Sins of the Lost Read Free Page B

“It’s bad, Alex.”
    “I’m—” The word
fine
died on her lips. Had those haggard lines always been around his eyes? That gray tinge under his skin? She stared at him, then nodded once in acknowledgment of the warning.
    Roberts released his grip.
    Alex walked toward the ambulance, passing the mobile command post, a forensic technician packing up equipment, two others winding up extension cords and shutting down generators. She tried to steel herself for what she knew was coming, but what had once been an automatic defense felt rusty from disuse. Whatever awaited her, it was going to be rough.
    With Roberts at her side, she reached the ambulance and waited for the coroner to unzip the body bag strapped to a gurney.
    Heavy-duty black plastic parted to expose a young woman’s face, its unnatural pallor speaking to massive blood loss. Silently, grimly, the coroner pulled open the rest of the bag. Alex’s gaze traveled down the body. Settled on the raw, gaping hole where the abdomen should have been. Where a baby would have been.
    If it hadn’t been ripped out of its mother.
    Not cut.
    Ripped.
    Brutally, viciously torn.
    Alex’s stomach heaved.

Chapter 4
    “You cannot avoid me forever, Mika’el.”
    The careful neutrality of Verchiel’s voice made the words all the more accusatory. Mika’el paused in the task of honing the sword laid across his lap. He stared down at the gleaming metal, its edge now beyond lethal. It hadn’t needed sharpening, but the rhythmic act of sliding stone over metal had been calming. Mindless. Requiring no conscious thought as long as he continued.
    Given a choice, he would have continued for eternity.
    He laid the broadsword beside him on the garden bench. Then he leaned back and stretched his arms wide along the backrest. “I’m not avoiding you, Highest.”
    “Fine. Then you can’t avoid
yourself
forever.”
    He grimaced at the diminutive, crimson-robed female in the arched entry of the rose garden where he’d taken refuge. “You’re very astute.”
    Verchiel, Highest Seraph and executive administrator of Heaven, shrugged. “I’ve had my share of practice at reading angels,” she said. A reference, no doubt, to her past position as handler of the volatile Powers—particularly Aramael. “My point—”
    Mika’el waved her silent. “Your point is that you want to know what the One told me yesterday.”
    “She holds you responsible, doesn’t she? But she knew—”
    “She knew I would task Aramael with Seth’s assassination,” Mika’el cut in. “All that happened after—the Nephilim army, permitting Lucifer to manipulate me, my plan to strike the first blow and plunge Heaven into war again—all of that I kept from her.”
    “
We
kept it from her because if we’d told her—”
    “Then she would have stopped Lucifer the only way she could, and we would have lost her.”
    “Surely she cannot blame you for trying to protect her.”
    He played idly with the whetstone in his hand, moving it between his fingers. “She can if she prefers not to be protected.”
    Silence met his words, broken by the faintest whisper of a breeze passing through the stone-walled garden, the lazy drone of a bumblebee, the call of a distant bird, Verchiel’s swallow.
    “She
wants
to end herself?” the Highest asked at last. “You must be mistaken.”
    “Not end,” he said. “Alter. She wants to go back to what she was before she divided herself into so many pieces—or at least closer to that state. She’s worn out, Verchiel. Weary of the struggle between her and Lucifer, of trying to maintain balance in the universe, of being the All to so many souls. She’s given so much of herself that there’s nothing left. She tried to tell me before, but I didn’t want to listen. And now my actions might have made it impossible.”
    Leaving his sword on the bench, he stood and paced the gravel path. “If we—if
I
hadn’t interfered,” his voice was harsh in his own ears, “she could