Alex found Trent standing to the left of the cordoned-off scene, his attention on a group of people clustered behind a concrete barrier at the roadside above them. No, not just his attention. That weirdly intense focus he had.

He turned his head as she walked toward him and, for a moment, his gaze seemed to skewer her in place, making her heart flutter in her chest like a captured butterfly. Alex's steps faltered. Then, eyes hardening, Trent turned back to the onlookers.

Damn, but she hated how he could do that to her.

Alex took a moment to remember how to breathe, watching her partner study the crowd. Personality conflict, my ass. Whatever there was between her and Trent, it was no mere conflict. Not that it mattered, because regardless of the issue—and whether it was real or imagined—she was still going to have to suck it up and deal with it. And somehow find a way to keep it separate from the chaos that had become her psyche.

She adjusted her gun where it pressed into her hipbone, gathered her resolve, and picked her way across the uneven ground to Trent's side. She looked up at the vultures watching them, as always a little sickened by the way her fellow humans were drawn by another's tragedy. They should do her job for a while and see how fascinating they found death then.

"See anything?" she asked.

Trent said nothing for a second, then turned from his study. "No."

She hadn't thought he would. Their killer, if he had been in the crowd, would have caused a considerable stir, covered in blood as he had to be. Alex watched the cluster of people for another moment. Then, driven by a perversity new to her, she asked casually, "Feel anything?"

She sensed Trent's stiffening beside her.

"Are you making fun of me?" he asked.

The very quietness of his question sent a quiver down her spine. She swallowed.

"Of course not. I was curious, that's all."

"Then yes, I feel him."

"Ah." Alex turned her attention to a nearby forensics member planting a numbered flag beside a shoe print.

Like I can feel you.

She jerked her head around to stare at Trent, startled at his boldness. "Pardon me?"

Trent's eyebrows twitched together. "I didn't say anything."

"You said—I thought I heard you—" She stammered to a halt. She'd thought she'd heard his voice back at her sister's house, too, just before he'd jumped out from behind that tree. Shit. That was twice. Winged hallucinations were bad enough—but voices?

A sickness stirred in her belly.

"Detective?" Trent's voice held an edge that might have been concern, but his face remained distant and watchful.

"Nothing," she said. "Roberts wants us to help canvass the neighborhood. I'll check in with Bastion and then we can get started." She ducked under the yellow tape and strode toward a closely shorn, rumpled detective standing over a body. No voices, she told herself. You're not her. No way will you allow voices. Now, concentrate on the case and do your goddamned job.

She arrived at Bastion's side. "Roberts said you're running the canvass. Where do you want me?"

Bastion flashed her a surprised look, then went back to his notes. "Greetings to you, too," he said dryly.

He was right, that had been pretty rude. Christ, she was tired of feeling so on edge that she couldn't function normally anymore. Alex grimaced. "Sorry. Long day."

The older detective shook his head. "Don't worry about it. We're all in the same boat. I was just giving you a hard time." He tucked his notebook into his inside jacket pocket and swiped his sleeve across his forehead. "This shitty weather isn't helping. Do you know that it was forty-three degrees Celsius with the humidity this afternoon? They're calling for even higher tomorrow."

With surprise, Alex noted the sweat trickling down her neck beneath her hair. She'd been too caught up fretting over Trent to pay attention before. "Gotta love Toronto summers," she agreed.

Bastion tugged a battered map from an outer pocket. "So. You and your partner want in on the canvass, huh?" He used his teeth to uncap a red felt pen. "I go' Penn an' Smiff workin' dish"—he slurred around the marker cap, stabbing at a circled area and leaving a red dot in its center—" an' Ab'ams and Joly ovah he'ah." Another red dot. "An' Timmins an' I wi' take dish." He dotted a third circle.

Lifting his left leg, Bastion braced the map against his knee and swiped a fourth circle, nearly toppling over in the process. He stood straight again, removed the cap from his mouth, and held the map out to Alex, his index finger hooked over it to point at another spot. "That leaves you and your partner with this neighborhood over here."

Alex peered at the wobbly circle, noting the streets that formed the generous boundaries. "Great," she said. "I'll see you back in the office in what, a week or so?"

"Now, now, Jarvis," Bastion chided. "If you're letting this case get to you already, it's going to be a long haul."

Alex forced a smile. He had no idea. "I know. I'm not nearly as bitchy as I sound, honest."

"Uh-huh." Bastion stuffed the crumpled map and the marker back into his pocket and ambled away.

Alex rolled her shoulders, trying to ease the tightness across her back. She knew without looking that Trent hadn't moved from where she'd left him. Nor had he once taken those intense gray eyes off her. She stretched until her shoulder blades almost met, feeling the crack and crinkle of things sliding back into—or perhaps out of—place.

She didn't want to rejoin him. Didn't want to face that accusatory glare with its strange vulnerability, didn't want to feel the responding flutter in her chest—or anywhere else on her person—didn't want to find herself searching his back and shoulders for evidence that she wasn't going mad. Or that she was.

She glanced absently down at the body by her feet: a man in his forties, just beginning to gray, his eyes staring up at nothing, his throat slashed as the others had been, his torso ripped apart.

A man in his forties.

Warning prickled up the nape of Alex's neck. In less than a heartbeat, she realized her mistake. She'd forgotten to brace herself, to take her usual precautions, to block out what she couldn't face again, what she should never have faced in the first place. Her throat closed. Memories shifted in the long-ignored recesses of her mind, then began rising to the surface. Shit.

She tried her damnedest to stop what she knew was coming, but her attempts shredded like tissue-paper boats adrift in a hurricane. Ruthless images stabbed at her, each leaving a new hole in her decades-old defenses. Until, at last, it all flooded back.

"Bye, Jess!" she yelled, waving from the back door as Jessica ran down the alley behind the house. She watched until her friend caught up with a group of girls, her heart twisting inside her. She'd wanted so much to invite Jess in today, wanted to bring her up to her bedroom to do homework together and share her secret stash of bubble gum...

The girls looked back at her as one and dissolved into giggles. Alex felt her face burn. She pasted on a smile and made herself wave at them all, then turned and pushed the door open into the enclosed back porch. She'd wanted to ask her friend to stay, but she hadn't dared. She never dared. She knew what the giggles were for, knew what the others said about her—the kid with the crazy mother.

But Jess was different. Jess sat with her sometimes at lunch, and chose her for partner in class, and sometimes walked her home like she had today. Of them all, Jess was the only one Alex might consider bringing into the house. But not today. Not the way Mama had behaved this morning.

She'd known the minute Mama came into her room that it was a bad day. Mama had made her recite four psalms before allowing her to dress, and she'd been so rough with Alex's hair, pulling it into braids tight enough to cause tears, and all the while, she'd been talking to them.

Her angels, she called them. She even had names for them. Samuel, Rachel, Ezekiel. There were others sometimes, but mostly just those three. Like this morning.

Alex slipped her sandals from her feet and tucked them beneath the bench. She'd been going to stay home—one of them always did on bad days, just in case Mama tried to do something silly, Daddy said, though he never told her what that might be. But this morning had been worse than usual, bad even for Mama, and Daddy had looked out from behind his paper and told Alex to hurry or she'd be late for school.

Even then she had hesitated, knowing it meant Daddy would have to take the day off work. Knowing they couldn't afford for him to do so. But Daddy had smiled and winked, and called her pumpkin, and slipped her some lunch money. With a kiss and a wave, she'd gone, although not without a stab of guilt.

A stab that returned now as she hung her school bag on the hook beside the back door. She hoped the day hadn't been too awful. Maybe she'd play chess with Daddy before dinner. He liked chess, especially when she managed to beat him, which she found kind of weird. Nice, but weird.

Alex opened the door between the porch and the kitchen, pausing by the basket of peaches ripening on the bench. "I'm home!" she called. No answer came and her hand hesitated, hovering over the peaches. "Daddy? Mama? I'm home."

The house waited for her, too still. A shiver went down Alex's spine. She withdrew her hand, leaving the peaches untouched, and stepped into the kitchen—

— and stumbled over her father's body and skidded in a puddle of cold, sticky blood and fell to her knees and stared into his vacant eyes and then, after almost forever, raised her gaze to the horror that had once been their kitchen.

Blood was everywhere. Soaking her father's shirtfront, pooled beneath him, streaked across the floor. A handprint stood in crimson contrast to the white-painted door frame and cheerful yellow wall where a round, indifferent clock marked the time at 3:45 p.m. Streaks of red led like a trail of bread crumbs toward the living room.

Alex climbed slowly to her feet and followed the trail. Past her father, past a chair overturned beside a smashed coffee cup, past the knife block and its scattered contents on the floor by the stove, down the hallway. She stared at the shoe-clad feet sticking out from the living room. At the legs, covered in blood, with a bright floral dress tangled about them. At the gaping slashes in the pale, pale wrists of arms reaching up for her, seeking an embrace, gore-streaked knife still in hand.

Her gaze moved up her mother's prone form to the fading, beatific smile, the lips forming words that came from a long, long way away.

"It's all right now, baby, it's all over. Mama fixed everything. You're safe now. Come pray with me, Alexandra, come pray with your mama."

A strong arm encircled Alex's shoulders, turned her away from the body, steered her insistently along a path she could not see, did not care about. Hands urged her back against a rough surface and guided her head toward her knees as the first wave of nausea hit. Held her there when she struggled to escape.

"Take your time," Trent said, his rumbling voice coming from a far-off place.

Alex resisted for a brief second, then gave in to the all-consuming roil in her gut. Great, wrenching spasms wracked her—finally, blessedly, derailing the memories. Allowing her to stop thinking, stop reliving.

Letting her avoid, for a little longer, the black hole yawning at her feet.

She remained doubled over long after the nausea receded, leaning against the concrete pillar, her hands resting on her knees. Gingerly she tested her spent body and her battered mind, surprised to find she still existed and might even still be coherent, if not quite sane.

A handkerchief appeared before her and she stared at it. Trust Trent to carry an actual handkerchief. With a shaking hand, she accepted the cloth, wiped her mouth, folded the fabric over, and dabbed at the water streaming from her eyes. Then she straightened, stepped away from the stench of vomit, and tucked the soiled wad into her jacket pocket. She lifted her gaze to Trent's, wanting to flinch from the too-astute watchfulness she met there, from the curiosity mingled with compassion, but refusing to do so.

She could survive this, she told herself. If she was careful to keep things where they belonged. Each issue in its own place, separate from the others.

Very, very careful.

"Thank you," she said, inserting into the two little words every note of warning she could manage. Don't ask questions. Mind your own business. Don't you dare feel sorry for me.

***

Aramael heard the defiance in Alex's voice as clearly as he did the embarrassment. He studied her for a long minute without responding, debating the wisdom of pursuing the matter. Every rigid line of her body screamed defensiveness, making him inclined to spare her further stress, but he read lingering torment there, too. In the protective droop of her shoulders; in the shadows underscoring her hollow eyes; in the tremor she could not conceal; in the way she tilted her head and looked away from him.

He scowled. This wasn't his forte. It wasn't his job. Hell, it wasn't even his business. He couldn't help wondering, however, if his presence here—and Alex's awareness of him—had somehow contributed to the meltdown he'd just witnessed. The possibility left him feeling a whole new level of responsibility for this fragile mortal woman.

Hell.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked down on her bowed head. "Want to tell me what's going on?" he asked quietly.

Alex looked up at him for an instant, and then away. "I'm sure you've seen this happen before," she said. She forced a hollow laugh. "I'm not the first cop to do it, and I doubt I'll be the last."

"No. This was about more than a body."

Alex was silent for so long he thought she wouldn't answer; swallowed so often he found himself watching the movement of her slender throat in fascination. Then her shoulders lifted in a quick shrug. The shrug of a child trying to pretend that life had no impact on her; of an adult denying the child had ever existed.

Aramael waited. If she chose not to answer, he'd leave it alone, he told himself. He had his hands more than full already. He didn't need to take on the role of psychologist as well, and chances were he'd just foul things up further for her if he tried. His kind weren't well known for their temperate approach.

To anything.

"When I was a kid, I saw one similar to that," Alex said at last. She jerked her head toward the scene but fixed her attention on the ground before her. "I usually manage to block it out, but this one got to me. That's all."

She hunched her shoulders again and Aramael felt another tug of compassion for her. Leave it alone, he reminded himself. Leave her alone. Powers didn't deal with humanity on this level. Others did that. Others who didn't hunt. Who didn't carry out the One's dirty work so the mortal world could survive.

Others who were forever out of Alex's reach because of her Nephilim bloodline. Aramael sighed. Hell, he couldn't leave her like this. He had to at least try. "Detective—"

Alex's fair brows scrunched together. "That's all, Trent."

Part of Aramael didn't want to let the matter drop because he suspected the importance of breaking through the barriers he sensed rising around her. A larger part of him, governed by his very nature, finally—belatedly—asserted itself. He stared into the dark beyond the floodlights. He would let it go, as Alex asked. As his existence demanded.

He'd just prefer he didn't have to cut away a vital element of his soul to do so.