Sins of the Angels (28 page)

Eleven bodies to date, and now this. Christine missing, the toughest cops in the city silenced and brought to their knees. She wanted to trust Trent to protect her, but how could he? How could anyone be safe from this monster?

She stepped away from Trent's hand and into the other room, and saw what had made the tactical team go so silent. Understood why one of their own had bolted from the scene. Might have followed, but shock and disbelief paralyzed her feet.

Alex reached for the support of the wall, remembered she stood in a crime scene, and caught back her hand. She struggled to take in the mayhem before her. The gore. Blood was everywhere: splashed across walls, spattered on the ceiling, pooled on the tile floor, tracked into every corner by cops' booted feet. Its scent rose to clog her throat; its vivid crimson flooded her vision. Air became fire in her throat, her chest. For an instant, every memory, every fear that had ever tormented her loomed in her mind and blotted out the real with the remembered. She crossed her arms and dug her fingers into her ribs in an attempt to hold herself upright, to stave off the urge to crumple onto the floor and fold in on herself and give up.

Trent's presence loomed at her back and she wavered, feeling the draw of his strength, the promise of his protection.
No,
she told herself fiercely.
You've made it this far, no way will you fall apart now.

She looked away from the blood-bathed walls toward the center of the room and the rows of neatly arranged, stilloccupied chairs. Her jaw went slack. Resolve cracked, crumbled, began to dissolve. Horror attained a whole new definition.

The bodies. Dear God, so many, many bodies.

She didn't want to look, didn't want to see the defilement of human life, but she couldn't seem to stop herself. She scanned the victims, pausing on each as a distant part of her mind counted, catalogued, recorded.

One, a fresh-faced young man in a courier's uniform; two, a thirtyish black woman in a business suit . . .

. . . seven, a vaguely familiar girl with tattooed arm sleeves and a half dozen facial piercings . . .

. . . twelve, an unkempt middle-aged man, his skin color obscured under layers of street living . . .

. . . twenty-one, an elderly Asian man; twenty-two, a young woman with a swollen, pregnant belly.

Twenty-two victims. All sitting in chairs lined up to face the front of the room, throats gaping, eyes blank. Lifeless. Without so much as a rumpled shirt or skewed chair to indicate a struggle.

Alex tried to swallow but couldn't get past the lump in her throat. Her eyes burned hot and dry in their sockets as she stared at the rows of dead. Sweet Jesus, how could they have just sat there, waiting their turn at death? Why hadn't they fought back? How in God's name had the killer made them sit and watch and—

“Jarvis.” Roberts's voice echoed in the unnatural stillness of the room, jarring her out of her horror, and at the same time further into it.

Alex looked toward the front of the room where her supervisor stood on a raised platform, beckoning her forward. With Trent following as her own shadow would, she walked toward Roberts. Halfway there, she saw it.

A crucifix, mounted on the wall behind a flimsy wooden dais. Upside down. The body on it not of plastic or wood or plaster, but of bone and tendon and shreds of putrid flesh—recognizable as human only by its general shape. Alex tried to halt her steps, but the awfulness drew her forward even as it repelled her. She stopped at the edge of the platform and stared up at the atrocity, gagging anew at the reek. At the idea of a mind capable of this kind of malevolence.

A mind that had targeted her.

She tried to draw a steadying breath, but couldn't. Couldn't breathe at all. Panic stirred in her chest, trickled lower, turned her belly to liquid, became the stirrings of terror. Then Trent's hand pressed into her back, warm and solid and strong, and she focused everything she was on the touch, taking his strength into her as her own, letting him become the glue that kept her together, that kept her from spinning away into oblivion, right here, right now.

Alex stared past her supervisor. It would be so easy to give in to the collapse that hovered, to give herself the excuse she needed to walk away from all this. Roberts wouldn't even be able to say she hadn't warned him.

But even as she considered the possibility, her staff inspector cleared his throat, drawing her gaze back to meet his, and ice streaked down her spine at the bleakness there. It spread to claim her limbs as Roberts looked toward his feet, even before she followed his gaze.

Even before she saw Christine Delaney's carefully posed body and looked into her dull, dead eyes.

 

CAIM PACED THE
sidewalk behind the gathered gawkers with tight steps. How much longer would they remain in there? Surely the hunt would drive out Aramael soon. Caim snarled softly. This wasn't what he'd had in mind. The three minutes the Naphil and Aramael had spent on the sidewalk before entering the mission had told him nothing. The woman had barely acknowledged his brother, and the Power had remained well away from her. Caim needed more, much more, if he wanted to confirm his suspicions.

Because if he was right . . .

If he was right, it changed everything. If Aramael had feelings for the woman, then it became more than Caim finding a Naphil and a back door into Heaven. It became perfect justice. Retribution against the brother who had betrayed him. Taken away his freedom. Spurned him.

Caim balled his hands into fists. He willed Aramael's reappearance, but the mission's front door remained occupied only by the uniformed cop guarding it.

Fuck. All that trouble, all that effort, for this? A spot on the sidelines, watching the mortals' clumsy, bungling efforts to catch a killer they couldn't even begin to conceive of?

He'd have been better off going after that mewling female. The one who'd entered the mission as he'd finished the slaughter and then fled before he could turn his attention to her. Not that the girl was any threat to him. She might be physically unharmed, but her mind would have sustained serious damage when she'd looked on him and what he did. There was nothing like stumbling on life's darker realities to screw with the fragile mortal brain.

Still, he didn't like loose ends any more than he cared for idleness, and this was the second time someone had seen and escaped him. Maybe he should just track her down and—he scowled. No. He had to stay disciplined. Focused. Had to follow through on what he'd started. He would remain here, be patient. Aramael and the woman would emerge at some point, and he would be waiting, watching, learning.

Just as he'd promised the Naphil.

 

ALEX STARED PAST
the beat cop Roberts was talking to, unable to look away from the bloodied place of worship. Snippets of conversation washed over her, meaningless in the face of the atrocity with which they dealt.

“. . . truly dedicated to the street . . .” the beat cop's hushed voice murmured. “. . . saw him just yesterday . . .”

Behind her she heard the Forensics team lower the cross with the putrid body to the floor. Most likely Father William's remains, identified by the cross he wore around his neck, engraved with his name and the date of his ordination. An autopsy would be needed to confirm the identity for the record, of course, but Alex knew it was him. Knew it deep down, in her cop's gut. Which raised the question of whom, exactly, Christine Delaney had been dating—and how he'd made himself look enough like Father William to fool a cop who saw him nearly every day.

A muttered prayer reached Alex's ears. She blocked it out and studied the pregnant victim in the front row of chairs. The woman looked to be about six months along. No wedding ring. Maybe there wouldn't be anyone to notify about the loss of both a wife and a child in the same awful day.

“. . . don't understand how he could look like this now . . .”

Over the beat cop's shoulder, she saw Trent at the back of the room, pacing, his face drawn into lines of rage and torture, his body taut. Alex's insides shifted. She so didn't want to have to do this next part, but it was time. She'd run out of options.

She looked again at the victims lined up in the chairs and closed her eyes. Drew strength from some nether region of her mind she'd never before visited. Never had to visit. Then, with a mumbled aside to Roberts and the beat cop, she skirted the chairs and the bloody floor beneath them and headed toward Trent.

Her partner spoke first, before she'd even reached his side, his voice harsh. “He's taunting me.”

Alex tripped over a floodlight cord. Righted herself. Paused a few feet away and twisted her hands into her jacket pockets. “The others think there's more than one killer.”

“But you know better.”

It was a statement, not a question. Alex steeled herself. This was why she'd come over here. “Yes. I know better.”

Satisfaction flared in his expression.

“Now I want to know what you're going to do about it,” she added.

The look of torture returned to his face. “I don't know.”

“Can you feel him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Trust me. That part you
don't
want to know.”

Alex pressed her lips together against an automatic objection. She looked away from him. He was right. She should keep her questions pertinent, focused on the case. Like a good cop. Like a cop who believed they could actually catch the killer.

“We know he's made himself look like Father William. Maybe if we put out a description—” Her voice trailed off.

“And if you find him, what then? You'll arrest him?”

The grisly scene in which they stood pressed in on Alex. She felt Delaney's accusatory eyes boring into her back along with those of twenty-two witnesses to the fraud detective's death and Father William's desecration. No, she thought. None of them would be able to stop the monster who had done this. The monster who was after her.

Again Trent seemed to tap into her thoughts. “You're not responsible for what happened here,” he said quietly.

Alex's throat tightened. “Aren't I? Del—Christine told me about the priest. I should have said something then. Should have realized—”

“You didn't make her ignore her Guardian,” Trent interrupted. “She chose to do so. And you didn't fail in your purpose. I did.”

Guardian? Purpose? Alex felt the beginnings of a desire to hyperventilate. She looked over at Roberts. She'd give anything to return to his side and have this be a normal case where she could do the job the way she was supposed to. Where she could gather evidence and follow leads, and face a dozen killers instead of one who had somehow held twenty-two people in place while he murdered them one at a time; who had kept them from caring about what happened in front of them, or from seeing it at all. Or worse, had let them remain cognizant of every horrific moment.

Alex rested her hands on her hips and chewed at her bottom lip. There had to be
some
way of catching this son of a bitch. “Maybe if you tell me how this psychic thing of yours works, I can help.”

“Psychic thing?” One of Trent's eyebrows ascended.

“Your connection to the killer. Is it stronger when you're somewhere quiet? If you meditate?”

Trent's other eyebrow joined the first. “Meditate?”

“I'm just trying to help, damn it.”

“There's nothing you can do.”

“Why not? Why can't you at least let me try? Why—?”

“Because,” a new voice interrupted. “You are the problem, Alexandra Jarvis. Not the solution.”

Alex saw a murderous glint in Trent's eyes even as she recognized the voice. She turned her head and fixed hostile eyes on Seth Benjamin. “You again.”

“Despite your earlier efforts to be rid of me, yes.” Benjamin's gaze moved past her to Trent. “Your presence is requested. I'll stay with her until you return.”

Trent's dark brows had become one. “The way you did last night? If he'd known where to find her—”

“He didn't. And you have my word that I won't let her out of my sight this time.” Benjamin's confidence made Alex lift her chin. He smiled at the gesture. “Not even if I have to tie her down,” he added, as much for her benefit, she was sure, as for Trent's. “Verchiel waits for you. I think you'll want to hear what she has to say.”

Alex saw Trent waver, then dip his head in agreement. “Wait,” she said. “You can't leave now. I need—we need you.” She felt a flush climb into her cheeks at her slip. A flare in Trent's eyes told her he'd noticed, but he answered without inflection.

“I won't be long. A few minutes at most. Promise me you'll stay with Seth.”

Alex shot the other man a look of dislike. Something about Trent's former partner—if that was who he really was—set her teeth on edge. “I'll be fine,” she told Trent, turning her back on the man lounging against the wall. “With all these people around, how could—?”

Trent grasped her shoulders and whirled her to face the bloodied room. “Enough,” he snarled in her ear. “You cannot keep pretending you don't see what is before you, Alex. Damn it, open your eyes and look!”

She closed them instead. She didn't need to look. Didn't need to see any of it again to know he was right. To let what she had toyed with intellectually settle into her core, her center. To make the ultimate admission to herself that this wasn't just any killer. It wasn't even human. It was monstrous and obscenely powerful and evil beyond comprehension.

And it was bigger than her—bigger than all of the cops in this room put together.