“Even then.”
“Then that’s why. If this quest of yours is going to consume your days—and, frankly, many of your nights—I might as well help. At least it will let me be near you, that being the whole reason I chose to be here and all,” he added dryly.
“You’re sure.”
“You want answers. I can help you get them. I’m sure.”
The weight of Mika’el’s visit grew heavier, pressing down on the relief she wanted to feel. The gratitude. She drew a breath. No more secrets. She had to tell him. “Seth—”
“Alex—”
They both stopped. She mustered a smile. “You first.”
A muscle flickered in front of his ear. His dark eyes looked away. “There’s just one thing. Did you mean what you told Jennifer? About Aramael?”
She searched her memory but came up blank on specifics. “I’m not sure what—”
Seth cut her off. “You called him the soulmate you can never have. Is that how you think of him?”
The roughness of his voice scraped across her heart. He’d overheard? Damn it. “No! Lord, no, Seth. I was angry and trying to make a point and—”
“Do you regret choosing me?”
She put a hand out to him. His arm, already rock-hard, contracted beneath her touch. She gripped harder. “I will never regret choosing you, Seth Benjamin. Ever.”
“Then you do love me?”
She looked up into a pain that sliced to her very quick. Viciously, she pushed away the guilt that plagued her, the doubts that haunted her. She remembered the agony of standing in a Vancouver alley, certain she had lost him. Remembered how his name had been the first she’d thought of when she regained consciousness. Remembered and wanted—needed—to believe. In herself, in him, in them.
“With all my heart,” she said.
For a moment, he didn’t move. Then he folded her into his arms, his chin atop her head. “Me, too,” he said.
Silence fell between them. Seth’s hand moved rhythmically against her back, making slow, gentle circles. Closing her eyes, she focused on the steady rise and fall of his chest, the thud of his heartbeat, his warmth merging with hers. However badly the evening had ended with Jennifer, she preferred to focus on all the things that had gone right. Seth’s attempt to bridge the gap between them, his efforts to belong, and this . . . one of those precious, priceless moments where the world seemed to fall away and leave the two of them suspended in a secure, protected bubble.
“It’s your turn,” his voice rumbled beneath her ear.
“What?”
“You wanted to tell me something.”
Her throat closed. She couldn’t. Not now. Not after that.
“It can wait,” she said. “It wasn’t important.”
His hand resumed its massage, but the bubble enclosing them had already begun to shrink.
Chapter 20
“Any questions?” Alex shrugged into her coat and then reached for her scarf. Seth beat her to it, folding it in half, looping it around her neck, tucking the ends through the fold. Exactly the way she did it. She stretched up to kiss him.
“Apart from remaining skeptical about this whole Internet thing mortals have created, you mean?” He shook his head. “I still don’t see the point in relying on a tool that contains so much misleading—or wrong— information.”
“You just have to filter out the garbage. The real-time capacity is invaluable. It’s the best way we have to figure out where the babies have disappeared to—and who took them, on the off-chance that it isn’t the Fallen Ones after all. If humans are behind this, at least we can intervene.”
“And if it is the Fallen?”
She took down the strongbox from the closet shelf, unlocked it, and took out her service pistol. Slipping its magazine into place, she glanced at Seth. “You’re sure they’d still be here, in this world? Lucifer can’t take them?”
“To Hell? I’m sure. He wouldn’t even if he could. Their presence would sully his realm.”
She blinked at the idea that Lucifer, of all beings, could consider humans—or half-humans—dirty. Thrusting aside the incongruity, she slid her weapon into its holster at her waist and replaced the box on the shelf.
“Call me if you find anything?”
Seth arched a black brow. “Will you answer if I call?”
Heat crawled across her cheeks. “I will,” she promised.
Walking down the hall toward the elevator, she made another promise, this one to herself. Come Hell or high water, she would talk to someone today about her intimacy issues. She had no idea how she’d dance around the whole angel/demon thing in such a conversation, but she’d find a way. She had to. If Seth was willing to work at this, he deserved at least the same effort from her. They both did.
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
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.”
