Stepping out of the car, she scanned the street. Not a single person was in sight, despite the mild fall day. No toddlers on tricycles, no nannies with strollers, no one raking the thick, colorful layers of leaves from the lawns. Not so much as a mailman. One might have thought the neighborhood deserted if it weren’t for the parted window coverings up and down the block.
On the other side of the car, Aramael slammed his door.
Alex ignored him, tallying the resources on hand. Two ambulances, crews standing to one side as they awaited their cargo; three marked cars and two unmarked; half a dozen uniforms; a forensics team clad in their head-to-toe bunny suits to prevent contaminating the scene; and the requisite yellow tape. Yards of it.
She hunched her shoulders. Even with all she’d seen on the job, she still had trouble wrapping her head around the idea of a stoning. It would be a long time before the neighborhood recovered from this. If it could.
Aiming for the marked motorhome housing the command post, she strode past the ambulance that had blocked her view of the full scene. Her step faltered. She stopped. A single black bag lay stretched out at the edge of the grass. Two more forensics members stood knee-deep in a gaping hole beside a swing set, sand piled beside them. They plunged their shovels into the ground around a bloodied object.
Long seconds ticked by before she recognized the object as a human head. Horror warred with disbelief until a voice hailed. She tore her gaze from the grisly remains and focused on the command post. Detective Sergeant Mark Bastion stood in the open doorway.
“I see you have your partner back.”
“Looks like.”
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
She shrugged. “It puts me back on the street.”
And maybe if she said that often enough, she’d start to believe it. Nodding at the scene where Bastion’s partner, Timmins, stood to one side scribbling in his notebook, she changed the subject. “So? What do we know?”
“Too much. Not enough.” Bastion sighed. “Two victims, both female. Young, but there’s too much facial damage to accurately determine ages. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy.”
“Do we know yet if the second was pregnant?”
Timmins called from across the playground before Bastion could answer. He held a hand out in a thumbs-up sign at odds with his grim expression: a confirmation rather than an indication of something gone right.
The second woman had also been pregnant.
Bastion made the sign of the cross over his chest. “Christ.”
Alex squeezed her eyes shut until starbursts went off behind her lids. For the first time in her career, she wondered how much longer she would be able to continue. How much longer she could tolerate bearing witness to atrocities like this.
She fought a rising urge to simply leave. To be somewhere else, where people didn’t kill one another in such horrific ways. Where she didn’t have to see with her own eyes just how far downhill humanity had slid. Where women didn’t die in childbirth three weeks after becoming pregnant, or have their babies ripped out of their bellies, or get brutally murdered simply because they were pregnant.
Somewhere safe.
Except safe didn’t exist anymore. It never really had, and it never would again. Not as long as Heaven and Hell were at war over humanity’s very existence.
“We’ll canvass a six-block radius,” Bastion’s voice jolted her back to the present. “There’s not many people home this time of day, so I’ll have the uniforms set up roadblocks to catch them on their way home later. We’ll keep coming back until we’ve talked to every single household. If someone is away, track them down. I want a list of every woman who is or might be pregnant, and I want their well-being confirmed. In person.”
“We should look at churches that serve the area, too,” Alex said. “Places of worship.”
The forensics duo laid aside their shovels and lifted the second body from its sandy killing ground.
The second very pregnant body.
“Christ,” Bastion muttered again. He let out a gust of air. “Nicole is pregnant, you know. Four months. We had the first ultrasound on Monday.”
Alex unlocked her teeth. “Congratulations. That’s wonderful news.”
“Is it?” He turned haggard eyes to her. “Apart from the fact she seems to have avoided this virus thing”—he waved a hand at the playground—“what the hell kind of world are we bringing a kid into?”
She had no answer. Could not, for the life of her, give the reassurance he sought. Bastion swallowed audibly.
“You and your partner—Trent, isn’t it? You do the initial sweep of the immediate neighborhood,” he said. “This street and the one that backs onto the park. The church idea is a good one. We should include cultural centers as well. I’ll get more uniforms down here.”
You and your partner.
Hugging her coat close, she started toward the car. Stopped. “Bastion? Tell Nicole I said congratulations. It’s wonderful news. Really.”
The forensics team laid the woman’s body on a tarp beside the monkey bars.
Chapter 24
Seth stepped into the elevator, shifting the groceries he carried to one arm and reaching with the other for the eighth-floor button. Another man slipped inside as the doors slid closed. Ignoring him, Seth focused instead on his plans for the evening—the next stage in his attempts to fit into Alex’s world, to be what she needed him to be.
Tipping his head back, he stared at the buzzing fluorescent light panel in the ceiling and went over the menu for the dinner he’d planned. He’d kept his choices simple: grilled chicken with lemon and rosemary, roasted vegetables with avocado and goat cheese, and a tossed salad, all tied together with a chilled Chardonnay and his determination to make good on his word to try harder. If Alex was going to work these insanely long hours, at least he could make what little time they had together as pleasant as—
“I hope she’s worth it.”
He looked sideways at his elevator companion. “Excuse me?”
A bland, golden gaze met his, then dropped to the grocery bag he clutched. “Whoever that’s for. I hope she’s worth the effort.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes. She is.” He went back to watching the light flicker. The elevator lurched past another floor.
“Because too many of them come with all kinds of baggage,” the stranger continued. “Expectations. As if we could ever care about the things they do.”
Seth’s breath stilled. We? Carefully, without moving his head, he slanted another glance at his companion. At the gleam of light reflected on his dark, burnished face, the puckered scar at the corner of one eye . . . and, for just an instant, the hint of wing-shaped shadows behind him. Seth scowled.
“I told Mika’el—”
“I’m not with Mika’el.” The other man leaned back against the elevator wall. “Just as you’re not with them.”
Not with Mika’el? If he wasn’t with the Archangel, then he was—
His uninvited companion smiled. Cold trickled through Seth’s gut.
A Fallen One. Bloody Hell, he was trapped in an elevator with one of his father’s minions.
In the time it took to inhale, his awareness of his lack of power skyrocketed from a dull, ill-defined ache to an acute sense of loss. He shifted his stance, standing tall and facing the Fallen One head-on. He curled his free hand into a fist. With or without powers, he wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“I’m exactly where I choose to be,” he told the intruder.