Sins of the Warrior (34 page)

“Seth,” she agreed. “So what’s it going to be, Emmanuelle? Are you in or out?”

Bloody Hell.

Alex took the mug Michael held out to her, curling both hands around its warmth. Michael retreated to stand by the French doors, one shoulder resting against the frame, arms crossed. Silence sat heavy between them. The same silence that had prevailed since she had pulled away from him in the bedroom—raw and beaten and emptier than she’d ever been in her life. Emptier than should have been possible if one was still able to function.

The mug in her hands trembled, and she tightened her grip. Closed her eyes.

“Alex—” Michael began.

She cut him off, her voice harsh even in its whisper. “You shouldn’t have pulled me back. I’ve done enough for you. You should have let me go.”

“You have done enough,” he said quietly. “And I didn’t pull you back.”

Her eyelids snapped open. She scowled at him. “Don’t. Don’t lie to me. I felt you.”

“I only held you, nothing more. I knew you were going mad, and I didn’t try to stop it.” Michael sighed and rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I just didn’t want you to be alone when it happened.”

She held the emerald gaze, blinking back the sharp prickle of unwanted tears. “So if you didn’t stop it, what did? Is it because of what Seth did to me?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Immortality doesn’t guarantee sanity.”

“Then why, damn it? Why am I still here?”

“I suspect only you can answer that.”

Her fingers tightened on the mug, and she fought the urge to pitch it at his head. Fuck, but she was sick of obscure answers. She turned her gaze to the window and the darkened garden beyond.

“Why didn’t you want me to be alone?” she asked wearily. “Why did it matter?”

Long seconds ticked past without answer. So many that she finally looked back to him. Self-loathing filled his expression. She frowned.

“Michael?”

A muscle in the corner of his jaw worked. His eyes closed. Pain etched itself into the lines around his mouth. The heart she hadn’t thought capable of further feeling gave a flutter of unexpected compassion. Alex hesitated, then leaned forward and touched the corded muscle of his forearm. He flinched but didn’t pull away. A ragged exhale escaped him.

“Because so very much of this is my fault,” he said, his voice as rough as it was quiet. “Because my faith in the One blinded me to Emmanuelle’s warnings. Because I’ve asked you to do things no angel should ever ask of one who is only…”

He trailed off, and she finished bitterly, “Only human? But I’m not, am I? I’m…”

She couldn’t finish, either, because she didn’t know what she was any more than Michael did. Not anymore. Hell, she’d been broken and cobbled back together so many times, she didn’t think the One herself would have known what she was.

But it sure as Hell wasn’t
only human
.

Michael’s voice gentled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It matters only that you were mortal, and in my arrogance, my certainty that I was right, I interfered with your choices. I’m the reason you are where you are right now, Alexandra Jarvis. I’m the reason you’ve lost so much.
Will
lose so much. And for that, for all of that, I am profoundly sorry.”

She waited for the expected anger to stir in her. The refusal of his apology to spill from her lips. The familiar accusations to follow. None of those things happened. Instead, through her own despair, she saw the slump of powerful shoulders, the droop of magnificent wings, and her breath caught.

Compassion fluttered again in her breast. What must it be like to carry the weight that he did? The responsibility for not just one, but two, entire races—two worlds? Her gaze traced the hopelessness around Michael’s mouth, the worry etched into his brow.

Her fingers slid down his forearm and linked with his.

“Don’t,” she said. “You forget I could have said no. At any one of a thousand times, I could have made a different choice, a different decision. We both made mistakes, Michael. We all did.”

He stared down at their hands.

“I did it for myself,” he said.

“Pardon?”

His emerald gaze lifted to hers. Held it without flinching, without hiding. “I held you for myself. Because I needed to remember that I’m more than the war between Heaven and Hell. More than the sum of bad decisions and poor choices. For once, just for a moment, I needed to be an angel, and not a destroyer.”

Down the hall in the bedroom, Alex’s cell phone rang.

ALEX PICKED UP THE
cell phone on its seventh ring. She’d counted as she stood up from the couch beside Michael and walked the short distance to the bedroom. Counting had kept her feet moving. Kept her from going back to Michael and—

And what? Wrapping her arms around him? Cradling his head against her shoulder? Telling him everything would be all right? Even if that were true—and they both knew it wasn’t—he was an Archangel. Heaven’s greatest warrior. Soulmate to Emmanuelle, daughter of Lucifer and the One.

She thumbed the answer icon.

No, Michael didn’t need the paltry comfort of a screwed-up Naphil, immortal or otherwise. And she most definitely did not need to be feeling—

“Jarvis,” she said into the phone.

Silence responded. Then labored breathing.

Alex took the phone from her ear and glanced at the display. She frowned. “Hugh?”

A gasp. A groan.

The skin over Alex’s entire body went tight. Cold. The first lashings of panic whipped through her belly.

“Hugh? What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“Alex…”

A bare croak of sound.

Alex fought back a terror that threatened to devolve into hysteria. She struggled for calm. Authority. Air. “Tell me where you are. I’m on my way. I’ll call for backup.”

She stumbled for the door and pulled it open. Michael met her on the other side. The labored breathing in her ear continued.

“Hugh, for God’s sake—”

“Alex…Seth…
run
.”

The line went dead. Alex’s knees buckled. Strong hands caught and held her upright.

“Hugh,” she whispered.

Oh, God…Hugh.

“Alex? Alex!”

Michael’s voice came from a long way off, hollow and harsh.

Alex inhaled. Clamped her teeth together. Hard, until they ached. Darkness beckoned at the edges of her mind. She shook it off. She wouldn’t lose it again. Couldn’t. Not while Hugh needed—

Hugh.

Elizabeth.

“Alexandra Jarvis!”

This time Michael’s voice was accompanied by a shake of her shoulders. Alex’s head snapped back, jolting her into the immediate. She stared at the phone still gripped in fingers white with strain. Hugh and Elizabeth. She lifted her gaze to Michael’s, to the fierceness there, the sadness that underlined it. Her stomach rolled again.

“We have to go to them,” she whispered. “We have to…”

Her voice trailed off even before Michael’s head shook.

“It’s too late,” he said. “Seth—”

Hugh’s last words to her echoed in her mind, drowning out Michael’s voice.

“Alex…Seth…run.”

Seth.

Alex sucked in another breath. “Seth is coming. Here. For me.”

“Not just Seth,” Michael responded grimly. “Him and a small army. The angels are holding them off, but we need to leave. Now.”

“No.” She shook her head. Reached past the grief tangled around her heart for the calm she needed. Calm to speak the only words she could. The only words left. “No,” she whispered. “You go. Leave me here.”

Michael’s hands tightened on her shoulders. He shook his head. “You going to him won’t stop him. Not anymore.”

Alex flinched from what she knew to be the truth and, for a moment, quailed from her decision. But the calm she sought grew out of the grief she couldn’t escape, and together they became the only decision she could make. The only choice that remained.

“I know.” Alex put a hand on Michael’s arm as he made to step back. “But it might buy you some time.”

Michael went still, staring down at her fingers. Silent seconds slipped by, broken only by the sound of their breathing. Hers rapid and shallow in her ears, his ragged. She steeled herself, waiting for his agreement to seal her fate. Then the emerald eyes closed.

“I won’t leave you to him, Alex,” he said. “I can’t.”

Her hand trembled. She dropped it to her side and curled it into a fist.
You’re not helping
, she wanted to tell him.
Please don’t make this any harder,
she tried to say. Instead she stared at the powerful warrior before her, seeing, for the second time that night, the lines of defeat etched in his posture. A ripple of misgiving slid through her.

Michael’s shoulders straightened, and his gaze met hers, bleak with despair, hard with resolve.

“I’m going to have to do something unforgivable soon,” he continued quietly. “Something I won’t be able to come back from. It will likely destroy me.”

Alex’s breath hissed out, and he held up a hand to ward off her objection.

“Before I do,” he said, “I need to know I’m capable of more, that I’ve been able to do something good. I need to know you’re safe, Alex. I need to know I’ve saved you from Seth.”

Mouth flapping soundlessly, she stared at him. Tiny electric shocks of alarm traveled over her skin, raising the hairs along her arms and the back of her neck. What in hell—?

Before she could muddle through the confusion of her thoughts to form an actual question, wind gusted from the bedroom behind her, slamming into her back and throwing her against Michael. Glass shattered behind her, signaling the demise of Elizabeth’s windows and the arrival of—

“Bethiel!” Michael snarled above her head.

Alex blinked against his chest, acutely aware of three things: blood trickling from wounds inflicted on her arms by the battle-ready wings sweeping forward to protect her; the sheer relief coursing through her veins at hearing Bethiel’s name and not Seth’s; and the strong, steady beat of the heart beneath her cheek.

Alex pushed away from Michael and fought her way out of the feathered cocoon, turning to face the new arrival and the dawn filtering through the missing window. Down the street, a dog barked, a note of hysteria lacing its voice.

“You were supposed to stay with Emmanuelle,” Michael said.

“She sent me to get you. And the Naphil.” Bethiel jerked his chin at Alex. “Gabriel is with her. The war has come to Earth.”

MIKA’EL STRODE DOWN THE
length of the deck to where Emmanuelle and Gabriel waited. The two could not have been more different—or more alike. One petite, dark-haired, and clad in leather, the other tall, with brilliantly red hair, sheathed in armor. Both impossibly strong and hard-headed.

The next few thousand years would be interesting.

He met Gabriel’s sapphire gaze. “Give us a minute?”

“Seth—” She stopped, her eyes traveling between him and Emmanuelle. She nodded. “I’ll be inside.”

Mika’el waited until the door closed with a thump. Then, wordlessly, he stepped forward and gathered his soulmate into his arms. Emmanuelle resisted for a moment, then, with a long, quaking sigh, she buried her face against his chest. Her heat reached through the armor to wrap him close.

So long.

It had been so very long.

And now…

Now.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Closing his eyes, he buried his lips against her hair, inhaled her scent. He wondered if she knew she smelled like the roses of her mother’s garden. She’d always smelled that way. Like roses and sunshine.

Like Heaven.

Like a promise.

He drew back and looked down into the swirl of her iridescent eyes. “I knew you were right about them,” he said. “I knew they would destroy one another, but I thought if I tried hard enough, if I believed—”

Emmanuelle placed gentle fingers over his lips.

“And maybe if I’d chosen to stay instead of running away,” she said, “maybe then things would have been different as well. Or maybe none of this was ours to control, Mika’el. Maybe it needed to play out as it has, mistakes and all. Maybe…”

She took a breath and reached up to cup his face in both her hands.

“Maybe we accept the consequences of all the choices that have been made by everyone, and we try to save this world. And ours. Together.”

Mika’el looked over her head. She went still.

“Mika’el?”

Slowly, he shook his head. He brushed the hair away from her forehead. Looked into the iridescent, purple-silver eyes.

“We can’t,” he said. “Not together. Not like you mean.”

Emmanuelle stepped back. Her face had gone stiff. Wary. “I don’t understand.”

“Even if we win, even if we push back the Fallen and you fight your brother and triumph, the damage to this realm will be enormous,” he said quietly. “It will take every strength humanity possesses just to recover.”

He willed his soulmate to grasp his meaning the way she once would have without making him speak the words. But too much time had passed, or perhaps too much of everything else, and Emmanuelle’s eyes held no understanding, only questions.

The call of an eagle overhead pierced the morning, echoing over the trees. Mika’el closed his eyes and steeled himself.

“The Nephilim,” he said. “Humanity will never survive the Nephilim.”

Emmanuelle caught her breath. “You want me to—”

“No.” The word came out sharper than he intended. He laid his forehead against hers in apology. “No,” he said. “Not you.”

Utter silence came between them. Long seconds slipped by. Then Emmanuelle went rigid beneath his touch. She pulled back, away from him, taking her warmth with her. Her heartbeat.

“I can’t ask you do that,” she said, “and I—”

“You’re not asking.”

“And I won’t let you,” she finished, her eyes flashing. “You’d never survive the fall, Mika’el. They may be Nephilim, but they’re children, too. No matter what they’re destined to be, you won’t be able to separate yourself from the innocence they are
now
.”

His soul shuddered at the truth of her words, but he steadfastly held to the truth of his own. “There’s no other way, Emmanuelle. It must be done.”