Sins of the Son: The Grigori Legacy (34 page)

“The
woman
,” said Alex, “is going with you.”

“No.” The female shook her head. “You will only slow us down. You must stay here.”

Alex scowled at her. “We’ve already been over this. I’m not staying anywhere. I’m looking for Seth. I’m the only one he—” She stopped mid-word and paled again. Then she
walked toward the one named Aramael, halting halfway to where he stood by the window. “I need to be with you when you find him. You know he won’t listen to you. He
might
still listen to me.”

Michael responded before the other angel could. “We will come for you when we find him.
If
we need you.”

Alex’s gaze didn’t waver. “Aramael?”

Aramael looked over her head at the others and Hugh saw his gaze meet Michael’s. A message passed between the two of them, making Aramael’s jaw go hard. Hugh remembered what Alex had told him about her relationship with the angel and his lips compressed in mute sympathy. The angel’s pain filled the room, a pulsing energy that was raw and angry and every bit as human as any Hugh had ever felt himself. Perhaps more so.

But the gaze that Aramael turned back to Alex held nothing but grim determination. “Mika’el is right. You should stay here.”

Before Alex could react, Michael stepped between them, cold finality stamped across his features. “This will be done our way, Naphil,” he said. “You remain here.”

Alex crossed her arms and glared at him. “Damn it, Michael, you don’t get to tell me—”

A great gust of wind rushed through the living room, making Hugh blink. When he looked again, Michael and the others were gone and Alex was staring openmouthed at the empty space they’d left behind.

“That bastard!” She whirled to Hugh. “Fine. We’ll just look for him on our own. If he’s anywhere in this city, I’ll find him.”

“Hold up there, Alex,” Hugh called after her when she would have disappeared into the bedroom again. “No way in hell am I dragging you all over the city after what just happened. Let the others find Seth. You need to be checked out.”

Alex returned to stand a few feet away, calm, composed, her expression flatly determined. “I don’t need a doctor. He didn’t hurt me.”

“Damn it, Alex, you’re in shock.”

“He didn’t hurt me, Henderson. I wasn’t even awake when he—when he—” Swallowing, she made a visible effort to pull herself together. “Look. It happened, I survived, and there are more important things than having my blood pressure taken right now, all right?” She glared at him. “I don’t care if I have to go alone and on foot, but I am going to look for Seth.”

“Alex,” a woman’s voice said quietly, and Hugh jumped right along with Alex. He’d completely forgotten Liz’s presence, and from the look on Alex’s face, she hadn’t noticed the psychiatrist at all until now.

Nor did she look pleased to see her.

“Don’t you start,” she said tightly.

Liz straightened up from the wall, her face wan but determined, and Hugh could only imagine how everything she’d just seen and heard would mess with her logical mind.

“Hugh is right,” she said as if Alex hadn’t spoken. “You need to be examined.”

“I’m not discussing this anymore.” Alex started toward her room. “I need my coat.”

“Alex,” Liz said again, and this time the very quietness of her voice sent a spiral of unease through Hugh’s gut.

Alex gave an impatient huff. “What?”

“If this was a Fallen Angel and you’re like the other women who were attacked…” Liz bit her lip.

Hugh frowned. Liz didn’t hesitate. Ever.

The anomaly seemed to have reached through to Alex, too, draining away her impatience. Leaving her watchful. Quiet. Then suddenly horrified.

“Oh, hell,” she said.

And she bolted for the bathroom.

T
HE EXAM ROOM
door opened and a middle-aged doctor entered, smiling the impersonal smile of the overworked and exhausted. “Detective Jarvis? I’m Dr. Warner. Dr. Riley asked me to come and speak to you.”

Alex accepted the handshake he offered, not because she cared who he was or who had sent him, but because she was firmly entrenched in autopilot at this point, her body functioned on its own. Just as it had ever since she’d emerged from the bathroom at Hugh’s apartment, so shell-shocked that her mind felt like it had separated from the rest of her.

Things hadn’t improved since arriving in the hospital’s emergency ward.

She sat in the chair he indicated. Settling onto a wheeled stool, Warner rolled across the floor to join her, flipping through the chart he’d brought in with him.

“Right, so you’ve been given the results of the test.” Warner glanced up at her to confirm. “You know it was positive?”

Alex’s belly stirred. Heaved. Settled again.

Her head nodded.

“The fact it is positive this soon is unusual, of course.”

Were all doctors masters of understatement? Was that part of their training or something? Beat-Around-the-Bush 101?

“Unfortunately, it means the morning-after pill isn’t an option…if, in fact, you intend to abort the pregnancy.”

Alex’s fingers gripped the edge of the chair until her knuckles ached under the strain, her mind noting the discomfort from a distance. A nice, safe distance she would have done just about anything to maintain. Anything but give in to what a Fallen Angel had done to her.

“Detective?” Warner prompted.

Holding up a hand, she closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and took a deep, fortifying breath that made no difference whatsoever to the act of bringing mind and body together again, because reclaiming her full sanity in the face of what waited for her was just plain, fucking hard.

Warner’s hand closed over hers. One of them, Alex noted, was shaking.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded.

He squeezed her fingers. The tremble was definitely hers.

“I know it can be a difficult decision, Detective, and it isn’t normally my job to counsel patients one way or the other,” he said, “but to our knowledge, none of the mothers has yet survived giving birth to one of these…babies. Under the circumstances, regardless of your personal beliefs, my medical opinion is that you abort the fetus.”

Alex’s head shot up. Nothing could have completed the joining of mind and body faster than his words did. He thought she hesitated? That she considered letting a Fallen One’s child grow in her belly? She yanked away her hand.

“There’s no decision to be made,” she snarled. “I want it out of me.”

Dr. Warner blinked, visibly adjusting his perspective of the situation. “Right. Well, at this stage, the best procedure would be—”

“I don’t care what, just tell me when.”

Another adjustment. “Fine. I’ll go ahead and book an OR as soon as I can. Someone will give you a call with pre-op instructions. If your pregnancy progresses as the others have done, anytime within the first seven days will be fine. That still puts you comfortably within what would normally be the first trimester.”

Alex shook her head. “I don’t have seven days.”

“I know you’re anxious, Detective Jarvis, and I understand, but—”

“No,” she interrupted savagely. “You don’t understand. The thing that did this to me is on the verge of wiping out every human being on the planet. I have one chance to stop that from happening and I need this procedure now so I can get the fuck out of here.”

Dr. Warner stared at her. Opened his mouth, closed it, and stared some more. Alex reined in her impatience. Her desperation. Taking a deep breath, she uncurled her fingers and met his astounded, uncertain gaze with a steadiness that took every ounce of her control.

“I know you don’t understand,” she said. “And I know I sound crazy, but—”

“She’s telling the truth,” Elizabeth Riley’s voice said from the doorway.

Warner looked over at the psychiatrist at the same time as Alex. Alex hadn’t heard the door open, and knew she should be pissed at yet another of Riley’s invasions of privacy, but right then she was willing to forgive the shrink just about anything. Hell, she would have jumped up and kissed Riley if she trusted her legs to carry her that far. She settled, however, for giving the psychiatrist a tiny nod before turning her attention back to Warner.

Who now looked like he believed she and Riley were both nuts.

Or maybe he just wished they were, Alex thought, recognizing the flicker of unease deep in his eyes and feeling its echo in her own heart. Because he’d seen the mothers and their babies for himself, and he was afraid there might be a grain of truth to her words. Because, like she’d once told Aramael, insanity would be a whole hell of a lot easier than this heart-stopping, gut-churning reality that had become the world’s.

At last the obstetrician stood and rolled the stool back to the wall. “I’ll book the OR for an emergency procedure,” he said.

A
lex came out of the utilitarian bathroom to find Elizabeth Riley seated by the bed, flipping through a magazine. The psychiatrist looked up at her as she padded past to the locker and thrust her clothes inside.

“I brought you a toothbrush and toothpaste,” she said. “You’ll need them in the morning, when you’re discharged.”

Morning. Alex gritted her teeth at the complexities behind the simple word. Hours spent here, idle, useless, waiting while Seth was out there somewhere, angry, betrayed, potentially lethal. She and Riley had gone three rounds over the matter when Alex learned how long the procedure was going to take. In the first round, she had flatly refused to remain in the hospital that long and Riley had physically blocked her from leaving. Round two had brought Riley’s assurance that Henderson had every cop in the city searching for Seth, refuted by Alex’s insistence that only she would stand a chance of getting through to Seth.

Round three had resulted in Alex being here now, with Riley’s blunt reminder still ringing in her ears.
“If you don’t get this thing out of you right now, while you have the
chance, you will die—and you’re no good to Seth if you’re dead.
”

Just because Riley might have won, however, didn’t mean Alex had to like it. Slamming the locker door shut with a force that drew a frown from a passing nurse, she stalked past the shrink.

“Have they given me a time yet?”

“They’re just waiting for an anesthesiologist to come in.”

Alex picked up her cell phone and checked the display. A little after three. No missed calls. No text messages. No Seth. Not that any of the angels would let her know, but Henderson had promised to do so. This was going to be the longest night of her life. Setting the phone back down on the bedside table, she studied the other woman. Riley flipped through pages too fast to even be scanning, let alone reading.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” she told the psychiatrist. “I said I’d stay.”

“That’s not why I’m here. It’s going to be a couple of hours before you go into surgery and I thought you might want to talk.”

“I’m fine.”

Riley set the magazine on her lap. “You were raped, Detective Jarvis. You are not fine.”

Alex walked past her to the window.

Riley remained silent for a moment and then cleared her throat. “Ignoring it won’t change it, Alex,” she said gently.

“Neither will talking it to death,” Alex muttered, pulling aside the curtain and staring out into the night.

“You can’t keep locking away everything that happens to you. One day you’ll add one too many things and you won’t be able to close the door again and all of it will come out. Everything, all at once. Trust me, you do
not
want that to happen.”

A shudder crawled up Alex’s spine and she scowled, forcing it back down again. Riley was wrong. She’d managed to keep everything safely locked away so far, and she’d bloody well continue to do so for as long as she had to,
because with Armageddon pending, she didn’t have much choice.

Besides, there was already too much behind her door to risk opening it so much as a crack right now.

“I said I’m fine.”

Riley sighed behind her. “Well. I’m here if you change your mind. I will treat anything you say in absolute confidence.”

Alex wondered if Riley’s idea of
in confidence
was any better than Dr. Bell’s had proved to be. Deciding a change of subject was in order, she glanced over her shoulder at the shrink. “So how are you doing with all this?”

Riley picked up the magazine and began flipping through it again, her face expressionless. “I’m struggling,” she said at last, and Alex could only guess at the cost of the admission. “It’s been a lot to take in.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Hugh has told me everything he knows, but I still have questions.”

“Please. Fire away.”

Riley shook her head. “You should sleep.”

The suggestion brought a rush of memories associated with the last time Alex had slept. A Fallen Angel’s hand on her forehead. His whispered,
“Sleep.”
Waking to the aftermath, and Seth’s betrayal, and the knowledge of what had been done to her. Of what she carried. Alex made her fingers uncurl from the sudden death grip she had on the curtain. Shutting down thoughts she preferred not to examine, she settled onto the wide ledge.

“I’m not tired,” she said. “What would you like to know?”

Astute blue eyes regarded her over wire-framed glasses, but to her great and everlasting relief, Riley made no comment. Instead, she set down the magazine a second time and folded her hands over it.

“All right, here’s one. If God exists—” Riley broke off again, then muttered, “I can’t believe I even said that.”

Alex gave a small smile. “I’ve been given personal assurance she does, if that helps any.”

Both of Riley’s eyebrows shot upward. “She?”

“They—Aramael and the others—call her the One.”

A moment’s silence followed while Riley digested the news. Standing, she set the magazine on the bedside table beside Alex’s cell phone before joining her at the window.

“I’m guessing she’s not quite the god many imagine.” Riley drew back the curtain Alex had released a moment before. Her reflection took on a pensive expression. “The all-powerful one that’s supposed to look after us and not let bad things happen.”