Linda Poitevin - Sins of the Lost

He’d chosen this. Of his own free will.

It was time he made the best of it.

“Two sugars, no cream.” Alex handed one of the disposable coffee cups to the tall, overcoated man standing beneath a streetlamp.

Doug Roberts, staff inspector for Homicide Section, took the cup from her with a grunt of thanks. His assessing gaze swept over her from head to toe, then traveled back up to meet hers. “You look sane enough.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Voice of Doom has been trying to convince me otherwise for the past week.”

She raised a brow. “Bell?”

“The highly qualified Doctor Bell,” Roberts corrected. “In whose esteemed opinion, you’re ready for the loony bin.”

“What the hell is with that guy? Why is he so determined to trash my career?”

“It’s more about his own career. And his ego. He’s pissed that I’m allowing you back to work based on the judgment of an unknown psychiatrist on the other side of the country.”

“A psych—you mean Elizabeth Riley? Wait a minute. She contacted you, and you still made me suffer through a week of meetings with Bell?”

“I contacted her,” Roberts corrected, “and yes. CYA, Detective.”

Cover your ass .

Alex thought back over the excruciating hours of verbal sparring she’d endured as the department shrink tried and failed to elicit details about things she would never—could never—tell him. To her mind, Roberts’s ass could go straight to hell for making her go through that.

That, however, was an opinion best kept to herself. She surveyed the parking lot. With the question of her sanity out of the way, it was time to get down to business—and to her first murder scene since their serial killer more than two months before. A killer that had turned her entire reality upside down when she’d learned he was a Fallen Angel. She hunched her shoulders and gripped her coffee a little tighter.

A handful of personnel dismantled the powerful floodlights used to light the scene. Roberts had called her in late on this one. Odd. She shot him a sideways glance.

“So what do we have?”

“A goddamn mess.”

Noting the thin line of his mouth, she raised a brow. “Can we be a little more specific?”

Roberts pointed toward an ambulance across the lot. “In the body bag. Female, Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five years of age.”

“And?”

“She was pregnant. The baby is . . . gone.”

Gone. An innocuous enough word, if it hadn’t been for Roberts’s slight hesitation before speaking it. Gone. Gone how? Gone as in she’d given birth and the baby was missing? Gone as in the baby had died with its mother?

Or gone as in this was the reason Roberts had called her?

As in Seth was right and this had to do with them.

Tossing her still full cup into a nearby Dumpster, she took a deep breath. “Right. Let’s have a look.”

Roberts’s hand on her arm stopped her before she’d taken more than a step. “It’s bad, Alex.”

“I’m—” The word fine died on her lips. Had those haggard lines always been around his eyes? That gray tinge under his skin? She stared at him, then nodded once in acknowledgment of the warning.

Roberts released his grip.

Alex walked toward the ambulance, passing the mobile command post, a forensic technician packing up equipment, two others winding up extension cords and shutting down generators. She tried to steel herself for what she knew was coming, but what had once been an automatic defense felt rusty from disuse. Whatever awaited her, it was going to be rough.

With Roberts at her side, she reached the ambulance and waited for the coroner to unzip the body bag strapped to a gurney.

Heavy-duty black plastic parted to expose a young woman’s face, its unnatural pallor speaking to massive blood loss. Silently, grimly, the coroner pulled open the rest of the bag. Alex’s gaze traveled down the body. Settled on the raw, gaping hole where the abdomen should have been. Where a baby would have been.

If it hadn’t been ripped out of its mother.

Not cut.

Ripped.

Brutally, viciously torn.

Alex’s stomach heaved.

“You cannot avoid me forever, Mika’el.”

The careful neutrality of Verchiel’s voice made the words all the more accusatory. Mika’el paused in the task of honing the sword laid across his lap. He stared down at the gleaming metal, its edge now beyond lethal. It hadn’t needed sharpening, but the rhythmic act of sliding stone over metal had been calming. Mindless. Requiring no conscious thought as long as he continued.

Given a choice, he would have continued for eternity.

He laid the broadsword beside him on the garden bench. Then he leaned back and stretched his arms wide along the backrest. “I’m not avoiding you, Highest.”

“Fine. Then you can’t avoid yourself forever.”

He grimaced at the diminutive, crimson-robed female in the arched entry of the rose garden where he’d taken refuge. “You’re very astute.”

Verchiel, Highest Seraph and executive administrator of Heaven, shrugged. “I’ve had my share of practice at reading angels,” she said. A reference, no doubt, to her past position as handler of the volatile Powers—particularly Aramael. “My point—”

Mika’el waved her silent. “Your point is that you want to know what the One told me yesterday.”

“She holds you responsible, doesn’t she? But she knew—”

“She knew I would task Aramael with Seth’s assassination,” Mika’el cut in. “All that happened after—the Nephilim army, permitting Lucifer to manipulate me, my plan to strike the first blow and plunge Heaven into war again—all of that I kept from her.”

“ We kept it from her because if we’d told her—”

“Then she would have stopped Lucifer the only way she could, and we would have lost her.”

“Surely she cannot blame you for trying to protect her.”

He played idly with the whetstone in his hand, moving it between his fingers. “She can if she prefers not to be protected.”

Silence met his words, broken by the faintest whisper of a breeze passing through the stone-walled garden, the lazy drone of a bumblebee, the call of a distant bird, Verchiel’s swallow.

“She wants to end herself?” the Highest asked at last. “You must be mistaken.”

“Not end,” he said. “Alter. She wants to go back to what she was before she divided herself into so many pieces—or at least closer to that state. She’s worn out, Verchiel. Weary of the struggle between her and Lucifer, of trying to maintain balance in the universe, of being the All to so many souls. She’s given so much of herself that there’s nothing left. She tried to tell me before, but I didn’t want to listen. And now my actions might have made it impossible.”

Leaving his sword on the bench, he stood and paced the gravel path. “If we—if I hadn’t interfered,” his voice was harsh in his own ears, “she could have done what she wanted to do all along. She could have eliminated Lucifer as a threat and left us to deal only with the Fallen. We would still have faced a difficult battle, but we would have prevailed. We would have saved humanity.”

Verchiel’s head moved in convulsive denial. “Without the One? How will we live without her?”

Mika’el stopped to watch a honeybee buried in the pale pink folds of a rose, its buzzing at a frenzied pitch. The internal chaos he’d held at bay by endlessly sharpening his sword, by refusing to think, had begun swirling inside him again. How would they live without the One? He had no idea, but she had made it clear they had no choice. Their time with her had run out. It was up to him to lead the way.