Sins of the Warrior (19 page)

Raking both hands through her hair, Alex gathered it together and pulled it forward over one shoulder. She and Michael had been in Vancouver less than twelve hours and already she was ready to climb the walls. She had no idea how she’d survive sitting around doing nothing for, potentially, days on end.

She didn’t
do
nothing.

At least, not gracefully. And not when she had so many reasons to want to stay busy. To keep her mind occupied.

“Does he drink coffee?” Riley murmured, jerking her out of her mini reverie.

Alex followed the shrink’s gaze to Michael, still at the glass doors onto the garden.

“He has a name.”

“I know what his name is,” Riley said. “It just seems…”

“What?”

“Disrespectful, I suppose.” Riley sighed. “He’s an
angel
.”

Alex snorted. “Let’s try to remember it was Heaven that got us into this mess, shall we?”

Michael still didn’t look her way, but an irritated ruffle of feathers told her he’d heard. Riley studied her narrowly.

“When exactly is the last time you slept?” she asked.

“Last night, of course.”

“A full night. Without nightmares.”

“I—” The lie died on Alex’s lips as she met that damned blue gaze again. She looked away. “It’s been a while.”

“I can give you some—”

“No. Thank you. I’d rather not.”

“You can’t keep this up forever, Alex. All kinds of health issues arise from sleep deprivation.”

“I’m fine.”

“Alex—”

“I said I’m fine, Elizabeth.”

In silence, Riley filled the coffee machine’s water reservoir, scooped coffee into the permanent filter, and pressed the start button. Then she turned and cleared her throat. “Michael, could you give us a few minutes?”

Alex shook her head at the Archangel.
Don’t
. He tugged open the French doors.

“I’ll be outside.”

Traitor.

Riley pointed to one of the stools at the island’s eating bar. “Sit.”

“I—”

“I said
sit
.”

Maybe if she’d had more sleep or fewer nightmares, or if she hadn’t been fighting too many battles for too long, Alex might have argued. Instead, as she met Elizabeth’s clinical but oddly compassionate gaze, resistance whooshed out of her like the air from an overinflated balloon. She sat. Riley took the stool beside her.

“Talk.”

“About what?”

“Your sister and your soulmate are dead, Alex. Your niece is missing and going to die. Your former lover—who just happens to be a divine being who’s taken over Hell—is stalking you. How about you pick one and we’ll go from there?”

Alex had thought it before, and she’d think it again: Riley would have made one hell of an interrogator. But the psychiatrist wouldn’t wear her down that easily. Alex schooled herself to calmness. To detachment. She met the wire-framed gaze steadily.

“Fine. I’ll pick,” said Riley. “You saw Nina. How did she look?”

“Pregnant and sick and about to die. Probably because that’s how she is.” The odor rising from the coffee mug made Alex’s stomach churn. She slid it away from her and fixed Riley with a baleful glare. “I thought we weren’t doing this anymore, Liz. The last time you saw me, you said you’d decided I was handling things. You said you’d back off.”

Riley ignored her. “You must feel incredibly helpless.”

Alex stared out the window at Michael’s back, her jaw clenching until her head ached.

“You’ve lost so much already,” Riley pressed. “Aramael, Seth, Jen. What happens if this Bethiel can’t find Nina in time? What happens if she dies before you get to her? How will you survive?”

Alex curled her nails into her palms. She knew why Elizabeth pushed, knew what the psychiatrist tried to do. On some level, she might even have appreciated it, or at least the concern that motivated it. But on another level, in the dark and cavernous place growing inside her, she couldn’t care. Couldn’t let herself care. That’s how mental compartments worked.

“I’ll survive because breaking isn’t an option, Elizabeth. It never was. Talking won’t change that.”

“Bullshit. You want to know why I changed my mind about talking? Because
you
changed. I thought I’d seen you strung as wire-taut as I’ve ever seen anyone before, but I haven’t seen this.
You
haven’t seen this.” Riley paused. She reached out to cover Alex’s hand with her own.

“How much longer do you think you can handle everything before you break, Alex?”

The compartment door in Alex’s mind clanged shut. She slid from the stool and pulled her hand away from Riley’s warmth. Her humanness.

“Wrong question,” she said. She took her coat down from a hook by the door. “It’s not how long I
can
handle everything, Liz, it’s how long I have no choice
but
to handle it. And the answer is a fucking eternity.”

MICHAEL CAUGHT UP WITH
her before she’d reached the sidewalk, his hand descending onto her shoulder. She shrugged it off.

“Go away.”

He caught hold of her again, his grip like iron this time, and pulled her to a stop. She turned to repeat herself in a more direct manner, but came up short against Aramael’s sword, braced flat against her chest.

“Whether you care what happens to you or not,” Michael informed her, “I do.”

Bitter words found their way to her surface. “Until we speak with Emmanuelle, you mean.”

Michael’s mouth tightened and green fire flashed in his eyes. “I’m not as unfeeling as you’d like to think, Alexandra. If there was a way I could undo what Seth did to you, I would.”

She pulled away a second time. “You had that chance.
I
had that chance, and you wouldn’t let me take it.”

He blocked her path, wings spread to keep her from going around him. “I
couldn’t
let you take it, damn it. Everything hinges on Emmanuelle right now. If I screw this up, it’s not just Heaven’s survival at risk, it’s that of the very universe.”

She stared down the street, leafless trees lining it like sentries. A swirl of wind blew dust around her ankles. “I agreed to find her for you. Not to be your spokesperson.”

“I know. But I’m asking you anyway. She won’t listen to one of Heaven, not right away, and you’re the only mort—human who knows enough to go to her.””

“You don’t know she’ll listen to me, either.”

“I know you’re our best chance.”

“Why?” she snarled, throwing her hands wide. “What makes me so goddamned special that gods will listen to me and angels will fight for me, Michael? I never asked for this. I’m a goddamned mortal—or at least, I
was
until I landed in the middle of a fucking war between Heaven and Hell. So what is it about me?
What
?”

For a long moment, Michael looked down at her in silence, still holding the sheathed sword between them. Then he sighed. “I don’t know. Not for certain.”

“But you have a theory.”

“This isn’t the place to discuss it.”

Alex followed his gaze to Riley, standing at the window of the condo, watching them. The psychiatrist held a cell phone to her ear. Henderson. She’d called Henderson. Alex swallowed a groan, regretting her parting shot about having to handle an eternity of loss. Of course Riley would tell Hugh about that, and he would demand the whole story, and then he’d want to take it on himself to try and fix it and then Alex would have to deal with his anger and his concern and—

An invisible knife blade slid between her ribs.

Hell. So much for not caring.

“Get me out of here,” she said. “Please.”

Michael held her gaze for a moment and then, without a word, swept her into the cocoon of his wings, his arms holding her tight as her essence melted into his.

They rematerialized on a rocky stretch of shoreline hemmed in by high tide on one side and the dense, towering rain forest on the other. Alex pushed free of Michael’s hold the second she felt the ground beneath her. Scanning their surroundings, she found no other soul in sight. She put a dozen feet between her and the Archangel, crossing her arms against the chill wind.

“Well?” she said. “What’s your theory?”

Michael settled the end of Aramael’s sword scabbard on a flat rock at his feet. He rested his hands on the pommel. “I think your Naphil bloodline may have originated with an Archangel. Samael, to be exact.”

So her great-great-great-great-great-etc. grandfather was trying to kill her? Lovely.

“What difference would that make?”

“Archangels are a great deal more powerful than any of the other choirs. It stands to reason the Naphil descendant of one might be somewhat beyond ordinary as well. You might carry a spark of divinity within you even after all these generations. If I’m right, it’s why Mittron chose you to be Aramael’s soulmate in the first place. It would have strengthened the soulmate bond, and it would explain why Aramael was able to hear you across two realms. Why I was able to hear you.”

Alex waited for the catch in her throat to ease. “And Seth? How does it explain him?”

“It would have been the reason you attracted his attention to begin with.”

“But not why he’s become so obsessed with me.”

“No.”

She waited.

Michael gazed out over the water. “You know Seth saved your life.”

She bit back the snarky response she would have liked to make about having been there, and said instead, “Twice. Yes.”

“Both times you were so far gone that he had to take…extraordinary measures to bring you back.”

The catch in her throat moved into her chest, squeezing her lungs. She forced her words past it. “How extraordinary?”

“Most extraordinary,” Michael said. His voice was heavy. Rough with regret.

Or was that pity?

“I think Seth gave a little bit of his own soul to save you each of those times, Alex. To repair the damage to your own. I think it was the only way he
could
save you.”

Funny how the world could suddenly seem so far away even when you remained standing in it. As if you were no longer a part of it. As if the ocean rolled past a stranger’s feet rather than your own, and the cries of the seagulls fell on someone else’s ears.

“You are quite literally a part of him now,” Michael continued. “I don’t think he even realizes it himself. He just knows he isn’t complete without you.”

Alex stared at Michael’s hands, folded over the sword pommel. She waited for his words to sink in. To make sense. She shook her head.

“You’re wrong,” she whispered. “You have to be wrong.”

But they both knew he wasn’t.

Michael remained silent, and she waited some more, this time for the horror to envelop her. To paralyze her. It didn’t come—or if it did, the nothingness inside her simply swallowed it whole. A nothingness that stretched out before her for all of the eternity to which Seth had condemned her. She thought again of the moment when she’d stood with Michael in the between place, when she’d begun to pull away, when she might have ended all of this. Wondered if maybe…

She raised her gaze to his, but found only bleakness there. He knew what she would ask, and already he shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said. “I wish I could, Alex, but I can’t. I cannot willfully do anything to harm a mortal. None in Heaven can. Not without falling. To take you back there, to knowingly take part in ending your life—”

Alex turned away, cutting him off. She breathed in the tang of salt air. So that was it, then. Unless by some miracle she found Mittron and Bethiel upheld his end of their bargain, there really was no hope. No way to avoid the inevitability of eternity with Seth.

“I can, however, do this for you,” Michael said.

She blinked as Aramael’s sword appeared before her again. Unsheathed this time, glinting in the sunlight that had broken through the clouds. The ocean rolled over her boot.

“I don’t understand.”

“I can teach you to fight, Alex. To defend yourself.”

“To what point? I still wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Of winning, no.”

She stared at the sword. Then at Michael. Then at the sword again. Understanding dawned. She stepped away from the water.

Her hand closed over the hilt of Aramael’s sword, and the faint, residual energy of her soulmate crackled up her arm. She met Michael’s glittering gaze.

No, she would never win.

But maybe, just maybe, she could die trying.

“Yes,” she said.

There wasn’t much finesse to swinging a broadsword to begin with, and Alex possessed even less than Mika’el had hoped for. He blocked her every swing without effort, watching pain spasm across her face each time metal clashed against metal, ripping a grunt from her as a shockwave traveled along her arms and down her spine. In soberingly few minutes, she was soaked with sweat and panting, and he felt certain the sword remained in her grip through its own energy and not hers. His jaw tightened grimly as she let the weapon droop to rest against the ground.

“Enough,” she gasped. “I can’t even lift it anymore.”

He set the tip of his own sword in the sand and balanced his hands on its hilt. “Rest. We’ll continue in a minute.”

Blue eyes met his, anger and despair warring in their depths in equal measure. “Are you serious? This is useless. I can barely swing the damned thing, let alone land a blow.”

“And yet you disabled Seth in that washroom even before I had the sword remade to fit your hand rather than Aramael’s. You might have killed him if you’d known where to strike.”

Alex tossed the blade onto the rocky beach. “That was different. He didn’t expect me to—he wasn’t fighting back.”

“And no Fallen One who comes after you will expect it, either.”

“So now you think I can kill one of them?” She held up a trembling hand and snorted her disbelief.

“If you get lucky, you might.” Mika’el waved off the objection forming on her lips. “The way I see it, this can go one of three ways. Kill a Fallen One, and the next to come after you won’t be as willing to follow instructions and bring you back alive. Wound a Fallen One, and you gain another day here. Engage a Fallen One in battle, and you might—
might
—get lucky and suffer a fatal blow. Especially if you know how to put yourself in the path of that blow.”