Sins of the Son: The Grigori Legacy (16 page)

“I can hear the bottle.”

“I have a headache. I’m fine.”

“I’ve known you for more than ten years, Hugh. It’s in your voice. You’re not fine.”

“Then I’ll
be
fine once the headache is gone.” Tossing back two tablets, he reached for the cold coffee on his desk
and grimaced at the congealed cream floating on its surface.

Liz sighed. “You’re not responsible for Katherine Gray, Hugh. Any more than you were responsible for—”

“Don’t.” The word came out harsher than Hugh intended and he scrubbed an impatient hand over his head. She still didn’t get it, and no matter how good a shrink she was, she’d never get it because she hadn’t lived it. But even if she hadn’t been able to take away the guilt or the horror, she’d given him the tools to survive and, for that, he was grateful. Which made him sorry he’d snapped. “I know you’re trying to help, Liz, but I’m fine. And you’re not my doctor anymore. So do us both a favor and let it go, all right?”

“Damn it, Hugh—”

“Let it go.”

Liz muttered something he didn’t ask her to repeat and then heaved another sigh. “Fine. So was that it? Just the news about Katherine Gray?”

Leaning back in his chair, Hugh put his feet up on the desk and crossed them at the ankles. He stared at his shoes. Should he tell her about the conversation with Staff Inspector Roberts in Toronto? About the distinctly woo-woo flavor of a discussion he still couldn’t quite believe he’d had with another cop? Would it help to share what Roberts had told him about Seth Benjamin? His gaze slid to the trash can. Or to confess to ten years of ignored messages?

“Well?” Liz prodded.

“That was it. Just Gray.”

“Hugh—” The psychiatrist broke off. “Hold on, something’s up here.”

A quick, muffled conversation took place at the other end of the line, and then Liz’s voice came back on.

“Do you mind if we finish this later? We’re in lockdown. One of the patients has gone missing.”

“Benjamin.”

“How did you know?”

After all Roberts had told him? How could he not know?

“Lucky guess,” he said. “Go. Let me know if you need help.”

S
HE’D REALLY PAINTED
herself into a corner this time.

Alex stared across the hotel-room bed at Seth, still clad in hospital pajamas, and cursed her recently acquired ability to act without thinking through the consequences. What had seemed like the only option at the time had taken on ominous overtones now that she looked back on her actions. Riley would be livid, Henderson would be just as pissed, and if the court put out a detention order for Seth, Alex would face charges of contempt.

Taking a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, Alex reined in her overwrought nerves. No one knew, she reminded herself. No one
could
know. Riley had seen her leave the psych ward alone; Seth’s room would have remained locked; the security cameras in the hospital and the parking lot would show nothing. No connection between her and the missing patient. For now, they were safe.

For now.

But Alex still faced the problem of a powerful amnesiac angel. And the question destined to dog her every step:
now what?

She cleared her throat. “Are you hungry?”

Seth regarded her with a calm she would have liked to own herself. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

He was learning fast.

Her gaze dropped to the books he clutched in his hands and a smile tugged at her mouth. “Would you like me to help you with those?”

Seth frowned at the books. “Those?”

“The books. Would you like to learn the books?” They might as well get right to it. The faster he learned, the sooner she could tell him what little she knew of him. For all the good it might do if he still didn’t have his memory.

He held out the books to her. “Yes.”

Alex glanced around. The only potential work surfaces were the dresser with the television on it and one small desk in the corner where she’d set her suitcase. The room, she
realized, was barely adequate for one person, let alone two. A move to something bigger, however, would draw Riley and Henderson’s attention, so they’d just have to make do. With a sigh, Alex shifted her suitcase to the floor and tugged the desk out from the corner, positioning it beside the bed.

“Come,” she said to her student, patting the faded bedspread. “Sit.”

B
Y THE TIME
they took a break several hours later, Seth had proved himself not just an apt pupil, but a phenomenal one. He blasted through the reading books, retaining everything he learned on the first try, and was halfway through the second illustrated dictionary when Alex returned to the room with their take-out chicken dinner and an armload of clothes she’d picked up at a nearby discount store.

He looked up with a frown as she closed the door. “Magnet,” he said, holding up the book in his hands and pointing to a picture. “What is attract?”

Alex dropped the room key on the dresser beside the television, her exhaustion-fogged brain struggling for a definition he would understand. “Something that pulls another thing toward it,” she decided.

“What something?”

“A force of some kind. It’s invisible—you can’t see it.” She set their dinner on the desk and then placed her wallet beside it, flicking open the clasp. “This is a magnet. See how this piece pulls the other side toward it? That’s attraction.”

She demonstrated a few times and then, with a smile, handed the wallet over to a captivated Seth while she unpacked the deep-fried chicken, french fries, and coleslaw. Hardly her dinner of choice, but the fast food place had been the closest thing still open and she hadn’t wanted to leave Seth to his own devices while she hunted down something less artery clogging. If only she’d left him playing with a magnet in her absence, he might have remained occupied for hours.

“Alex, you are a magnet, too?”

Alex looked over to find Seth frowning again. “Why do you say that?”

Seth’s gaze lifted, meeting hers with an intensity that sent a curl of warning through her belly. “You attract me.”

Oh.
Alex’s memory leapt back to a moment when she’d stood outside a church-turned-slaughterhouse, her hand on Seth’s arm. Something had flared between them in that instant. An unexpected something she had all but forgotten, that returned now with a shocking swiftness. The already small room shrank ten sizes. Setting down the box of french fries, she opened her mouth, then snapped it closed again when no sound emerged. She groped for the chair and sank into it, searching for a response.

Seth preempted her efforts.

“Why?” He studied her, his dark eyes curious and warm. Too warm. “Why do you attract me?”

Change the subject,
she told herself.
Distract him.

Seth, however, had other ideas.

“Do I attract you?” His voice dropped, roughened, and his words slid over Alex like raw silk, catching on her every heightened nerve ending.

Alex curled her fingers into the chair arms. Hell. She’d just lost her soulmate, the world was on the verge of annihilation, she had somehow managed to become the savior of the savior, and her answer to the whole mess was a rush of hormones?

Her cell phone shrilled into the taut, expectant silence and she damn near vaulted from the chair. Hand shaking, she tugged the phone from its case and flipped it open.

“Jarvis,” she croaked.

“You’ll notice I’m doing you the courtesy of calling instead of coming to your room,” a gruff male voice said.

“Detective Henderson?”

“He’s missing.”

Caught off guard by Henderson’s abruptness—and still reeling from Seth’s questions—Alex almost forgot to play
dumb. She bit back her well-rehearsed but too-early denial just in time. “He who?”

“Coffee,” Henderson replied. “Same place as before. Five minutes.”

The connection went dead. Alex lowered the phone, stared at it, and then snapped it shut. Son of a bitch. She might be considered one of the best interrogators on the Toronto police force, but she had met her match in Vancouver’s Hugh Henderson. The man changed direction so often and so quickly she found herself hard-pressed just to keep up, let alone keep her wits about her.

Tapping the phone against one knee, she went over the terse conversation again. She suspected Henderson’s comment about calling instead of coming to her room had been more veiled threat than courtesy. If she wasn’t in the coffee shop in—she glanced at her watch—four and a half minutes, she’d guarantee he’d be at the door in six.

She looked over at Seth, relieved to find the intensity in his gaze replaced with curiosity. At the very least, taking a break to see Henderson would give her time to decide how she was going to handle the attraction issue.

She hoped.

“I have to go out,” she said. “Just for a little while. Will you be okay here?”

“I come?”

In spite of her current stress level, Alex’s lips quirked. Tomorrow they’d have to do something about grammar. “Not this time. I have to go alone. You stay here and read, and—” She broke off at a sudden idea and rose from the chair. Going to the television, she switched it on, hoping it was one of the things in the hotel—unlike hallway light bulbs—that worked.

A picture sprang to life on the screen. Success. She turned to Seth. “This is a television. I don’t know if there’s satellite or not, but there should be enough on to keep you occupied for a while. You change channels with these buttons.” She pressed the up arrow and then the down, and
Seth’s eyes narrowed on the television. “And this is for volume.”

Louder. Softer. Seth’s eyes widened and he reached for the control. Alex smiled.

“Just don’t turn it up too loud, all right? We don’t want to disturb the neighbors.”

“Neighbors?”

Right, he hadn’t reached
n
in the dictionary yet. Was still at
m
.
M
for
magnet
. Alex’s cheeks warmed again.

“The people in the rooms around us.” Lifting her wallet from the desk, she tucked it into her jacket pocket. “So we have this straight, right? I go, you stay?”

Seth flicked the channel upward several times and grinned. “I stay,” he agreed, and settled in to investigate his new toy.

A
lex stripped off her rain-soaked jacket and slid into the booth across from Henderson. She shook her head at the approaching waitress. Her jitters were bad enough without adding caffeine to the mix. Clinging to the questionable calm she’d managed to impose over herself on the short walk from the hotel, she met the Vancouver detective’s eyes. “Well?” she asked. “I’m here. Now what?”

“Now you tell me who he really is and why you’re hiding him in your room.”

Balling sweaty hands into fists under the table, Alex readied herself to lie through her teeth. She’d make a lousy criminal. “I assume you’re talking about Seth, Detective, in which case I’ve already told you all I know about him, and what do you mean hiding him? Are you telling me he’s
missing
?” She allowed her voice to rise with what she hoped was the right amount of concerned indignation.

Henderson’s gaze didn’t so much as flicker. “When you clench a hand, there’s a corresponding muscle movement as far up the arm as the shoulder,” he remarked. “You might
want to watch for that in your interviews. It’s a dead giveaway of nerves.”

Alex’s fists tightened before she could stop herself. She knew that, damn it. She’d just been so focused on keeping her face still—she scowled at her colleague. “I know how to conduct an interview, Detective Henderson. What I don’t know is what I’m doing here.”

Leaning back on the bench seat, Henderson toyed with a spoon on the table until Alex was tempted to snatch it away and rap it across his knuckles. She swallowed, remembering a time when she’d wanted to do something similar to Aramael. When she’d sat in another coffee shop a lifetime away and witnessed the beginning of the end of the reality she thought she’d known.

“Benjamin disappeared from his room,” said Henderson.

Wrenching her mind back to the present, Alex stepped into semi-rehearsed territory. She frowned. “When?”

“They noticed the absence at dinner.”

“Who the hell left his door unlocked?”

“No one. It was still locked.”

Alex paused for effect and then drawled, “He’s missing from a locked room and I’m responsible. What, I waved my magic wand and poof, he disappeared?” She flapped away Henderson’s response and, not wanting to push her luck too far, switched tactics. “Never mind. What about the cameras? They’re all over that ward—they must have caught something.”

“That’s the problem. They didn’t. They show everything else, but no Benjamin. Not so much as a glimpse of him. He was in the room, and then he wasn’t.” Setting aside the spoon, Henderson leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table. His gaze held Alex’s for a bare second before sliding away, up toward a television suspended from the wall over the counter.

Alex wondered whose idea it had been to question her this time: Henderson’s or Riley’s.

“I spoke to your supervisor.”

Another topic change. “Oh?”

Henderson’s gaze skipped back to hers. It moved away again. “You didn’t tell me Benjamin saved your life in that fire.”

Caution prickled up Alex’s spine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Roberts saw Benjamin standing in the flames when you staggered out. You were bleeding and burned. He didn’t have a mark on him.” Henderson continued to look toward the television. “And before you say it, I asked. Roberts swears he wasn’t seeing things.”

Alex waited, certain he wasn’t yet done. Her gaze traveled over the lines of fatigue etched around his eyes and the scruff along his jawline, the look of a cop working too many hours. One who had seen way more than any person should have to see and yet continued to do his job because someone had to. She thought about Roberts, a cop just as dedicated as Henderson, who knew so much more than she’d realized and had risked his reputation to share the information.

For her sake.

Was she ready to take the same risk?