Sins of the Son: The Grigori Legacy (19 page)

“Fuck.” He groped along the wood. Could they not provide decent lighting in this place?

“Can I help you?” a man’s disapproving voice asked.

Adrenaline jolted through Hugh’s veins. He curled his fingers into his palms. Abandoning his escape efforts, he turned to confirm what his ears had already told him. He knew that voice. Would have known it anywhere, even after all this time.

“Father Marcus. I wasn’t sure I’d find you here at this hour.”

A burly man stepped out of the deeper shadows of an archway, still robed from evening Mass. He squinted through the gloom. “Hugh?”

He stretched out a hand toward the wall and the sconces lining the foyer grew instantly brighter—as did the priest’s lined face. He smiled with delight and came forward to envelop Hugh in a bone-crushing bear hug.

“It
is
you. I’d given up hope of ever seeing you back here.” Father Marcus pulled back and clapped his massive hands onto Hugh’s shoulders, adding a shake to his greeting that nearly knocked Hugh’s two-hundred-plus pounds from his feet.

In spite of his inner turmoil, Hugh couldn’t help a small smile as he endured a second hug before extricating himself and stepping back. “It’s good to see you, too, Father.”

The priest snorted. “What’s this Father nonsense? You and I were and always will be friends, Hugh, no matter how much time passes. Call me Marcus as you always have.” Marcus’s eyes grew sober as he studied him. “You look well.”

The tightness returned to Hugh’s chest. The door at his back beckoned. Reminding himself of the reasons that had brought him here, he reached deep and stood his ground. Fleeing wouldn’t make the last ten years any easier. Nor would it provide the answers he’d come for.

“Thank you,” he said. “But I’m not here for personal reasons. Do you have time to talk?”

“Always. Let me lock up so we’re not interrupted.”

Stepping out of the way, Hugh watched the priest take a key from the same niche beside the door in which he’d always kept it, regardless of the many times Hugh had discussed security issues with him. Hugh shook his head but remained silent as the giant dead bolt clicked home and Marcus returned the key to its hiding spot.

“Sanctuary or my office?”

Hugh’s palms went damp. Whether he knew it or not, Marcus offered a bitch of a choice: the place denied his family because of the circumstances of their deaths, or the one in which he’d turned his back on Church and faith? He stared past the priest into the vaulted expanse of the sanctuary. The old but still-fresh bitterness rose in his chest. Once again he considered flight; once again he smothered the urge.

“Office,” he said.

If Marcus noticed the strangulation in his voice, he didn’t comment, only motioned toward the archway on the left, the beginning of the passage that ran the length of the church to the offices tucked away at the back. Minutes later, Hugh found himself seated in a room that hadn’t changed in…

Well, a long time.

He refused the offered coffee and waited for Marcus to take his seat behind the desk. Then, not wanting to give the priest the opportunity to steer the conversation into personal waters, he opened his mouth. Marcus beat him to it.

“Thank you for coming. I can’t tell you how difficult this decision was—or how many of the Church’s laws I am breaking,” the priest muttered, staring down at his folded hands on the desk. “If the bishop had any idea…”

Hugh made a rapid adjustment in his thought process. Of course. Marcus’s message. He couldn’t very well admit he hadn’t come because of it. Pushing aside his own questions for the moment, he cleared his throat. “Your message said it was urgent. What’s going on?”

“The pregnancies.”

Hugh blinked. Foreboding crawled down his spine. The priest couldn’t mean…

“What pregnancies?”

Faded blue eyes lifted to his. “
The
pregnancies, Hugh. The ones on the news, in our own city, all over the world.”

He did mean. The air snagged in Hugh’s lungs and refused to move. He coughed. “You know something about them?”

“I know they’ve happened before.” The priest’s face had gone haggard. Suddenly Marcus looked every second of his age. “Six thousand years ago, give or take.”

M
IKA’EL TOOK HIS
place at the table, Raphael on his left, Gabriel to the right, the others continuing the circle from there. Uriel, Azrael, Zachariel. Technically, each of them held an equal role in council, an equal seat in the hall; there was never to have been a leader here, never to have been one Archangel with more authority than another. And yet all eyes still turned to Mika’el, just as they always had.

He stared down at his fingertips resting on the plain wooden surface, worn smooth over thousands of years of polishing. Expectant silence settled over the gathering. Lifting his gaze, he let it travel the room, meeting each of his fellow Archangels’ eyes, pausing at the gap in their circle where the traitor Samael had once sat, forcing himself to move on.

“The pact is broken,” he said. “The agreement will not stand. We go to war.”

The rustle of multiple wings whispered through the hall, rising to the vaulted ceiling. One of the gathered—Mika’el didn’t see who—coughed.

“But Seth lives,” Azrael objected.

Mika’el’s jaw flexed. He stared at the other Archangel. “The agreement will not stand,” he repeated.

Silence dropped across the table as the Archangels absorbed the impact of his words. Then Zachariel frowned.

“What you are suggesting—it is an enormous risk.”

“Perhaps,” responded Gabriel, the only female among them. “But given the circumstances, would it not be a greater risk otherwise?”

The caution behind the exchange told Mika’el his fellow warriors knew exactly what he had left unsaid and understood the critical need to keep silent about it—even in their own meeting place. Even in Heaven. He glanced again at the hole in their midst that marked a betrayal from which they had never recovered.

“Is it to be one of us?” Uriel asked, and wings rustled again.

Mika’el shook his head. “One no longer connected to us.”

Curiosity sat heavy behind their eyes, but no one asked. Most, if not all, of them would figure out that Aramael had been tasked with the Appointed’s assassination, but they would not speak his name. Wouldn’t even hint at it. Samael’s treason had taught them well.

Across the table, Zachariel cleared his throat. “What now?”

Mika’el gritted his teeth and closed his eyes, bracing himself to step fully back into the role he had forsaken almost five thousand years before, a role he had never thought to fill again. The weight of the One’s disclosures pressed in on him with the force of a collapsing star. He opened his eyes and surveyed the grim faces of his fellow Archangels again.

“Now,” he said, “we plan.”

“W
ell, well. A once mighty Power stooping to theft. What is the world coming to?”

Aramael’s fingers stilled in their unraveling of the knotted rope holding the boat to the pier. He straightened with slow deliberation. So. They’d found him, had they? It had taken them long enough—he’d been expecting them since Mika’el left him on the Washington shoreline. Or maybe they’d just waited until he’d crawled out of the water and they didn’t have to get wet to come after him.

Pivoting, he faced the Fallen One leaning against a lamppost a few yards away in a pool of light. Only one. Good. It would be his first fight since Mika’el had declared him capable, and he hadn’t looked forward to taking on multiple enemies when he tested the theory that his strength equaled theirs.

Aramael studied the leather-clad figure. He’d seen that craggy face before. He searched his memory and his mouth drew tight with satisfaction. Estiel. How fitting that one of the Grigori, the choir of angels that started the whole downfall
mess, should be the first Fallen One to encounter his newly honed fighting skills.

He shifted into a wider stance.

“Let’s skip the small talk, shall we? I’m on a tight deadline.”

Estiel gave a bark of laughter. “I heard you were still pretty cocky. We haven’t beaten it out of you yet?” He straightened. “I guess we’ll just have to try harder. But not faster. Deadline or no deadline, I plan to take my time. I want to enjoy this.”

Aramael waited for Estiel to stroll forward. When the Fallen One stopped a scant few feet away, he lashed out with all the controlled fury taught to him by Heaven’s best. Estiel’s jawbone gave way beneath his fist with a satisfying crunch. The Fallen One staggered backward, surprise flaring beside pain in the flat black gaze.

Regaining his balance, Estiel pushed his jaw back into place and narrowed his eyes. “You’ve been practicing.”

“And you’re still talking too much.”

Estiel feinted left and then caught him in the gut with a solid right. Something inside Aramael ruptured and began to bleed, but he shut out the pain and danced away from a second blow. Leaning into Mika’el’s training, he drew into himself until he found the angel still there. The strength. The sheer power that came with being who he was.

What he was.

In quick succession, he delivered punishing hits to Estiel’s gut, ribs, and—when his enemy spun away to avoid him—kidneys. Estiel crashed to his knees on the pier. Without pause, Aramael aimed a vicious kick into the Fallen One’s belly, sending him a dozen feet sideways.

Surprise in the dark gaze turned to disbelief as Aramael stalked across the boards to stand over him. Estiel slithered away but came up short against a post. Curled into a ball, eyes glazed with pain, he glowered at Aramael.

“You wouldn’t.” His lips twisted into a sneer. “You’re of Heaven. You can’t.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Aramael growled. “They threw me out. And I already have.”

He brought down his foot on the Fallen One’s skull. Felt it turn to pulp beneath his boot. For a long few seconds, he stood amid bone shards and gray matter and pooling blood and stared at what he had done, examining the cold ease with which he had done it. At last he turned from his enemy and went back to the task of stealing a boat to take him to Vancouver.

It didn’t matter that Estiel wasn’t really dead, or that Aramael could no longer take an immortal life—at least, not this one. Nor did it matter that the Fallen One would rise again and go on to tell his compatriots of the new and improved version of their nemesis, or that they were certain to come after him again, perhaps in numbers that would make fighting back impossible, even with what Mika’el had taught him.

None of it mattered except the truth at the core of it all.

Releasing the boat from its mooring, Aramael leapt onto its deck. Mika’el had been wrong about him becoming a murderer.

Because he couldn’t become what he already was.

S
ETH STOOD AT
the bedside, staring down at Alex. Even in sleep she looked tired, still carried that frown between her eyebrows. His hand curled at his side, alive with its own desire to reach out and smooth away the lines of concern.

Because he recognized it as concern, now. Understood she worried. About him, about what she had watched on television with him—a newscast, she had called it—before she finally fell asleep in the chair beside him as day moved back toward evening. Knew it had been right to move her to the bed then, but would be wrong to touch her in her sleep now, without her permission.

After thirty-one straight hours of watching the world through the eyes of the box on the desk and manipu-lating it to pick up on energy signals it normally wouldn’t, he
knew all that and more: different languages, places, events, people…But for every one thing he learned, more questions had arisen. Thousands of them, burning in his brain, demanding answers. Demanding he fill the void that remained within him.

Alex had done her best to provide those answers. She stayed by his side for twenty-seven revolutions of the clock, watching, answering, breaking only for food and bathroom and the occasional stretch that had drawn his attention away from the pictures to her lithe, curved form.

Her voice had grown hoarse and her eyes had taken on a bruised look until, finally, she had drifted into sleep.

Seth had moved her then, placing her in the bed the way he had seen it done on television. Arranging the pillows. Tucking the covers around her. Always feeling her warmth. Her pull on him.

An attraction, she had called it. The people on tele-vision had given it other words, too. Love. Need. Want. Desire. Alex had explained the emotions to him when he asked, along with myriad others—anger, rage, jealousy, sadness, hope—but her words had only served to feed his curiosity. And his growing, unsettled awareness of the differences between them. Between him and her and those like her.

He may have woken up in this world, but he became more convinced by the minute he didn’t belong here. Memory issues aside, he felt no familiarity with any of what he saw, any of what he learned. No connection.

Except…

Alex moved in the bed and Seth’s gaze returned to the blonde hair splayed across the pillow, the tiny frown pulling at her forehead, her length hidden beneath the covers. At his core, he felt again the stir to which he was becoming so accustomed.

Except.

Why the connection to her—and only her? What was it about this woman that drew him so inexorably toward her? Why did it feel so right? So inevitable? How did he fit into her life?

Did
he fit?

Alex shifted under the covers once more and he waited, but she only breathed deeply and settled again. With a sigh, Seth lowered himself into the chair at her side and prepared to wait a little longer for her return to him.

A
RAMAEL EYED THE
burly security guard lumbering down the corridor and expelled a hiss of air. Bloody Hell, the last thing he needed was a confrontation with a mortal. The door of the stair exit to the left of the nurses’ station opened and another guard stepped into the hallway.

Bloody, bloody Hell. So much for in and out discreetly.

He regarded the nurse on the other side of the counter who, judging from the satisfied line of her mouth, was the instigator of his approaching difficulties.