Alex’s arm throbbed, her imagined chill settled deeper into her bones, and she felt herself sway. She bit down harder on her lip to distract herself, but knew if she insisted on continuing this standoff, she stood a good chance of passing out on the spot. Which would result in Trent staying and involve the touching she wanted to avoid.
She stepped past him into the house.
Trent moved into the living room, turning on more lights as he went. Another hundred men joined the sledgehammer ranks inside Alex’s head.
Trent returned to the front hall and frowned at her. “You’re in pain.”
“That generally happens when some asshole slices open your arm and shoves you into a brick wall,” she agreed. Then she regretted her sharpness. The man was hardly responsible for the twisted state of her sanity, and he had volunteered to babysit her tonight so that she could leave the hospital and come home—the least she could do was be civil.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Trust me,” he replied cryptically, “you’re not the one who should be sorry.”
She blinked at him, decided he must mean her assailant, and shrugged. “He’ll pay the price,” she said. “He already has, in a way. You don’t get retribution much more divine than lightning, after all.”
A shadow darkened Trent’s eyes. Guilt? Over what—dishing out the retribution in question? Alex gave an inward sigh. There she went again, blurring reality with the dark goings-on in her psyche.
Trent shoved his hands into his pockets. “Can I get you anything? Tea? Something to eat?”
Her stomach revolted at the very suggestion. “God, no,” she muttered. “But thanks. I’m going to take a shower. Help yourself to whatever you’d like. The kitchen is that way.” She pointed toward the back of the house. She crossed the foyer to the staircase leading to the second floor and contemplated the climb ahead of her. She desperately needed to wash this day from her body, but that was a long way up.
“What about your stitches?”
Hell. Alex remembered the list of instructions issued by the nurse, the first of which had detailed how she was not, under any circumstances, to get her stitches wet for twenty-four hours. Her head drooped.
“Maybe we could cover them,” Trent suggested.
The gentle note in his voice surprised her. The sudden lump that formed in her throat in response surprised her even more. She swallowed twice before her vocal cords cooperated enough to tell him where to find a plastic garbage bag, scissors, and tape. Then, when his firm tread had faded down the hallway, she sagged onto the stairs, rested her pounding forehead on her knees, and tucked her arm against her side.
The drugs they’d given her at the hospital had taken the edge off the pain, but that was all, and for the first time, she regretted refusing the additional medication the nurse had tried to press on her as she was leaving. Pharmaceutical oblivion held a certain appeal at this point.
Alex released a shaky breath. No. The last thing she needed right now was drug-induced hallucinations. Her mouth twisted. As opposed to the ordinary ones, for instance.
The hammering in her head settled into the same rhythm as her heartbeat. In the living room, the mantel clock chimed a soft three times. Already? Hell, even with Roberts pushing back the task force meeting until noon, she’d be lucky to get three or four hours before the alarm went off.
Trent’s returning footsteps sounded. Alex gathered herself, lifted her head, and held out her hand for the supplies he carried. Trent’s eyebrow rose. She bristled, and then slumped. He was right. It would take her forever to wrap her own arm, and she couldn’t hope to do it well enough to keep her wound dry. She had no choice but to accept his help.
And that bloody touch.
Trent squatted in front of her, set the tape and scissors on the bottom step, and unrolled the white plastic garbage bag. Alex turned her head away and raised her arm. She wondered if he, too, remembered the overwhelming electricity that had surged between them. Wondered what he would think if he knew how she’d stared at him that evening, what she’d imagined. She braced for the feel of his hand.
Trent slid the bag over her arm, snipping off the bottom to fit it over her hand, his fingers gentle and jolt-less. Alex exhaled in relief. She looked down at his bent head as he unrolled a length of tape and clipped it off. He seemed so normal right now. Like a concerned colleague, and not some angel of wrath—
Trent looked up at her twitch. “Did I hurt you?”
Alex compressed her lips. Why did she keep doing that to herself?
“I’m fine,” she muttered.
Trent returned to his task, his movements reassuringly impersonal. Alex watched, still half expecting wings to sprout and send her world somersaulting out from beneath her again, but his shoulders remained solid and unchanging, and a tiny knot of tension unraveled in her belly.
He wrapped a long piece of tape around the top of the plastic and secured it just above her elbow. Everything about him seemed … normal. Not ordinary, exactly—no man who looked the way he did could ever be ordinary—but normal in the sense of not weird or bizarre. Normal in the sense of real.
Human.
A wry thought occurred to her. Maybe that whack on the head had been a blessing in disguise. Maybe it hadn’t scrambled her brains after all, but had instead knocked some sense into her, made it possible for her to put things in perspective.
Or maybe it was just the drugs.
“You look amused.”
Alex realized Trent was watching her. Without thinking, she shook her head, sending an extra crash of pain through her already-aching skull. “Hell—I have to remember not to do that,” she murmured, cradling her forehead in her hand and waiting for the reverberations to die down.
“Do you have something you can take for the pain?” Trent asked.
“Upstairs. I’ll take it when I go up for my shower.” She felt him wrap another piece of tape around her arm and smooth it into place. “Trent—”
“Mm?”
She hesitated. She’d had a sudden urge to apologize to him, but for what? Her imagination? Her paranoia? And what would she say? I’m sorry I keep seeing you as a really angry angel? Oh, yes, that was sure to erase any bad impressions made so far. And I’m sorry I have the hots for you would be about as good.
“Nothing.”
Trent looked up at her, his gaze assessing, then returned to his ministrations. He applied several more strips of tape to seal his handiwork and, a minute later, gathered up the remaining supplies.
“That should hold well enough.”
“Thank you.”
He rose to his feet and held out a hand to her. Alex hesitated for only the briefest of moments before accepting it and letting him draw her to her feet. A frisson of warmth slid through her, less than the jolt she had experienced from him earlier, but more than she had the right to feel from her new partner. With or without wings, Jacob Trent packed a powerful aura.
Alex withdrew her hand from his grasp and offered him a shaky smile—and herself a stern reminder about the dangers inherent along that particular path. “I mean that, Trent. Thank you. I guess I did need some help tonight after all.”
“Believe me,” he said quietly, “it was the least I could do.”
Alex felt her smile falter. She had the sense that his words held some greater meaning, but her brain shied sideways from any kind of analysis. She’d just started to get things unscrambled, and she would very much like them to remain that way. At least for a while. With an effort, she found her voice.
“I think I’ll take that shower now.”
SEVENTEEN
Aramael placed the tape and scissors into the drawer with careful precision, slid the drawer closed again, and then paused, staring at his outstretched hands. His traitorous, treacherous hands. Hands that had tended a mortal’s arm but had wanted—coveted—so much more.
He curled his fingers tightly into his palms and watched his knuckles whiten. Somewhere, somehow, in the pro
cess of looking after Alex, his awareness of her had grown. Become more than some ethereal connection. Become … physical.
The scent of her hair, the warmth of her breath on his cheek, her proximity itself had triggered a longing in him that set every fiber of his being aflame, touched off an intensity of sensation so acute that the very texture of her skin had imprinted itself on his soul. Aramael’s belly clenched and his entire body thrummed with pent-up energy—a foreign, nearly living force he had no idea how to handle.
Physical desire for a mortal. In all his years, he had never experienced an agony quite so complete, quite so …
Exquisite.
“Bloody Hell!” His harsh curse echoed in the empty kitchen. He leaned his fisted hands on the counter and hunched his shoulders against the quiver coursing through his center—and the ache underlying it. An ache born of a need so raw he thought it might have the capacity to redefine him.
He eased his head back against the strain building in his neck. At least this time he hadn’t been completely caught off guard by his reaction to her, had managed to endure his feelings without projecting them. Doing so had taken a toll, however. A much greater toll than he would have imagined, if he could ever have imagined it at all.
Exquisite agony.
He stared at the ceiling. First his attack on the mortal man, and now this. He dreaded what might come next. Above him, footsteps crossed the floor, and water began to run. Alex, getting into the shower.
A newborn imagination snaked to life, conjuring an image for which nothing in the universe could have prepared him: Alex, her long hair caught up, her slender neck and shoulders exposed, stepping naked under a cascade of water; her skin, smooth, slick, glistening with a thousand tiny water beads. Alex, tipping her head back to let the water cascade over her face, pivoting under the spray, rivulets sliding down her back, her waist, her hips …
“Well,” a voice said, shattering the image in his mind as suddenly as it had formed. “Of all the things I might have expected from this hunt, this certainly wasn’t one of them.”
Verchiel.
Aramael whirled to face her and hot, liquid humiliation washed over him at the idea of the Dominion bearing witness to his internal struggle. What had merely clenched in his belly before now twisted into a defensive, angry knot. “My thoughts are none of your business, Dominion,” he snarled.
Verchiel eyed him, looking puzzled, and then intrigued. “What thoughts?”
With a rush of irritation, Aramael realized he had misinterpreted her presence and piqued a curiosity with which he preferred not to deal. He put Alex from his mind and pulled together his fractured center, and then leaned against the counter, arms crossed.
“Never mind,” he told the Dominion. “You’re here about the mortal.”
“The one you attacked, yes.”
“A mistake.”
Verchiel raised a delicate, silver-white brow. “Your second mistake today,” she pointed out, her voice no less tart because of its mildness. “The very fact that you struck a mortal, Aramael … we’ll be lucky if you haven’t already precipitated matters.”
Aramael scowled at her. He needed no reminding of the One’s pact with Lucifer. Or that, if the mortal had died, Aramael’s actions would have allowed Lucifer to toss aside the agreement in its entirety, and could very well have resulted in all-out war between the loyal and the Fallen. Might already have done so even if the mortal lived.
But he was damned if he’d take full blame.
“No,” he said. “You do not get to pass judgment on me for Mittron’s arrogance, or for your own complacence. You know as well as I do that something is wrong here, but rather than find out what it is, you’re behaving like a puppet, doing no more than what you’re told to do.”
“I’m following orders, Aramael. It’s what we do.”
“Then maybe we need to do more.”
Dismay crossed the Dominion’s face. “You don’t mean that.”
His words were tantamount to blasphemy, Aramael knew. No angel had the free will to act on his or her own. Not since so many had exercised that will in following Lucifer. He half expected instant reprisal, the rush of Archangels’ wings, but felt nothing but irritation at himself. Of course Heaven’s enforcers weren’t coming for him. They answered not to Mittron, but to the One, who wouldn’t even have noticed Aramael’s transgression just now because her presence in her angels’ lives had been noticeably lacking for the last several millennia.
Which was why Mittron got away with this arrogance in the first place.
Aramael levered himself away from the counter and stalked toward Verchiel, stopping when she took a step back. He lowered his voice to a growl. “Bloody Hell, Dominion, just for a moment, think for yourself. If I’m to protect Alex and complete this hunt, I need to know what’s going on. Have you even tried to find out why she can see me? Is it because she’s Nephilim?”
Not only did Verchiel not reply, she wouldn’t even meet his gaze. Aramael’s irritation surged, and then he realized that the Dominion didn’t avoid him but instead stared past him, her eyes wide with dismay. For the span of a heartbeat, Aramael wondered if he might have underestimated Mittron; then, in almost the same instant, he knew he faced something far worse than potential Judgment.
Verchiel withdrew from the room, from the realm, her final words, whatever they might have been, fading with her. With no similar escape available, and because he had no choice, Aramael turned to confirm what his instinct, his heart, already knew.
Alex stood in the doorway to the hall, her skin glowing from her shower, damp tendrils of hair escaping the twist on top of her head to cling to her neck. A white terry cloth bathrobe fell in soft folds to skim her ankles. She looked beautiful, fragile, and utterly panicked.
Aramael felt it then. Felt her awareness of him. Keenly. Decisively. Knew she saw him not as another mortal, but in all his angelic glory.
For long, agonizing seconds, he stood frozen, unable to react, bared to Alex in ways he had never imagined, vulnerable in ways he could not explain. Until at last Alex blinked and, far too late, the curtain of celestial duplicity slipped between them once more.
Alex slid to the floor, her shoulder resting against the door frame. With a mighty effort, Aramael pieced his presence back together, and then roused himself to motion. He strode forward to crouch in front of Alex, trying not to flinch at the hollowness he saw in her eyes. A hollowness he didn’t understand but knew he had somehow caused. He sought for words of reassurance and comfort, found none in the inner turmoil he’d once known as his center.
Slowly Alex’s expression hardened into something cold and uncompromising, and he saw her withdraw so far into herself that he knew he had no hope of reaching her. Not now, not like this. He rose, stepped back, and waited.
Long seconds ticked by while Alex stared into a place he could not follow, her face an alabaster mask. At last, ignoring the hand he extended to her, she climbed to her feet, met his gaze, and squared her shoulders.
Then, very succinctly, she said, “Get the fuck out of my house.”
DON’T THINK, DON’T think, don’t think …
Alex climbed the stairs and lurched down the hallway to the bathroom. She closed the door, fumbled with the lock, and leaned her head against the frame. Only then could she breathe again, gulping air into deprived lungs. She slumped against the wall and willed her legs not to fail a second time, because she wasn’t at all sure she could get up off the floor again. Wasn’t sure she would want to …
Don’t think.
Her head pounded. She pressed her fingertips against her eyelids and then pulled herself upright and crossed to the sink, reaching for the mirrored cabinet above it. Stopping when her gaze locked on her reflection. She took in the pale face and haunted eyes. The resemblance was undeniable, but how deep did it go?
No. You’re not her. You’re nothing like her. Jennifer said so.
But Jennifer didn’t know about the wings or the voices
or—
Alex opened the cabinet and took out the bottle of acetaminophen.
Don’t think.
She pried off the cap and shook two tablets onto the countertop. She hesitated, assessing her pain level, wondering how much medication they had already given her at the hospital, and then added a third tablet. If the pills had more than their intended buffering effect, if they made it possible to sleep, maybe, or to forget what she’d seen in her kitchen just now—
Don’t think.
Alex returned the bottle to the cabinet and ran a glass of water. She tossed back the tablets, drained the glass, and looked once more at her reflection.
The image of a hollow-eyed woman stared back at her. A woman with wild gray hair and piercing blue eyes and a manic intensity about her, who had been plagued by beautiful, glowing, winged beings that hadn’t existed.
Winged beings like Trent.
Glowing ones like the woman with him.
DON’T THINK!
Too late.
She’d heard the voices as she’d come out of the bathroom. Had known she should ignore them and stay away; known she didn’t want to identify their source. Her feet had taken on a life of their own, however, and led her downstairs, one step at a time, until she reached the bottom. Until she traversed the length of the hallway. Until she stood in the doorway and saw the woman, ethereal in her beauty, robed in iridescent purple, her silvery hair shining with a light of its own, standing just beyond him.
Her partner, but not her partner, at the center of the kitchen, with massive wings rising more than a foot above his head and trailing nearly to the floor. Golden wings, their feathers alive with a fire that seemed to surround each and every one of them. Shimmering, pulsing, hypnotically beautiful fire.
An eternity had passed before the woman disappeared and he turned, almost as if he moved in slow motion, to face her. A man in real life, an angel in her mind’s eye, merged into one. Gray eyes had clashed with hers, imprisoned her—no, impaled her—and had driven the wind from her body and coherent thought from her mind.
Sins of the Angels Page 13