’t seem to find her lips. “I had to,” she whispered. “I couldn’t let him win. Not like this.”
His hold tightened. “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to make this better. I can’t lose you, Alex. I won’t make it alone.”
She fought off an encroaching fog. Shook her head. “You can’t make it better. Not this time.” It’s okay, she wanted to add, but her voice had disappeared, too, and the effort of searching for it drained her. Her eyes drifted closed, shutting out the alley and bringing a not-unwelcome darkness. The cold seeped toward her core.
“Open your eyes, Alex, damn it!”
Colder.
“Alex, wait!”
Darker.
“Alex!”
Aramael, she thought.
Gone.
FORTY-SEVEN
Seth stared at the body in his arms, mind empty, chest emptier, world at a standstill.
So this was death.
A simple cessation of life. Of being.
Here…
And then not.
The reality stunned him.
The finality damn near killed him.
Sucking a breath into lungs paralyzed by loss, he lifted his head. He met the bitter sorrow in Mika’el’s eyes, the disgust in his father’s. Anger fanned back to life. With a frighteningly foreign detachment, he moved to lay aside the vessel that had been Alex. A hand closed over his arm.
Seth looked around, into the eyes of the angel he held responsible for all that had just happened. Fury licked along the edges of his loss. His jaw went tight, his body rigid.
Aramael gave him a shake. “Did you hear me? I said she’s not dead, damn it.”
Seth blinked. Scowled. “I felt her go.”
“Her soul is still there, but you’ll have to work fast. Once it leaves, it will be too late. You can’t bring her back after that.” Aramael placed his fingertips on the side of Alex’s throat. “And for the sake of the One herself, whatever you do, don’t save that thing inside her.”
Seth looked down at the lifeless form in his arms. “You’ll have to do it,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I can’t. I don’t have that power. You do know what to do, Seth. You’re the Appointed. You saved her before and you can do it again. You just have to remember.” Aramael looked up, and Seth followed his gaze toward the wall of Archangels between them and Lucifer. The Power’s voice went grim as he added, “Before your father does something stupid.”
“But I can’t remember,” Seth grated, hearing the agony in his own words. “I’ve tried, and I can’t remember anything.”
“You remembered Alex,” Aramael said quietly. “Start there. On her porch, meeting her for the first time. She tried to throw us both out.”
Seth hesitated a second longer and then pulled into himself, into the opaque swirl that refused to let him pass, no matter how hard or how often he tried. Nothing.
“You were supposed to stay with her while I hunted Caim, but she wouldn’t let you,” Aramael insisted.
The swirl grew stubbornly thicker. Power built in the air around them. Seth tensed, darting a look at the Archangels between him and Lucifer. Between Alex and the creature who had done this to her.
Aramael’s hand tightened on his arm. “Never mind them. Let Mika’el handle it. You need to focus.” His voice went tight. “When Alex realized Caim knew where to find her sister, she tried to talk you into taking her there. She didn’t want to wait for me. She put her hand on your arm. You felt something. You almost gave in to her because of it.”
A tingle passed over Seth’s forearm. He stared down, certain fingers had just touched there. The swirl thinned and, just for an instant, he stood on a hot, humid sidewalk, blocking access to a car, hearing a quiet plea. Come with me if you want, but let me go to them. Please.
He reached for the memory and tried to seize it, but it was gone again. Frustration returned and he tightened his hold on Alex’s body, his fingers digging into the still, unresponsive flesh. “Damn it, I’m trying. I just can’t—”
The woman in Seth’s arms breathed out in a long, low groan, barely audible to his ears, and he stopped short. Stared down. “I heard that,” a voice whispered, “and it’s good enough for me.”
“What?” Aramael asked.
Seth raised his gaze to the Power. “Pardon?”
“You said something. I didn’t hear you.”
That had been him? But how could he have spoken words he hadn’t thought? Unless…his center grew still. Unless they had been his words another time, a time before, when he had remembered. When he had known who he was.
Alex, broken and bleeding on the floor of a bedroom, flames surrounding her.
Me, kneeling beside her, begging her to show me some sign of life because I wasn’t permitted to bring her all the way back if she was already gone.
The smell of scorched flesh.
My hand, touching her, healing her, taking away the pain.
Seth’s fingers closed over something cold and hard and he watched himself pull the knife from Alex’s belly. A distant part of him noted a pulse of energy pressing in on him. He pushed the awareness of it away and dropped the blade to the ground. His hand settled over the seeping wound. Heat tingled through his fingertips. Not Alex’s heat. His. From somewhere deep within him that he had forgotten. Somewhere that swelled now with remembering.
A soaring, vaulted hall, lined with books and the hushed murmur of many voices.
The bleeding beneath his fingers slowed, then stopped as severed vessels reconnected.
Gardens stretched out before him, a riot of color in some places, a deep, cooling green in others, all interspersed with reflective pools and connected by streams and waterfalls and meandering paths. A place of unparalleled beauty. Home.
Deep tissues, hidden from sight, joined, held, bonded.
A silver-hai
red female, luminescent with age and wisdom, looked up from a potting bench and smiled at him, filling his entire being with a tremendous surge of love.
Fascia knit together. Skin healed.
A promise, heartfelt at the time but still underlined by doubt, to honor his word and fulfill the destiny to which he had agreed. Sadness hollowing a woman’s eyes. His mother’s eyes.
A tiny presence, barely clinging to life, tugged at his attention. He directed his touch away. More memories flashed through his mind.
A wooden door. A decision. A co-conspirator. A transition. Alex.
Seth’s breath strangled in his throat and he stared down at the woman in his arms. Stared, loved, and—suddenly and without the fanfare that should have accompanied such a revelation—remembered it all. Everything. Who he was. What he was. What he had promised and then renounced because of a mortal woman.
Because of Alex.
Alex, whose life spark had begun to falter. Seth lifted his hand from her belly and laid it over her heart, finding a beat there, but so slow. So frighteningly weak.
Always Alex.
He gathered himself and the very air went still around him. Focusing, he directed his own life energy down his arm, through his hand, into her. A pulse moved against his fingertips, faltered, grew stronger.
“I choose you,” he whispered. Alex’s heartbeat steadied into a deep, reassuring rhythm. Beneath them, the earth rumbled and began to shudder . “I will always choose you.”
A Power’s fiery wings swept over them as the alley imploded.
FORTY-EIGHT
“She’s coming around.”
Alex’s consciousness returned with all the delicacy of a sledgehammer, jolting her into a world filled with noise and confusion. She blinked a few times, trying to orient herself as fingers held her eyelids apart and a beam of light flashed across her eyes.
“Detective? Can you hear me?”
She twisted her head away.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Jarvis,” she croaked. “Alexandra Jarvis.”
Why was her voice so muffled?
“Do you know where you are?”
“Vancouver.” She put fingertips to the oxygen mask covering her nose and mouth, but a gentle, gloved grip guided her hand to her side again.
“Can you be a little more specific?” the voice persisted. “Where in Vancouver are you, Detective Jarvis?”
She tried to think. Ran through the list of places she’d been. The psych ward at the hospital. The hotel. The coffee shop. Henderson’s apartment.
Alex surged upward against hands that tried to hold her down. Ripping off the mask, she sucked for air and choked on a thick swirl of dust.
Henderson’s apartment.
Lucifer.
Seth in the alley.
The knife.
“Easy does it, Detective,” a calm voice said. “We need to finish checking you out before you get to run around. You were under a pretty impressive pile of bricks.”
Alex shook off the hands holding hers and probed her belly. She found the hole in her jacket, the one in her jeans…and, beneath the layers of fabric, the scar that marked the passage of the knife. The wound that should have taken her life. Should have taken the life of—
Oh, dear God, no.
With a strength born of equal parts desperation and denial, Alex scrambled up from the ground. Stood, swaying, as two paramedics followed suit and caught hold of her again. Fought them off when they tried to guide her onto a waiting stretcher. That thing couldn’t still be alive in her. The Archangels wouldn’t have let that happen. Wouldn’t have let Lucifer get to her like that. Couldn’t have—
Seth. Where the hell was Seth?
Her gaze swept over the ruin surrounding her and she blinked, her jaw going slack. What the hell? It looked as if she stood in a war zone. The walls that formed the sides and end of the blind alley had all collapsed, exposing shattered beams and sagging floors and providing an almost obscene glimpse into the lives of the people who had lived there, who had managed to stay off the streets.
Until now.
Alex swallowed the bile rising into her throat, watching rescue workers and search dogs swarm over the massive piles of rubble. One of the dogs gave a sharp bark and a dozen figures scrambled toward it.
“How many injured?” she asked the paramedics who seemed to have satisfied themselves with steadying her while she viewed the wreckage. “Was anyone killed?”
“They’re still looking,” one hedged. Alex shot him a hard look and he added, “Six dead so far. You’re the only one we’ve pulled out alive.”
Seth.
She’d barely registered the possibility when a shout went up from the spot identified by the dog. More workers joined the effort and a few seconds later a figure was pulled from the debris, limp, unmoving, still dressed in full ERT gear. A fresh shock of dread jolted through Alex.
“Cops?” she asked through numb lips.
“Five missing.”
She sagged and would have dropped to her knees but for the support of the men at her side. All these people, and for what? So she could fail? So she could lose Seth and die giving birth to Lucifer’s child? A monster that would lead the other Nephilim to destroy the world?
Firm hands steered her to sit on the stretcher. “Okay, Detective, we’re just going to put the oxygen mask on you again for a—”
“Alex.”
“Michael!” Alex bounded upright again as a tall figure loomed beyond the paramedics. “What happened? Where is Seth?” She pushed toward him, shaking off the paramedics impatiently.
The Archangel shot a glance at her attendants and Alex half turned to address them, though her gaze never left Michael’s.
“I’m refusing treatment,” she said.
“Detective—”
“I’m fine. I’ll find one of you if anything changes.”
After several attempts to change her mind, the paramedics packed up and, heads shaking, departed with their stretcher between them, leaving Alex and Michael alone in their corner of the alley. The instant the men were out of earshot, Alex rounded on the Archangel.
“Where is he? Tell me he didn’t choose…?” She trailed off, unable to finish the question.
Michael shook his head, but before Alex could do more than recognize the relief swamping her, he said, “He didn’t choose the One, either.”
Relief died in her chest, sitting on her lungs with the weight of an elephant. Perhaps she’d been too quick to reject the oxygen mask. She stared past Michael’s shoulder at what remained of a building. “Please don’t tell me this puts us back to square one.”
“More into uncharted territory,” Michael said. “He chose you.”
“Me?” Alex blinked, and then frowned. “I wasn’t one of the choices.”
“For him, you were. He had already tried to give up everything for you once, remember.”
“Once…? You mean he succeeded this time? But how?”
“Seth attained full power in order to heal you. Once he’d done so, he chose to give up that power in order to stay with you. There were unexpected consequences.” Michael gestured at the ruined alleyway and Alex’s gaze followed.
“This—this wasn’t Lucifer, saving his child?”
Michael shook his head. “No. The child died. This was all Seth’s doing. I had no idea it could even be done, so I never guessed at the havoc it might wreak.”
Another rush of relief traveled through Alex at Michael’s first words, only to turn cold when the rest sank in. “It goes beyond this alley?”
“They’re calling it an earthquake. The alley sustained the worst damage, but yes, there’s more.”
The Archangel’s hand reached to steady her as she swayed, staring at the destruction. Even if the quake had been small, it couldn’t be a good thing—not with Vancouver sitting square in the middle of some serious fault lines. Who knew what else it might have triggered?
“Christ, we have t
o help.” She pinpointed the person who appeared to be in charge and started in his direction, but Michael’s grip brought her up short. Looking up into his set, stoic features, she scowled. “Tell me you’re not pulling that whole non-interference thing again.”
“The Appointed is already helping, and the Guardians have been instructed to provide more guidance than is usually allowed,” he hedged.
“The Guardians.” Bitterness edged Alex’s voice. She didn’t apologize for it. “Your kind bloody well causes this whole, massive mess and now—what? You’re planning a fucking vacation somewhere?”
A muscle in Michael’s jaw flexed and anger flared in his eyes. “Apart from the fact that it was Lucifer who caused this mess, not us, you forget the war.”
She had forgotten.
Could have done without being reminded.
And flatly refused to apologize for that, either.
But still…war.
“Already?” she asked, her throat tight.
Michael nodded.
“But Lucifer said—”
“Lucifer has said a lot of things in his lifetime. Few of them worthy of repeating.”
Alex looked back at the alley. At the rescue crews scrambling over the piles of debris, the shrouded bodies lined up in the middle of the destruction, the utter devastation caused by Seth’s choice. She tried to imagine how much worse it could have been if he’d made a different decision; how much worse it would be when powers as great as his began to clash.
Armageddon. It was real. And it was happening now.
“Do we stand any chance at all?” she asked quietly.
“We’ll try to confine things to our own realm as much as we can.”
His answer-that-wasn’t-an-answer was all the more profound for its lack of directness.
“And if you can’t confine things?”
“I should get back.”
Michael’s fingers slid from her arm, but when he would have withdrawn into the shadows, she touched his sleeve. “Wait. What can I do to help?”
“Your part in our affairs is done. Humanity is about to be challenged as it never has before. You will have enough to face here.”
Sins of the Son: The Grigori Legacy Page 30