And maybe doing so would finally make telling him about Michael easier, too.
Alex’s good intentions lasted right up until she stepped out of the office elevator and into chaos.
She leapt out of the way as two of her fellow detectives pushed past her, boarding the elevator she’d just left, and dodged three others headed for the stairs. All were gone before she had a chance to formulate a single question. From behind the Homicide door, voices competed with the shrill of telephones.
Then, above all else, the roar of Staff Inspector Roberts. “Where the hell is Jarvis?”
She pulled open the door. “Here,” she called, waving her hand for Roberts’s attention. “I’m here.”
Roberts’s gaze met hers, relief warring with something dark and awful in its depths. “My office,” he said. “Now.”
She headed across the office, catching snippets of conversation as she passed by desks. Enough to know that there had been an incident in the Leaside neighborhood, not enough to figure out that incident had been. Joining her supervisor, she closed the door against the commotion. Roberts paced the tight space behind his desk. Filing cabinet to wall, window to desk.
“There’s been a stoning.”
His voice was so quiet, Alex didn’t think she’d heard right. Was certain she couldn’t have.
“Excuse me?”
“A stoning,” Roberts repeated. He stopped to stare out the window, holding apart the slats of the horizontal blind covering it.
She shriveled inside. “A stoning. As in—?”
“As in an honest-to-God, straight-out-of-the-fucking-good-book stoning.” Roberts released the blind with a metallic clatter and turned to her, his face ashen. “Two of them, actually. Women. Buried up to their necks in a playground in Leaside.”
Alex’s hands curled at her sides. Horror rose in her. Words to describe it didn’t exist. Things like this just didn’t happen here. Not in Toronto. Not in a civilized world.
“At least one of them was pregnant,” Roberts continued hoarsely. “They haven’t pulled out the other one yet.”
“Where do you want me?”
“Now that you have a partner again, on scene. Bastion has point, report to him when you get there.”
Partner? What partner?
“Thank you for that, by the way,” her staff inspector said. “I still don’t know who he is exactly, and I would have preferred you give me a heads-up, but I’m happy to have him back. Bringing someone new into Homicide in the middle of all this”—he waved an encompassing hand—“would have been a nightmare.”
A brick slid down her throat and landed with a sickening thud in her gut. She swallowed twice before she found a semblance of her voice.
“Him? Him, who?”
“Trent. He stopped by a few minutes ago—” Roberts broke off. “You didn’t know.”
He continued speaking, but the buzzing in her ears drowned him out. Trent. Jacob Trent, a.k.a. Aramael, angel of the Sixth Choir, the Powers. Aramael, who had killed his twin to save her and had endured exile for his sin; who had been sent to assassinate Seth and then, at the last minute, chosen to help her save him instead. The room tilted sideways.
“Jarvis.”
She jolted back to the present and found her supervisor scowling at her.
“You caught all that, right?”
“Um . . .”
Get a grip, Alex.
“No,” she said. “I mean yes, I caught it. But no, I didn’t know he was back.”
“And? Tell me you can do this, Detective. I know the two of you don’t see eye-to-eye, but I need you on the street and I can’t put you out there without a partner.”
Aramael, back as my partner.
Fuck.
She looked out the window into the main Homicide office, half empty now. The remaining faces were all familiar. Joly, Abrams, Penn, Smith.
No Aramael posing as Jacob Trent.
She unglued her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “Where is he?”
“He said he’d wait in the coffee room.”
She straightened her shoulders, drawing on the strength she was learning she possessed. Wondered, briefly, how much longer that strength would hold out.
She strode toward the door.
“Detective.”
Pausing, her hand on the doorknob, she looked over her shoulder.
“You can’t fall apart,” Roberts said. “Not now. We can’t afford to lose you.”
She went in search of an angel.
Chapter 21
Alex tried to keep her stride purposeful, but placing one foot in front of the other on the way to the coffee room proved to be an all-consuming exercise in determination.
Aramael. Was he still in exile? Had he, by some miracle, been taken back into Heaven? Either way, what the hell was he doing here? She’d chosen Seth over him. Had made that choice clear. Hadn’t seen so much as a feather from him since. So why now, and why like this? Why as her goddamn partner again?
She stopped for the office cleaning lady and her cart. The tiny woman’s usual nod and smile hardly registered. Alex waited for her to pass, focused on the simple act of remaining upright and not taking shelter under her desk. It didn’t matter why Aramael was here, only that he left. Roberts could be as pissed as he liked. She wouldn’t work with him again. She couldn’t.
And she’d tell him so as soon as she unglued her feet from the floor.
Shit.
The cleaning lady moved out of her path. Alex looked through the coffee room window at the angel standing inside with his back to her. Her vision blurred, tunneled, narrowed. Everything around her faded into the background. Everything but him. She took in the dark, unruly hair, the breadth of the shoulders straining beneath the suit he wore, the familiar, balanced poise with which he carried himself. And the wings.
Her eyebrows twitched together.
Black wings.
Aramael’s wings were golden.
Cold pooled in her belly, emerged on the palms of her hands. She thought of how easily Lucifer had fooled her once, taking on the visage of his own son. Remembered how Aramael’s twin, Caim, had assumed the identity of the priest he had killed. She flicked a glance toward the door and the escape it offered. If she moved fast, and if she was very, very lucky, she might be able to get out before whoever this was—whatever it was—noticed.
And then what? Go home to Seth? Tell him she was being stalked by someone who had taken on Aramael’s persona? That she’d neglected to tell him yesterday about Michael’s visit? That she had once more become entangled with the ones he wanted so very much to leave behind?
She shifted her weight, held hostage by indecision tempered with the first stirrings of panic. Then she froze. The angel in the coffee room had turned. She knew without looking. Felt his attention on her, his will reaching out to her, his desire enveloping her. She fought against its pull.
This was no impostor, no other pretending to be her soulmate. It was him. It was Aramael.
Jaw set, she turned her head to meet the turbulent gray gaze, felt it reach inside to her most private places . . .
And coldly shut it down. No. Not this time. Not anymore.
She crossed the last few feet to the coffee room and stepped inside. Hands in pockets, her would-be partner regarded her warily.
“Alex.”
Aramael, her heart whispered.
She ignored it. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re being watched by one of the Fallen. Mika’el sent me.”
So Heaven had taken him back. “Watched—why?”