Christine Delaney pushed the buzzer for a third time and stood back to peer up at the windows of the stately home. Not so much as the twitch of a drape. She checked her watch again. Three o'clock. Exactly on time. So where the hell was Arthur Stevens, overbearing parent extraordinaire? Christ, she detested the way the wealthy figured the world would fall in with their own personal schedules.

She scowled at the glossy black front door. She should never have agreed to drive all the way out to Oakville to take the moron's statement, just so the staff in his downtown office wouldn't know about Daddy's difficulties with his son. It would have been so much more sensible to have the Halton Regional Police Service do the interview for her. Oakville fell within their jurisdiction, after all. She gave a soft snort. Maybe she was the moron, not Stevens.

She gazed down the long, empty sweep of driveway. Well, she was here now, so she might as well check around back to see if anyone was there. With a place this size, Stevens had to have hired help kicking around somewhere. Maybe they'd know when he was expected home.

She headed down the stairs and across the lawn, cursing as her designer shoes sank into the soft turf. Great. Now she'd have to have them cleaned, all because the mayor's golfing buddy couldn't let go of his adult son. Asshole.

Speaking of the son, she still needed to get his side of the story, too. Daddy Stevens might not think it necessary, but Christine planned to err on the side of extreme thoroughness on this file. She had no intention of having it come back to bite her in the ass.

She pulled out her cell phone, punched the Recent Calls button, selected Mitch Stevens's name, and hit Auto Dial. If she could meet him on her way back to the office, her day might not feel like such a colossal waste. As she rounded the corner of the house, however, Mitch Stevens's voice mail kicked in yet again.

"Damn it, doesn't anyone answer the phone anymore?" Christine waited for the tone and left another message, terser than the first two. She hung up as her shoe landed in something too soft to be lawn. Groaning, she froze. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."

She stared at the dog crap under her foot for a moment and then raised a baleful face to whatever deities might occupy the sky. "If you're trying to tell me this case is a pile of shit, I already figured that out," she muttered. "You don't have to rub it in."

***

Roberts turned as Alex climbed out of her car. His forehead creased. "What happened to you?" he asked. "You see that ghost again?"

Alex recoiled from her staff inspector's ill-chosen words. Her hand, still quivering from its encounter with Trent, tightened its grip on the top edge of the driver's door. "I'm fine."

"You don't look it."

Alex shrugged off his concern and reached into the car for the sunglasses she'd left on the dash. A hot wind, scented by exhaust fumes from the city four stories below, gusted across the rooftop parking lot and lifted the hair from her neck.

Trent got out on the other side of the car. Alex eyed his stiff posture, turned her back on him, and slid her sunglasses into place on her nose.

Roberts raised an eyebrow. "Something I should know about?"

Still smarting from the dressing-down she'd received in her staff inspector's office, Alex shook her head. "Nothing more than we already discussed."

Roberts grunted and turned back to the scene. "So has the circus started yet?"

Alex knew he referred to the gathering of media she'd come through on the street below. She slammed the door and joined her supervisor beside the coroner's vehicle. The sun's harsh rays radiated back from the concrete at her feet, and a trickle of sweat slithered between her shoulder blades. "Four more than I counted last night, including CNN. They've set up for live broadcasting this time."

"Fucking hell."

Alex turned her attention to the tarp-covered victim. In his cryptic phone call, Roberts had said the body looked to have been there for about a day, which meant it had been out in the rain and the scene had likely been washed clean. Again. She looked askance at her staff inspector.

"We're sure it's the same guy?"

"We're sure."

That put the count at three in the last twenty-four hours. Their killer was escalating. Alex heard the scuff of a shoe against concrete and braced for Trent to join them.

They hadn't exchanged a word since she'd told him the subject of Roberts's phone call. Eighteen minutes to maneuver through traffic and not a word, not a glance. Only a cold anger emanating from him like the chill from an iceberg, defying the day's heat. If he'd been anyone else, she wouldn't have hesitated to confront him, to demand an end to the bizarre behavior and tell him to take a flying leap off the nearest building if he couldn't get his act together and behave like a decent human being.

But he wasn't anyone else.

He was the man who had grown wings before her eyes. Twice.

And the man who'd left her reeling from a simple touch. Also twice.

Alex pressed her lips together. "Has anyone run the plates yet?" she asked Roberts. When he shook his head in the negative, she took her notebook from her pocket and held it out to Trent. Her partner made no move to take it.

"What's that for?"

"License plates. All the cars on this level."

She saw a muscle twitch in Trent's jaw, but she refused to back down. She continued holding out the notebook, silently defying him not to take it, and at last he reached out a hand. Alex maintained her grip on it, careful not to let his fingers touch hers, until he met her eyes.

"Don't forget to record the province if it's not Ontario," she said.

Trent stalked over to the first parked car. Alex extracted her nails from her palms, then turned to her staff inspector. "Any word on that file yet?"

"What file?" Roberts asked absently, his attention on his own note-taking.

"Trent's service record."

"Oh. That. Not yet."

"But you're looking into it."

Temper flared in Roberts's expression. "Was I not clear enough about this the first time around, Detective? I'd rather they sent us someone with experience, too, especially right now. But unless this asshole eases up, the administrative stuff isn't going to happen and you're just going to have to deal with it."

She knew he was right. Knew that, in his shoes, she'd expect her to deal with it, too. But she didn't have to like it. She eased her neck from side to side against the tension building there.

"Fine," she said. "So what do you want me—us—to do?"

"I gave Troy and Williker the file. You can check with them to see if they need you to follow up on security cameras or anything, but otherwise just finish up the plates with Trent and have someone pull up the drivers' licenses for comparison to the vic's photo. Maybe we'll get lucky." He nodded toward the surrounding buildings and the hundreds of windows looking down on the parking lot, too many to canvass with resources already stretched thin. "We'll ask the media to put out a public appeal and see if anyone out there saw anything."

They both looked over as the head of Forensics passed by, clipboard in hand. Frustration was etched into every line of the man's face, and he shook his head in response to the unspoken question hanging in the air.

"Of course not," Roberts muttered. "How could I have possibly imagined they'd find something?"

"He has to slip up at some point," Alex said. "Maybe they'll get something on the autopsy."

After five scenes without a scrap of evidence, however, her words sounded as hollow to her as she knew they did to her supervisor. Without responding, Roberts turned and headed for his own vehicle, parked near the top of the ramp. When he was gone, Alex settled her hands on her hips, and stared at the covered body on the pavement beyond the barriers, fingertips poking out on either side. She didn't need to see the familiar pose to know it was there: arms outstretched, ankles crossed. Neither did she need to see the gashes; deep, livid, exposing parts of the victim never meant to be seen.

A familiar knot formed in her belly.

Of all the weapons in the world, the killer had to use a blade. Couldn't have just strangled his victims instead, or blown their faces off with a shotgun—just as messy, but so much less personal. And, for her, so much less complicated.

She looked down the parking lot at the other complication in her life. Her gaze traveled Trent's lean, powerful body, coming to rest on his profile. Her partner. A partner who inspired imagined wings and wild energy, and a certainty that he despised her on a level she'd never encountered.

Along with a visceral response she'd never had to any man in her life. Ever.

The knot in her belly snarled a little tighter. Fuck, she didn't need this right now. Any of this. Not the case, not the memories, not the hormones, not the imagination gone berserk. She didn't need that last one ever, but especially not now.

Another year and she would have made it. Been in the clear. She would have passed that magic milestone in her mind, the age her mother had been when the madness had won. She could have begun to relax, to believe that maybe she wouldn't be the same after all, that she wouldn't inherit the voices, the delusions.

The insanity.

Lips pressed tight, she turned on her heel and went in search of Trent.

***

From the corner of his eye, Aramael saw Alex's determined, hands-on-hips approach. He suspected that even if he hadn't seen her, he would have still felt the space between them closing; he had become that tuned in to her presence, that aware of her every move.

He clutched the pen until it dug into his knuckles.

He should be focused on the hunt. Should be directing all his energy toward tracking Caim, following the taint of evil that lingered behind as far as he could, drawing ever closer to the confrontation. The capture.

Instead, he was writing down license plate numbers. On the orders of a mortal. A Naphil whose very existence was a slap in Heaven's face. Aramael jabbed pen against paper hard enough to dig through to the underlying sheet. A Naphil he'd been sent to defend and who had instead put him on the defensive and awakened a response that shouldn't exist. Couldn't exist.

Alex's steps neared. The back of Aramael's neck knotted.

It had been bad enough the first time they had touched and she had seen him. Even then he'd felt a response to the recognition flaring in her eyes, a tug of something that had acted as a brake on his instinct to lash out. But the second time had been worse. So much worse. No urge for self-preservation had come to his defense. Not even a hint of one. Only a need to complete the connection between them. To reach out to her, to the descendant of a Grigori, and—

Alex cleared her throat.

Aramael dug deep and found the edge of purpose that drove him. Clung to it as he turned to his charge.

"Are you just about done?" she asked.

He flipped the notebook shut in answer and held it out to her. She took it from him and tucked it back into her jacket pocket. "So," she began.

Bloody Hell, he couldn't continue like this.

"We need to talk," he said.

Alex studied him with guarded reservation. "About what?"

"The killer."

"What about him? Or them?"

"Him."

Alex lifted an eyebrow. "We have to consider the possibility there's more than—"

"Him," Aramael repeated.

"You sound awfully sure of yourself, Detective. Care to share why?"

"Not here." He looked over her head and out across the city. He shouldn't do this—shouldn't even be considering it—but he had to do something, and Mittron and Verchiel had left him little choice. "Can we go somewhere else?"

A pause. Then a scowl. "Fine. I'll just see if they need us for anything here first."

"No."

Alex stopped in mid-swivel. Slowly, she turned back to face him again.

"I beg your pardon?"

"This is a waste of time."

"Excuse me?"

"You're not going to find him this way."

"All right," she said, "then how will we find him?"

"We need to talk," he repeated. "But not here."

He saw her waver, her sense of duty warring with curiosity. At last, she fished the car keys out of her pocket.

"We'll get a coffee," she said. "You're buying."

*******************

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