Aramael said nothing for the first few minutes of the drive, not sure he could be civil to the backseat passenger. Instead, he contented himself with glaring daggers over his shoulder at Seth, mutely promising their confrontation was far from over.

He told himself it was Seth's negligence alone that disturbed him, but he lied. His anger stemmed not just from the averted threat to Alex, but from what he had witnessed when he joined her and Seth on the sidewalk.

Her hand on the Appointed's arm.

Seth's reaction to her.

Hers to him.

Sourness twisted in his belly. He met Seth's hooded gaze; knew the Appointed read his thoughts. Distrust crackled between them. Aramael turned away again and, with an effort, made himself focus on the "incident" he had missed.

He shuddered.

Caim. Here. With Alex.

His brother had found her. Could have killed her then and there. Could have ended everything with a single swipe of his hand. Aramael felt Alex's sideways look and knew she sensed his rising tension. The way she sensed everything about him. Soulmates.

Aramael stared out the window. Caim could have ended everything, but he hadn't.

Why not?

Because of Alex's sister and niece? But why would he need another Nephilim target when he already had Alex? What game was he playing? Aramael's thoughts stilled. That was it. Caim played a game. With him.

How could he not have seen it? Caim had all but spelled it out for him in that phone call to Alex at the office, asking if Aramael felt the same way about her as she did him. Saying he would be watching them, would judge for himself. Because he knew. He knew Aramael had feelings for Alex.

But still—why not just kill her outright? Why wait? Aramael snarled under his breath. He was missing something, but what? He turned to Alex. "Can we go any faster?"

Alex reached for a switch under the dash and a siren wailed to life.

Jen flung open the front door before Alex rang the bell.

"Thank God!" she exclaimed, grabbing Alex's arm and hauling her into the brightly lit entrance. "I thought you'd never get here. She's in the living room. She still hasn't said anything and she hasn't moved. I don't know what's wrong—" Jen's babble died away as she looked past Alex's shoulder. "I thought you were coming alone."

Alex glanced at the two men she hadn't been able to convince to remain in the car. A taxi rolled by on the street behind them and turned the corner. "Colleagues," she said, for lack of a better description, and then added to Trent, "You should come in. It's not safe to stand in the open like this."

The two men joined her in the front entry and Alex peered past Jen into the lamp-lit living room. "I don't see her."

Jen's face drew tight and she pointed into a corner behind the sofa, just outside the circle of light. Alex made out a drawn-up pair of knees and a curtain of dark hair.

Nina. Small and vulnerable and very, very fragile.

Alex's heart skipped a beat. She pitched her voice low. "Has she said anything?"

Jen shook her head. Bit her lip. "Not a word."

"All right." Alex shrugged out of her blazer and laid it across the back of a chair. "Why don't you make some tea while I talk to her?"

"She might need me—"

"She might need to talk to me first."

The sister in Alex ached as she watched Jen struggle with hurt and fear, but she knew from experience that kids her niece's age tended to be more forthcoming without their parents hovering over them. She wondered if that had been the case when Delaney had spoken to Mitchell Stevens; if Delaney had ever had the chance to do so. Then she pushed away questions that no longer mattered and nudged her sister toward the hallway. "I'll come get you when I'm done."

With Trent and Benjamin hovering in the living room doorway, Alex crossed the room and settled onto the floor beside her niece, near but not touching. "Nina?" she said softly. "It's Auntie Alex."

Nina had actually dropped the "Auntie" title a few months before, declaring herself too old to use it. Alex hadn't argued, happy at the time to see an emerging, confident young woman in her niece. But no trace remained of that young woman in the crumpled figure beside her now. The crumpled, blood-stained figure. She took in the details of her niece's appearance and felt her heart jump into her throat. Blood had soaked both of the girl's running shoes and all of what Alex could see of her jeans, and had dried to a crust in strands of Nina's hair. What the hell?

She bit her lip, trying to decide who Nina most needed her to be right now, cop or aunt, and then looked up as a darker shadow fell over her.

Trent scowled at her. "You didn't tell me she'd seen him."

"What?"

"Your niece. You didn't tell me she'd seen Caim."

Caim? Alex frowned. "I don't know what you're talking about. Jen called me because she arrived home like this and wouldn't say what—" The rest of her words piled up in her throat, mixed with bile, choked off all possibility of sound. She stared again at her niece. Jesus, no.

She took in Nina's runners a second time and then examined the rest of her niece, from the girl's legs to the huddled shoulders, the matted hair. That was a lot of blood. An awful, frightening amount of blood. The kind of blood that came from multiple bodies. Multiple victims. Then she remembered the one with the tattooed arm sleeves and piercings that had seemed vaguely familiar...and how she had seen the girl in Nina's company once when she'd picked up her niece from school. Every cell in Alex's body went still with horror. Denial.

No.

Of its own volition, her hand reached for Nina, slid beneath her chin, forced the girl's head up and around to face her. She looked into the familiar, bright blue eyes and saw—

Nothing.

The same nothing she'd seen when she had looked into Martin James's eyes yesterday. Sweet Jesus, no. The parting of Alex's mind from her body, begun outside the mission, became a little more pronounced. A little more defined.

Trent's hand closed over her arm, tugged her hand away from her niece. Nina's head lolled forward again. Trent raised Alex to her feet, his face set in grim lines.

"It's time to talk."

"Nina—"

"Seth will stay with her." Trent shot a glare at the other man that dared him to object.

Seth hesitated for a fraction of a second, then looked at Alex. He nodded. "Go," he said quietly. "You've earned your answers."

#

Alex watched Trent prowl the perimeter of her sister's dining room. Once again, he had the look of a predator about him—one that was caged and desperate to find a way out. One she would have preferred not to provoke, if she'd had the choice. But with Jen and Nina now at risk, no choice remained. If she wanted any chance to keep her sister and niece safe, she had to know what was going on. All of it.

Even if it involves wings.

She retreated into a corner of the dining room, crossed her arms, hunched her shoulders, and tried to ignored the doorway that yawned invitingly to her left. Trent stopped pacing. Alex swallowed.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked.

She studied the oak floor at her feet. "I'm sure."

"There can be no turning back. No way to undo—"

He stopped midsentence as she raised her gaze to his. Gray eyes stared into hers, so many thoughts and emotions churning in them that she couldn't begin to sort them out. Somehow she found it comforting to know he suffered as much angst about this as she did.

She nodded. "I'm sure."

Trent watched her in silence for a second and then nodded. "Very well. My name is Aramael." He lifted his head. "And I'm an angel."

As much as Alex had expected the words, they still rocked her world to its very foundation.

She had known for a while now that something out of the ordinary was happening; that she could no longer deny her partner was more than he seemed and the killer more than they thought. This afternoon, when the killer called, she had turned her back on any last lingering doubts about her sanity. But still—

An angel?

She bit down on her lip. Couldn't he have been something else? Anything else? An alien, maybe? Hell, she would have preferred he declare himself to be Supreme Tooth Fairy. But her very own, couldn't-get-much-more-fucking-crazy-than-this angel? A tremor began in her chest. Maybe she'd been wrong. Maybe she had followed in her mother's footsteps after all, and this was just part of it. Part of the insanity. Maybe—

"You're not her, Alex."

Her head snapped up and she stared at Trent—Aramael—whoever the hell he was. "How do you know about—?"

"It goes with the territory."

Of course it did. Silly her. She flexed her fingers, stiff from the tension that seemed to own her, and studied him. He was dressed in the same suit he'd worn when she first met him—how had she not noticed that he never changed?—and he looked so...normal. So not like she imagined an angel might look. No heavenly glow, no shining white robes. He didn't even have wings at the moment, for God's sake.

Her other thoughts piled up behind the last one like a train wreck. If he was an angel, then God—? Heaven—? She reached for the back of a chair to support herself. So many questions. She didn't know what to ask first. Or what to avoid.

"Sit," her former partner said. "I'll start at the beginning."

Alex did as he suggested, mostly because she no longer trusted her own legs to support her, and in less time than she would have believed possible, what little remained of her reality was turned on its head. She learned of the One's creation of a human race, nurtured throughout its evolution, and of Lucifer's intense envy of the One's attachment to those humans. Of the splitting of Heaven and the formation of Hell. Of the downfall of those angels who chose to follow Lucifer. The resulting noninterference pact. The appointment of a handful of those who remained loyal to the One as Powers when not all of the Fallen would abide by the agreement.

Learned, absorbed, and then sat in silence for a long, long time after he finished.

Footsteps approached on the wooden floor and stopped in front of her. "Well?"

She stared at his feet, humanly clad in leather dress shoes, and then lifted her gaze and flinched from fiery golden wings. "What kind of angel are you?"

"Not the nice kind. I'm one of the Powers. A hunter of the Fallen Ones."

"So the serial killer is—?"

"One of those who followed Lucifer. Yes."

A buzzing started in her ears. One of Lucifer's followers. A Fallen Angel. Stalking her. Stalking Jen and Nina. Alex fought down the urge to hyperventilate and drew on the shreds of her training. Being a cop might not help if she came up against Caim, but it could at least keep her thinking. Maybe keep her and Jen and Nina away from him long enough for Aramael to do his job.

So think, damn it.

She frowned. "Wait a minute. If you're an angel, can't you just do some kind of miracle thing and find him?"

"I wish it worked like that, but I can only sense him in his demonic form, the one he becomes when he attacks a mortal."

"Demonic—" The buzz in Alex's head became louder. Shit. "What about the rest of the time? Can he look like whoever he wants?"

Trent—no, Aramael, he'd called himself. Would she ever get used to that? Aramael flexed his hands at his sides. "He can make you think he looks like someone else, but his true form is the one you saw tonight," he said. "Caim is my brother, Alex. My twin."

The dining room door swung inward and Alex jumped in her seat, then stared at her sister. Jen's gaze darted from her to Aramael and back. "Alex? Nina—"

"She's with my colleague," Aramael said brusquely.

Discontent fluttered across Jen's brow.

"She's fine, Jen." Alex forced the reassurance through stiff lips. "We're just discussing the situation."

Discussing the total upheaval of everything I held to be true in life.

"Did Nina say something? Have you called someone?" Again Jen's eyes did the darting thing. "You haven't, have you? Why not? What's going on, Alex? Has Nina—oh, God—" Her grip went rigid around the edge of the door. "Did she hurt someone?"

"No!" Rousing herself from her own shock-induced stasis, Alex went to her sister's side, pried her hand loose, and led her to the chair she'd just vacated. "Nina could never hurt someone, Jen. You know that."

Brown eyes, wide with shock, met hers. Jen nodded. "Of course. I do know that. It's just—" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "There's so much blood. Where did it all come from?"

Alex crouched down on one knee. "We think she may have witnessed something, sweetie. Something pretty awful. That's why she's not talking."

Her sister's head bobbed. "Shock will do that," she agreed. "We've covered that in class. But she'll get better."

Alex bit her lip, seeing more than a little shock in Jen's own face at the moment. Not wanting to add to it. Remembering Martin James.

Jen's fingers dug like claws into her arm. "She will get better, won't she, Alex? We can get her help—"

Alex looked to Aramael for an answer, but found only a reflection of her own misgivings. Her heart lurched. He looked haggard, she thought. She hadn't known angels could look haggard. Not that she'd known angels at all until now. And she still didn't—at least, not as well as she needed to if she was going to protect her family.

Rising from beside her sister, she leaned back against the windowsill, her hands braced on either side of her, and returned to where she and Aramael had left off. "He's really your brother? Couldn't they have sent someone else after him? You're not the only one who does this, are you?"

"No. There are others. Seventeen in all."

"Then why send you—wait—seventeen? That's it? How many angels did you say fell?"

"Alex, what the hell—?" Jen broke off.

Aramael answered as if Jen hadn't spoken. "A third of the host. A hundred thousand, give or take."

Alex thought of the destruction wrought by Caim in the last few days and swallowed. "You're telling me only seventeen of you stand between humanity and a hundred thousand demons?"

A hundred thousand Caims?

"All of Heaven stands between you. But with the agreement between Lucifer and the One, only seventeen of us have been necessary to...keep the peace, I suppose you could say."

Jen almost fell off her chair. "Lucifer?"

Alex ignored her sister. "You're kidding me. You're only here for the ones who break some pact? What about the others? They just get to walk around freely, indistinguishable from the rest of us?" She shuddered at the thought. Her cop habit of seeing nearly everyone she met as a potential criminal had been bad enough; she didn't know what she'd do with the possibility that any one of them could also be a Fallen Angel. "Doing what, exactly?"

"Whatever they can within the limits. They attempt to influence the choices mortals make, and Guardians try to counter that influence."

"That's it. That's just how it is. Angels and demons playing tug-of-war with human beings. I thought God—the One—was supposed to be all-powerful."

Aramael leaned his weight against the table and shook his head. "That's not the point."

"Then what is the fucking point?" she demanded. "People are dying because of these monsters and—"

"They're not all like Caim."

"For chrissake, you just told me they're trying to wipe out humanity!"

"Only with your permission."

Alex shook her head to clear it. "What?"

"The One gave mortals free will, Alex. Each of you has the ability to choose, to determine your own path. Both good and evil have always existed in your lives, only you can decide which to follow."

"That is such a complete cop-out it's not even funny. Can your One destroy these demons or not?"

"Demons?" squeaked Jen.

Alex sent her sister a quick look. Angels, demons—how the hell was she going to explain any of this? Especially given their mother's delusions?

Irritation crept into Aramael's voice. "I'm not here to debate theology with you. All I can tell you is that the One is ultimate good and does not destroy."

"Right. And droughts, volcanoes, wars, earthquakes—what would you call those if not wholesale destruction?"

"Mortals choose where and how to live. The One does not impose that on you."

"No, she just lets demons walk among us and sends you to kill the ones who step too far out of line."

"To hunt the ones who step out of line, yes."

Jennifer rose from her chair and, giving Aramael a wide berth, edged to Alex's side. Her fingers dug into Alex's forearm. "Alex, for God's sake, what is going on?" she hissed. "What the hell are you talking about? Angels? Demons? This is insane!"

"Not now, Jen. Please." Alex shrugged off her sister's grip. Aramael's last correction hadn't sounded like semantics. "Hunt. Not kill."

"I am an instrument of the One. If I were to destroy in her name it would alter the balance of the universe in ways I don't think any of us would care to explore. But rest assured Caim will be exiled to a place far removed from the mortal realm."

"So that's it? After all that monster has done, he gets to live?" She paced in front of the window. "Damn it to hell, you saw what he did in that mission. What he did to those people—to Christine and Father McIntyre. How many more does he have to kill before you do more than exile him?"

"That isn't my decision to make. My job is to stop Caim from interfering in your realm. Nothing more, nothing less."

"Then why haven't you?"

Aramael angled his body away from her, every line shouting tension. Misery. "There are complications."

From the kitchen came the sound of a tea kettle's whistle building to a scream. It ended abruptly as someone lifted it from the stove. Seth, probably. Seth, whose words rang again in Alex's memory, You are the problem, Alexandra Jarvis. Not the solution.