Sins of the Angels (9 page)

“Because I can catch him.”

Alex might have laughed if the hairs on the back of her neck hadn't been standing on end. She lifted a hand to smooth them down. Outside the window, a flare of lightning illuminated a street gone gloomy beneath clouds she hadn't noticed until now. She glared at the man across from her.

“Let me get this straight. We have an entire police force out looking for this prick, we're using every forensic procedure at our disposal, every profiler, and you think
you're
the one who will find him? And just how, pray tell, are you planning to do that?”

“I can feel him.”

Well. What this guy lacked in experience, he certainly made up for in balls. Alex picked up her coffee again and shot him a look of exasperation. “Newsflash, Detective Trent. You don't hold the monopoly on a cop's instinct.”

“It's not instinct,” Trent said, his voice deadly quiet.

Alex's hand froze with the cup hovering near her mouth. She so didn't like the way this man's reality seemed to operate. Or the way it skewed her own.

“It's fact.” Trent leaned over the table. His glare bored into her, held her immobile. “When he stalks a victim, I feel him. When he kills that victim, I feel him. I feel his hunger, his need, his desperation. And it's just a matter of time until I'm close enough to catch him.”

Alex was sure she must look as stupid as she felt, with her jaw hanging slack and her eyebrows raised so high that her forehead felt stretched. But she couldn't help it. Because she didn't know how else to look when her new partner suddenly announced his psychic ability.

And she'd been worried about her own sanity?

With great deliberation, she set her cup back in its saucer. “You know,” she said, reaching for her car keys, “I think we're done—”

Trent lifted a hand in a sudden, imperious gesture.

Alex raised just one eyebrow this time. “Excuse me?”

Trent had gone rigid, his whole attitude one of intense concentration, alert to something she couldn't see or hear. Thunder rumbled faintly through the glass beside them, vibrating down Alex's spine alongside a sudden chill.

Her partner bolted from the booth. “He's near.”

Alex's hand jerked, overturning her coffee cup. “Shit!”

She hastily righted the cup, then pulled a wad of napkins from the dispenser and dabbed at the stain spreading down the front of her white cotton blouse, then at the coffee spilling over the edge of the table. She tried to remember if she had a clean shirt in her locker and jumped anew as Trent plucked the napkins from her hand.

She opened her mouth to object, but the ferocity in his eyes stopped her cold.

“Didn't you hear me?” he snarled. “He's near. Now.” People in the diner turned to look at them, some frowning, others only curious.

“
Who's
here?” Alex motioned at the napkins in his hand. “Can I have those back, please?”

The napkins sailed past her to land in a soggy lump by the sugar dispenser. Alex watched their progress, then turned a dumbfounded gaze on Trent. Christ, was normal conversation with this man even possible?

“What in the hell is the matter with—” she began.

Trent thrust his face down to her level, inches away. “He's near,” he grated. “Not
here
, but near. And he's about to kill again. And I will not lose him because of you, do you understand?”

He seized her arm and pulled her unceremoniously from the booth. Too astounded to object, Alex found herself towed out of the restaurant, across the sidewalk, and into the middle of the street. Trent stopped there, in the center of four lanes of city traffic traveling in two different directions, and tilted his head as though listening.

Or sensing.

Car horns blared around them and Alex started, tugging without success at Trent's grasp on her arm and noting that, for once, his touch was just that. A touch. With no hallucinogenic effect. Which made her theory that she had imagined the prior incidents all that much stronger—and her mental state that much more questionable. Shoving away the misgivings inherent in the thought, she pushed back a dripping lock of hair. It was raining, she realized. Hard.

“Damn it, Trent—”

“There.” He whirled to face down the street, oblivious to the rain and Alex's attempts to free herself. “He's there.”

Thunder cracked overhead. The rain came harder.

Trent advanced down the center line of the street, silent, watchful, towing her behind him toward the heart of Chinatown. Alex shivered with a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. He was serious, she thought. The man was serious—and seriously nuts.

They stopped in front of an Asian grocery store, its front sidewalk cluttered with an array of produce on makeshift tables and stacked high with empty cardboard boxes. A narrow passageway stretched between the store and neighboring building, shadowed beneath the afternoon's clouds.

Alex shot a look at Trent and found him focused on the passage. One hundred percent focused. She fought another shiver. Nuts, she thought again. Right off his rocker. Maybe now Roberts would listen. A cab swerved around them, horn blaring.

Against all reason, her free hand settled on her gun.

“You're sure he's in there?” she whispered.

Trent looked down at her as if he'd forgotten her existence and was surprised to find her still there. Without replying, he pulled her through a break in the traffic and thrust her into the midst of the boxes in front of the grocery.

“Wait here,” he ordered.

“Are you kidding me?” Alex scrambled out of the sodden cardboard. “I'm not letting you go in there alone.”
No matter how much I don't like you.
“I'm coming with you.”

“No.”

Trent's growl was so fierce it startled her into a step back. Seeming to take this as submission, he nodded his satisfaction. “Good. Now, whatever happens, do
not
come in after me. Do you understand?”

“No, I do not—”

Trent took hold of her shoulders and shook her. “Do you understand?”

A frisson of real fear crawled across Alex's shoulders. She wanted to deny him, to tell him to go straight to hell, but something in his face, in the urgency of his grip, held her back. Something she didn't want to identify.

She looked at the passageway again and the fear solidified, settling in her gut. She didn't understand. Didn't think she wanted to. But she nodded anyway, and in an instant, Trent released her and disappeared down the passage. She stared after him, the heat of his touch lingering on her skin, unsure whether she should be more shocked at his behavior or hers.

A sudden tap sounded beside her and she spun to face the store window, gun in hand, thumb reaching for the safety. A wide-eyed storekeeper stared back at her through the rivulets running down the plate glass, raising his hands above his head along with the phone he held. Heart pounding, Alex lowered her weapon and flashed the badge she wore clipped to the belt at her waist. The storekeeper backed away from the window, looking unconvinced, hands still in the air.

Alex drew together the tattered remnants of adrenalineravaged nerves and peered around the corner of the store, down the passageway. Nothing moved in the rain-blurred depths. The blood in her veins chilled. Nutcase or not, there was no way Trent should have gone in there alone. No way she should have let him.

So much for keeping him out of trouble.

“Fucking hell,” she muttered. She shifted her grip on her gun, clambered over the collapsed boxes, and stepped into the stale, sour gloom.

Aramael emerged from the passageway into a wider alley, perpendicular to the first. He paused to take his bearings.
Close. So very close. But where?
A muffled sound reached him, far down the laneway. He turned, waited, and then felt it again. Caim, in a niche between two buildings, hidden from the world. Too caught up in his task to be aware of his hunter.

He began to walk, stalking his quarry with silent focus, oblivious to the rain, his surroundings, the mortal whose life slowly drained onto the dank earth at his brother's feet. With each step the rage unfurled a little more in his belly, hot and bitter, mixed with the betrayal he had carried for almost five thousand years, ever since his brother had chosen Lucifer's path. He shrugged away the pain and stopped.

“Caim,” he said.

The creature his brother had become froze but didn't turn. Instead, it stared down at what remained of the human life in its withered, clawed hands. Then it shook its head and let the corpse slump to the ground.

“It wasn't the right one,” Caim murmured, his voice guttural, twisted by the same hatred and bitterness that had changed his physical form. Underlined by an infinite sadness.

Aramael spread his feet wider. Readied himself. “You know why I'm here.”

Caim nodded. “I wondered if they'd send you. It can't be pleasant, hunting your own brother. Again.”

Fresh pain uncoiled in Aramael's chest. He made himself detach from it, noting instead the blood that soaked the arm and shoulder of his brother's otherwise pristine white shirt, a garment revoltingly out of place on the skin-clad skeleton who wore it. “If you'd stayed where you belonged, hunting you again wouldn't be necessary.”

“Have you any idea what it is like in that prison?” Caim's voice was clearer now as the bloodlust faded from his veins. He began shifting form again and turned to face Aramael, the front of his shirt and jeans dark with crimson, his face still half-foreign but becoming eerily familiar. His wings, faded and ragged with neglect, rustled behind him. “The emptiness—no sound, no touch, nothing but your own thoughts.
Nothing.
An eternity without so much as a whisper.” His eyes darkened to the color of obsidian. Became distant. Empty. “It is beyond endurance.”

Aramael suspected the truth in his brother's words. He had dragged a hundred Fallen Angels into Limbo and the few seconds he'd spent there each time had seemed endless in their nonbeing. He couldn't begin to imagine spending the rest of his existence there. That was why it had been so awful to abandon his twin to it the first time. Why he recoiled from doing so again.

“You cannot send me back,” Caim said. “I cannot survive there.”

Aramael pushed away the unwanted compassion that twisted in his heart. “Damn you, Caim,” he growled. “You knew the consequences if you followed him. You knew what would happen if you interfered with the mortals. You made a choice.”

“As did you,” Caim retorted bitterly. “I wanted to return. I begged her forgiveness. But you—you chose to betray me.”

Aramael's nostrils flared. “I chose to speak the truth, to remain loyal to the One. Your soul was not pure. You knew it and I could feel it. I could not lie for you.”

“Then have mercy, Brother. You can choose differently this time—you can spare me.”

“I cannot.”

“You
can
.”

Suddenly Aramael understood what his brother asked. He recoiled from the idea—and from the question that whispered through him in response. Could he?

Caim dropped to his knees, bottomless misery staring through his eyes. “Kill me,” he whispered. “Please.”

The single harsh word hung in the air between them, ripped from Aramael's soul. An angel's duty to the One. A brother's denial. Aramael grappled for mastery over a seething mass of conflicting emotions. It was time to finish this. To return Caim to his prison and end the struggle between them. To end the struggle within his own breast.

He flexed his wings and readied the power in his core. Rain dripped from the roof of the building beside them and puddled on the ground, murky red near his brother's feet. The universe stilled with expectation. Hope faded from Caim's expression.

“Trent? Are you okay?”

Aramael heard Alex's words behind him in the same instant he felt the shift in his brother's focus. Felt Caim zero in on the mortal presence that joined them. Felt him desire it.

His reaction came blindly, from a place inside him he had never known. He whirled and grabbed Alex's shoulders, pushed her back, extended his wings to hide her from Caim. He felt her startled, soft warmth beneath his hands, his own primal response. For a fraction of a second, all thought of his purpose slid away.

He realized his mistake instantly. Knew before he put Alex from him and turned back to Caim that the space his brother had occupied would be empty. That he had let the impossible happen. The unpardonable.

 

ALEX STAGGERED UNDER
the assault on body and senses. Flashes of impressions burned into her brain: the merest glimpse of a hazy form through the pelting rain; massive wings aflame with golden fire; Trent's fingers digging into her arms, their touch burning, going beyond the mere physical.

Her mother's face.

Alex swallowed the sudden bile of memories. Trent snarled something and released her, and then turned away, his form still blocking her view. She didn't ask him to repeat his words.

Instead, she stared at his smooth, suit-clad back. She rubbed her arms where they had gone cold in the absence of his touch; tried to remember how to breathe, to forget what she thought she'd seen. To put the feel of his hands out of her mind.

She realized she still held her gun and fumbled it back into its holster. Then she saw the bloody rivulets of water trickling past her feet and traced them to their source. Her reason for following Trent into the alley crashed back.