Linda Poitevin: Sins of the Lost

“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.