Alex studied the minutiae of the scene in great detail. The lay of the alley, the distance between the body and the walls on either side, the pebbles and puddles and sodden bits of garbage strewn in all directions. At last, when she'd examined everything Forensics had already tagged, she admitted to herself that she avoided the inevitable. The admission wasn't easy. In six years of homicide detail, she'd seen just about everything there was to see, and had witnessed far worse than what they dealt with now. But this one...this one unnerved her. As had the three before it.

Her mouth twisted as she glared balefully at the tarp-covered corpse from a few feet away. She knew why slashings bothered her, of course. She didn't need a shrink to tell her what she'd seen twenty-three years ago had left its mark. But she'd made a point of dealing with that. Made herself learn how to shut off the memories and disregard the initial horror that threatened to swamp her whenever she viewed such a victim. She'd had no choice—not if she wanted to stay in this career. And she did.

But this case, where they'd already had so many victims so close together, and there was no sign that the killer would let up...

Alex put the brakes on her thoughts and reached into her pocket for a pair of latex gloves. No. She could do this. It was just another victim. Nothing more. She stepped across a puddle to the tarp. Taking a deep breath, she pulled on the gloves. Latex snapped into place around each wrist. She exhaled. Braced herself. Crouched beside the tarp. Every time she had a case like this, the memories threatened. Most of the time, she could hold them back. She lifted a corner of the plastic sheeting.

And sometimes she couldn't.

Unbidden images slammed into her brain, vivid, horrifying, resisting all attempts to push them away. She squeezed her eyes closed to shut out the corpse at her feet. The images continued. A kitchen floor, slick with blood. A knife. A body. One like this, with its skin laid open and—Alex took a shuddering breath and gritted her teeth. With a monumental effort, she summoned her mental door—huge, thick, impenetrable—and made her mind force it shut again on the unwanted images. The memories. The past.

Seconds crept by. Slowly, the nausea receded. At last, her grasp on her stomach's contents still precarious at best, Alex opened her eyes again, careful to focus beyond the victim. She wiped her sleeve across her forehead, removing moisture that couldn't all be blamed on the alley's stifling air. Footsteps approached from behind and mud-spattered black shoes entered her peripheral vision. They stopped at the edge of a murky red puddle.

Alex looked up to find fellow detective Raymond Joly standing beside her. "Christ," she said softly, "Do you ever get used to seeing this, do you think?"

"Some say they do." Joly shrugged, his face hidden in shadow as he viewed the remains. "I think they're kidding themselves."

Alex tasted a faint metallic tang and realized she'd bitten her lip hard enough to draw blood. She wiped away the droplet. Then, aware of Joly's presence at her side, she made herself to do her job and lift the tarp clear of the lifeless, wrecked young woman on the pavement. A single, bloody gash ran from ear to ear across the throat, and other slices across the torso—in groups of four, equidistant from one another—had gone through clothing, skin, and muscle alike, exposing pale bone and now-bloodless organs.

Roberts had been right. This was no ordinary murder—if murder could ever be ordinary. And it was exactly like the three before it. Alex chewed at the inside of her cheek as she studied the young woman's waxen features and the way she had been posed on the pavement, arms outstretched perpendicular to the body, legs together, feet crossed at the ankles.

Simple death did not satisfy whoever had done this, whoever had done the same to the others. There was more here than mere disregard for human life, more than a desire to kill. This was...Alex paused in her thoughts, searching for the right word. Obscene. Depraved. Another word whispered through her mind, and she shuddered.

Evil. It was evil.

She dropped the tarp and pushed to her feet. Then, to cover her discomposure, she flipped open her notebook and put pen to paper.

Joly plucked the pen from her. "Go home."

"Excuse me?" Alex looked up in surprise.

Six inches shorter than she was, but with an enormous handlebar mustache that somehow made up for his lack of stature, Joly waved his cell phone under her nose. "Roberts called and said that if you were still here, I was to kick your ass for him." He stuck the cell phone back into its holster on his belt. "He also said to tell you this is a limited-time offer. The task force meets at eleven."

Alex glanced at her watch. That gave her six hours including travel time, first to home and then to the office. Given the fact she lived a good forty minutes from work—without traffic—the allotment wasn't nearly as generous as it first seemed. "Lucky me," she muttered.

"Take it," Joly advised, handing back her pen. "If this lunatic keeps up this pace, none of us will be going home again for a while."

Recognizing the truth of his words, and cringing at the thought of the catnaps she faced on the lumpy sofa in the office break room, Alex slid the pen into her pocket and closed the notebook cover. "Do we have enough people for the canvass?"

"We'll manage. We're not exactly tripping over witnesses around here at this hour." With the unspoken respect they all gave the dead, Joly stepped around the tarp-covered body and strolled away to join his partner, tossing a last disheartening comment over his shoulder. "I hate to be the one to break it to you, Jarvis, but you won't miss a thing. This is one I'll guarantee we won't solve today."

***

"No." Aramael didn't turn around to deliver his refusal. Didn't care that nothing had been asked yet. He'd sensed the approach long before a presence filled his doorway, and knew it was Verchiel who stood there. Just as he knew why she had come. They needed him for another hunt, but he wouldn't do it. Not so soon after the last.

"Warmest greetings to you, too," Verchiel said dryly. "May I come in?"

Aramael selected a slim volume from the shelf in front of him. Poetry? The flowery verses might be just what he needed to soothe his battered soul. Or they might drive him over the edge into outright rebellion. Kill or cure, so to speak—and perhaps not the best choice in his current frame of mind. He slid the book back into place. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Verchiel join him, her pale silver hair glowing against the rich purple of her gown. He continued to ignore her.

"This is rude even for you," she commented at last, mild reproof in her voice.

Aramael reminded himself that she was only the messenger, and that snarling at her would serve no purpose other than to alienate one of the few angels with whom he shared any kind of civility. Gritting his teeth, he looked down and sideways at her. "You're right. I am being rude. But I'm still not doing it."

"You don't even know why I'm here."

"There is only one reason a Dominion visits a Power, Verchiel. Why any of the others would visit us, either, if they bothered at all." Aramael ran his finger down the title on the spine of a massive volume, paused, and moved on. Too heavy—in the literary, as well as the literal, sense. "So, yes, I do know why you're here."

Verchiel fell silent for a moment, then admitted, "I'd never thought of it quite like that. I suppose it is rather obvious."

"Rather."

"You're right, of course."

"Of course. And I've told you, I'm not doing it. I've only just come back from the last hunt. Find someone else."

"There is no one else."

Aramael met the other angel's serene, pale blue gaze for a moment before he turned away. "Ezrael is in the garden. Send him."

"There's more to it this time. Mittron wants you to go."

Aramael caught back an unangelic curse and pulled a book from the shelf. "I'm tired, Verchiel. Do you understand? I'm tired, and I'm empty, and I've just finished four consecutive hunts. I'm not doing it. Send Ezrael."

"There's a woman—"

"A what?" He pushed the book back into place without glancing at its title and eyed her narrowly. "What does a mortal have to do with this?"

"She—well, she—" Verchiel floundered, avoiding his eyes. Her hands fluttered in a way that reminded him of a trapped bird. Any hint of serenity had vanished. "She's important to us," she finished.

"And?"

"We think the Fallen One might attack her."

He wasn't sure if he found it more unsettling or annoying that she seemed to have lost her capacity to give him a straight answer. "And?"

"We'd like you to watch over her."

That was straight enough. But incomprehensible nonetheless. He stared at her.

"You want me to what?"

"To look out for her. Make sure that the Fallen One doesn't reach her—"

"I'm not a Guardian."

"I know." Verchiel's hands fluttered faster. "We know. And we don't expect you to protect her in any other way, just to keep..." Her voice trailed off.

"I am not a Guardian," he repeated. He turned his back on her and glared at the row of books, but their titles had become a meaningless jumble of letters.

"We know that."

"Then you shouldn't be asking."

Verchiel muttered something that sounded like "I know that, too," but when Aramael glanced over his shoulder, she had closed her eyes and begun massaging her temple. He regarded her, toying with the idea of asking her to repeat herself. He decided to let it go because whatever she may or may not have said had no bearing on a conversation he preferred not to be having in the first place. A conversation he now considered finished. He turned his attention to the bookshelf once more.

She didn't leave.

Long seconds crawled by.

Aramael's impatience surged and he rounded on the Dominion. "I don't know why this woman is so important to you, and I won't even pretend to care. But I do know that I will not be sent on another hunt right now. Especially one where I have to act—without explanation, I might add—as a Guardian! Now, if you don't mind—"

"She's Nephilim."

Aramael almost choked on the rest of his outburst as it backed up in his throat. He stared at the Dominion. "She's what?"

"Nephilim. The bloodline is very faint at this point, of course, but—"

He held up a hand, cutting off her words, and narrowed his eyes. "You want me to act as Guardian to a Grigori descendant."

The Dominion's hands retreated back into the folds of her robe. She nodded.

Aramael turned and paced the room's perimeter. His mind raced. Nephilim. The very name tasted bitter on his tongue, as it would on the tongues of all those who remained loyal to the One. He spun around at the door and retraced his steps, then paused at the window, bracing a hand on either side of the frame. He staring through the glass without seeing.

Nephilim. Seed of the original Fallen Angels, the Grigori, who were cast from Heaven for interference with the mortals they were to watch over. Who remained a reminder of all that had been lost in the ensuing exodus from Heaven, and of the enduring, irreconcilable split that remained between angelkind.

And now Mittron wanted one of those reminders protected from one of the Fallen? An ugly suspicion crawled up Aramael's spine. His belly clenched. His fists followed suit. He knew of only one former angel who might target a Naphil and raise the concern of Heaven's administrator, the highest of the Seraphim.

"It's him, isn't it?" he asked.

He willed Verchiel to confirm his guess without speaking the name. If she didn't say it, if he wasn't named, maybe Aramael might still escape. Deny the hunt. Retain his soul.

Verchiel cleared her throat. "Yes," she said.

Aramael closed his eyes and braced himself, knowing what would come next.

"It's Caim."

A dark fury exploded in him before the sound of her voice had died. A fury as timeless as the One herself. A pulsing, nearly living thing that wanted to consume him, that tried to become him. And the harder he fought it, the more he struggled, the more he lost to it.

The rage was as familiar to him as it was hated. It was what set him apart—set all of the Sixth Choir apart—from the others. What made them Powers. Hunters. Now it had awakened in him and would drive him, relentlessly, until he found the prey that had been named to him. And not just any prey.

Caim.

No other name could have triggered a wrath of quite this depth; no other Fallen Angel could have aroused this passion. He knew that, and in a blinding flash of clarity, he understood Verchiel and Mittron had known it, too. More, they had counted on it.

"Then you'll do it," Verchiel said, her voice seeming to come from a very long way off, hollow and flat. "You'll accept the hunt and protect the woman."

Aramael wanted to deny it. He wanted with all his being to tell Verchiel that she and the Highest Seraph had misjudged him, that he didn't care in the least about the hunt, and that he cared even less about the woman.

But he wanted Caim more.

More than anything else in his universe.

His voice vibrated with the anger that now owned him. "You knew I would."

"Yes."

"You promised I would never hunt him again."

The Dominion's robe rustled softly. "I know."

He wanted to shout at her. To rage and yell, and fling himself around the room. To demand that she release him from the hunt; that she hold to the promise she had made four thousand years before. But it was out of her hands now. She had already inflicted the damage: she had designated his prey, and he had no choice but to complete what had begun, even as his every particle rebelled at the knowledge.

Caim had escaped. After all the pain, all the torment he had caused, he walked the mortal realm as if none of it had ever happened. As if it had not torn Aramael nearly in half to capture him in the first place and would not destroy him now to do so again.

Aramael clenched his jaw until it ached and the muscles of his neck and shoulders throbbed in sympathy. When he finally forced his teeth apart, he leveled a look of pure malevolence over his shoulder, uncaring of Verchiel's authority. "Then know this, too, Dominion," he snarled. "Know that I hate you for what you've done. Almost as much as I hate him."

Almost as much as I hate my own brother.