“No. I tracked you down because I wanted to be sure you’re all right.” Riley indicated her face. “Those must sting.”
“Less so now that they’ve finished poking at them.” Alex peered at her reflection in the mirror over the examining room counter. She suppressed a shudder at the dozen or so cuts inflicted by Aramael’s wings. What kind of feathers were as sharp as razors? She turned away. “They look worse than they feel.”
“Are they from your attacker?”
“No.”
Riley waited.
Alex shrugged into her blazer, lifted her hair free, and reached for her coat.
Riley sighed.
“You’re not going to volunteer a thing, are you?”
Alex took her pistol from the coat pocket and slid it into the holster at her waist. “You really expected otherwise?”
“No, but I hoped once you—” Riley broke off and shook her head. “Damn it, Alex, you have to know that I’m not your enemy. I’m trying to help you.”
“Then go home.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Yes,” Alex said. “You can. Your credentials far outweigh Bell’s. Tell the captain you’ve met with me, done all your mumbo jumbo stuff, and decided that I’m fine. Sound of mind, sane, however you want to put it. And then go home.”
“I would have already done that if I thought it was true.”
Alex slid her arms into her coat. “Meaning what? You think I’m nuts?”
“I think you’re under a tremendous amount of stress. I think it would help you to talk.”
At last Alex stopped and gave Riley her full, undivided attention. The Vancouver psychiatrist stared back implacably. Alex shook her head, feeling oddly sad, weirdly compassionate. She’d been in Riley’s shoes not that very long ago, she reminded herself. That place of knowing but not wanting to know, seeing but refusing to accept. A place most of the world would likely find itself in the days to come.
“Look, Riley, try to understand. The world as we know it is very quickly coming to a grinding, crashing halt. For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, I’m in the middle of it. Yes, it’s tremendously stressful. Yes, under other circumstances it might be helpful to talk. But right now, I can’t. I don’t dare. Because if I start looking too closely at my own mess—” Her voice caught, and she paused to swallow.
“If I start thinking about everything that’s going on, everything that’s already happened, and what’s still to come, I might fold. And if I consider what it might be doing to me personally?” She shook her head slowly. Shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll survive. So please. There are a lot of people who are going to need your help through this. I’m not one of them. It’s time to leave me alone.”
Riley’s blue eyes regarded her through wire-framed glasses for a long minute. Then Riley opened the door and stepped aside. “He’s in the waiting area.”
“I don’t want Ara—Trent, I want Seth.”
“That’s who I meant.”
Alex paused in the doorway. “He can’t be. Roberts said he had broken ribs and a concussion.”
“He did. He doesn’t anymore.”
Alex stared out into the corridor. She watched two paramedics rolled an empty gurney back toward the ambulance bay. She inhaled carefully.
“Right,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Alex.”
Again she met Riley’s wire-framed gaze.
“I understand more than you realize,” Riley said.
Alex walked away.
Chapter 40
“Ah, for chrissakes,” a voice above Mittron muttered. “What have you done to yourself, you idiot?”
Mittron twisted away from the hand cupping his chin, the disgust in the voice. No. Don’t make me come back.
The cell guard grabbed him again, harder this time, forcing his head one way, then the other, then thrusting him away with a sigh.
“Christ, your head is a goddamn mess. Wait here. I’ll call the ambulance.”
He tried not to listen to the man rise, or to hear the metallic clang of the cell door or the retreating footsteps. He wanted to stay in the dark place he’d found, where the voices couldn’t follow. But it was too late.
The cold of the concrete penetrated first, hard against body parts stiff from lying on it too long. The pain of his battered skull came next, a deep, throbbing ache where he’d beaten it against the bars of his cage as the drugs wore off and the voices returned. Beaten it rhythmically, mercilessly, until the dark finally claimed him. How long had he managed to escape? Not long enough. Nothing short of eternity would be long enough.
A whisper slid through his brain, heralding their return. All the souls lost so far to the Fallen, to be joined by billions more by the time Lucifer was done. And now, caged and without access to the drugs, he would have no choice but to endure. He lifted his head and smashed it down on the floor once, twice, again.
Strong hands seized his shoulders and hauled him to his feet, shoved him against the bars. “Would you stop that?” an irritated voice asked. “I can’t talk to you if your brains are scrambled.”
Fingertips tried unsuccessfully to pry open one of his eyes. Then the hand slapped his cheeks, once on each side, sharp enough to create a new pain that overrode the first. Forcing his arms up to ward off another blow, he mumbled an objection.
“Then open your eyes,” the voice retorted. “Look at me.”
He sagged to the floor.
“Bloody Heaven, Seraph.” The voice’s owner dragged him upright again. Sheer surprise at the address accomplished what pain could not. Mittron’s eyes flew open. A hand patted his cheek. “That’s better.”
He stared at the burnished, mahogany-dark face inches from his own. “You—what—Samael?”
“You recognize me. Good. I wasn’t sure you would in your current state.” Samael drew back, wrinkling his nose. “For the record, you reek.”
Footsteps thudded somewhere down the corridor. Mittron’s visitor shot an impatient look in their direction. “We need to make this quick.”
More words issued forth from Samael’s mouth, but they became lost in the growing volume of whispers. Mittron put his hands to his ears, trying in vain to block what originated within his soul. Trying to focus.
“What?”
Samael pulled his hands away.
“Limbo. You broke Caim out. Can you do so for others?”
The whispers—
“Damn it, Seraph. Can you or can’t you get others out of Limbo?”
“How many?” he mumbled.
“All of them.”
The voices dropped to murmurs.
A door clanged. The heavy footsteps drew nearer. More than one set. Cursing his ownsluggishness, Mittron wrestled with Samael’s question, seeking its purpose. Was such a thing possible?
“Why?” he asked.
“Suffice it to say I need to raise an army, and they’re the most likely recruits. If I can get them out.”
Mittron shook his head. His brain smashed against the inside of his skull. “Even if you could, there’s no telling what you’d get. Some of them have been in there for millennia. Their minds—”
“I’m willing to take the chance. Can you do it?”
“Why should I?”
Samael held up a clear glass vial filled with an amber liquid. “Because I can stop the pain,” he said. “Temporarily for now, with this. Permanently if my plan succeeds.”
“Permanently—you’ll kill me if I help?”
“If all goes well, I won’t have to. But yes. If necessary, I will do what your enemy will not.”
Mittron stared at the vial. He fought to still his tremble, to block the voices so that he could think for one moment more. What Samael wanted—opening Limbo and releasing the Fallen imprisoned there—it would be the ultimate betrayal of the One who had created him.