Sins of the Angels (15 page)

She didn't want to rejoin him. Didn't want to face that accusatory glare with its strange vulnerability, didn't want to feel the responding flutter in her chest—or anywhere else on her person—didn't want to find herself searching his back and shoulders for evidence that she wasn't going mad. Or that she was.

She glanced absently down at the body by her feet: a man in his forties, just beginning to gray, his eyes staring up at nothing, his throat slashed as the others had been, his torso ripped apart.

Warning prickled up the nape of Alex's neck. In less than a heartbeat, she realized her mistake. She'd forgotten to brace herself, to take her usual precautions, to block out what she couldn't face again, what she should never have faced in the first place. Her throat closed. Memories shifted in the long-ignored recesses of her mind, then began rising to the surface.
Shit.

She tried her damnedest to stop what she knew was coming, but her attempts shredded like tissue-paper boats adrift in a hurricane. Ruthless images stabbed at her, each leaving a new hole in her decades-old defenses.

A strong arm encircled Alex's shoulders, turned her away from the body, steered her insistently along a path she could not see, did not care about. Hands urged her back against a rough surface and guided her head toward her knees as the first wave of nausea hit. Held her there when she struggled to escape.

“Take your time,” Trent said, his rumbling voice coming from a far-off place.

Alex resisted for a brief second, then gave in to the allconsuming roil in her gut. Great, wrenching spasms wracked her—finally, blessedly, derailing the memories. Allowing her to stop thinking, stop reliving.

Letting her avoid, for a little longer, the black hole yawning at her feet.

She remained doubled over long after the nausea receded, leaning against the concrete pillar, her hands resting on her knees. Gingerly she tested her spent body and her battered mind, surprised to find she still existed, might still be coherent, if not quite sane.

A handkerchief appeared before her and she stared at it. He would carry a handkerchief. With a shaking hand, she accepted the cloth, wiped her mouth, folded the fabric over, and dabbed at the water streaming from her eyes. Then she straightened, stepped away from the stench of vomit, and tucked the soiled wad into her jacket pocket. She lifted her gaze to Trent's, wanting to flinch from the too-astute watchfulness she met there, from the curiosity mingled with compassion, but refusing to do so.

She could survive this, she told herself. If she was careful to keep things where they belonged. Each issue in its own place, separate from the others.

Very, very careful.

“Thank you,” she said, inserting into the two little words every note of warning she could manage.
Don't ask questions. Mind your own business. Don't you dare feel sorry for me.

 

ARAMAEL HEARD THE
defiance in Alex's voice as clearly as he did the embarrassment. He studied her for a long minute without responding, debating the wisdom of pursuing the matter. Every rigid line of her body screamed defensiveness, making him inclined to spare her further stress, but he read lingering torment there, too. In the protective droop of her shoulders; in the shadows underscoring her hollow eyes; in the tremor she could not conceal; in the way she tilted her head and looked away from him.

He scowled. This wasn't his forte. It wasn't his job. Hell, it wasn't even his business. He couldn't help wondering, however, if his presence here—and Alex's awareness of him—had somehow contributed to the meltdown he'd just witnessed. The possibility left him feeling a whole new level of responsibility for this fragile mortal woman.

Hell.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked down on her bowed head. “Want to tell me what's going on?” he asked quietly.

Alex looked up at him for an instant, and then away. “I'm sure you've seen this happen before,” she said. She forced a hollow laugh. “I'm not the first cop to do it, and I doubt I'll be the last.”

“No. This was about more than a body.”

Alex was silent for so long he thought she wouldn't answer; swallowed so often he found himself watching the movement of her slender throat in fascination. Then her shoulders lifted in a quick shrug. The shrug of a child trying to pretend that life had no impact on her; of an adult denying the child had ever existed.

Aramael waited. If she chose not to answer, he'd leave it alone, he told himself. He had his hands more than full already. He didn't need to take on the role of psychologist as well, and chances were he'd just foul things up further for her if he tried. His kind weren't well-known for their temperate approach.

To anything.

“When I was a kid, I saw one similar to that,” Alex said at last. She jerked her head toward the scene but fixed her attention on the ground before her. “I usually manage to block it out, but this one got to me. That's all.”

She hunched her shoulders again and Aramael felt another tug of compassion for her.
Leave it alone,
he reminded himself.
Leave
her
alone.
Powers didn't deal with humanity on this level. Others did that. Others who didn't hunt. Who didn't carry out the One's dirty work so the mortal world could survive.

Others who were forever out of Alex's reach because of her Nephilim bloodline. Aramael sighed. Hell, he couldn't leave her like this. He had to at least try. “Detective—”

Alex's fair brows scrunched together. “That's
all
, Trent.”

Part of Aramael didn't want to let the matter drop, suspected the importance of breaking through the barriers he sensed rising around her. A larger part of him, governed by his very nature, finally—belatedly—asserted itself. He stared into the dark beyond the floodlights. He would let it go, as Alex asked. As his existence demanded.

He'd just prefer he didn't have to cut away a vital element of his soul to do so.

Alex cast a weary look at her wristwatch and groaned. Almost eleven thirty. She and Trent had been canvassing their assigned sector for more than two hours without a break. No wonder her feet hurt and her belly grumbled.

She plucked at the shirt clinging between her breasts. Despite the earlier rain, the heat hadn't abated in the least and thunder growled again in the distance. She glowered at the bluish glimmer of sheet lightning behind the clouds, and then looked down the sidewalk.

Interior lights had gone out in most of the homes, but a glow still crept out from behind curtains and blinds in some. Apart from her and Trent, who stood bathed in neon orange beneath an all-night corner store's sign, the only other person out of doors was an elderly man waiting patiently for his terrier to complete its business at the base of a garbage can. For all intents and purposes, the neighborhood's rhythm had continued as if the evening's murder had never occurred, as if two homicide detectives hadn't just wasted an entire evening pursuing wishful thinking.

About the only good thing to have come of this exercise, Alex reflected, was the time it had given her to get her act together. It had been far easier to put things back into perspective here, tramping up and down endless, narrow flights of stairs in elevatorless buildings, than it would have been alone at home with too much time to think.

She'd managed to return certain demons to the mental closet where they belonged, but she didn't delude herself that the peace would last. Like it or not, at some point she'd have to deal with what she'd spent the last twenty years trying to ignore. For now, however . . .

She shot a dark look at Trent, who had turned aloof after her embarrassing display at the crime scene, and then proceeded to grow ever more surly as their evening wore on. At last her patience had reached its limits and she told him, as pleasantly as she could manage through gritted teeth, to just wait for her while she knocked on the last few doors at the end of the street. Now that she'd finished, however, she would have preferred to face a hundred more doors rather than drive back to the office with him.

Her eyes lingered on Trent's broad shoulders and she felt a tingle at the memory of the hard, muscled arm that had gone around her at the construction site, leading her away from the victim, holding her against a solid, sculpted chest. She let her gaze slide lower, until it rested on Trent's flat stomach. Wondered if his stunning musculature extended to that part of his anatomy . . . or any other.

Heat flared low in her belly and scorched her cheeks, like the aftermath of a slap in the face. A well-deserved slap. Fantasies about her partner? Christ, that was all she needed. Next thing she'd be imagining the two of them—

Gritting her teeth and shoving her unruly hormones as far from mind as she could manage, Alex scanned the quiet street a final time, noting that the man with the terrier was gone, leaving the street deserted between her and Trent. Footsteps hollow in the night air, she started toward her partner. The sooner they headed back, the sooner she could get away from Trent and get a few hours' peace, if such a thing were possible after her little episode. So many memories after so many years . . . Her insides jittered and she cinched her self-control a little tighter.

A barely there sound caught her ear.

Alex stopped midstride, cocked her head, and listened.