Sins of the Son: The Grigori Legacy (8 page)

“I think you might have been right about me going back to work too soon,” she said. “I decided I need a change of scenery.”

Jennifer scowled. “I don’t believe you. The truth, Alex.”

Alex set the sweaters by the suitcase. “That is the—”

“The truth.”

Alex crossed her arms. “I hate how you can do that,” she muttered. “Fine. The truth is I don’t think we’re done yet.”

“Done? Done with what?”

“Seth is back. He’s in Vancouver.”

Jen’s face paled and she groped for the edge of the bed. Pushing the sweaters away, she sat down and swallowed.

“I see. Do you know why?”

“No.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

Alex shook her head. “I don’t think he can. He’s in the hospital out there. They say he has amnesia.”

“Amnesia—but he’s an—” Jennifer’s voice choked off. She tried again. “He’s—can he—can his kind even have amnesia?”

“I’m guessing something went wrong.”

“And that’s why you’re going out there? To figure out what?”

“And to help him if I can.”

“Don’t. It’s none of your business, Alex. Whatever’s going on is between them. It has nothing to do with us.”

“It has everything to do with us. We’re the ones they’re fighting over.” Alex reached past Jennifer to pick out the more innocuous sweaters in the stack. She didn’t know what she was walking into in Vancouver, and preferred not to stand out in anyone’s memory. As she refolded a brown turtleneck, Jen’s hand closed over her wrist.

“I don’t care. Let it go. Please.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“If it means keeping you safe, yes, I do.”

Alex pushed away the suitcase and sat beside her sister. “I have to do this, Jen. There are things I never told you—”

“It won’t change my mind.” Jen shook her head stubbornly. “Nothing will change my mind. You and Nina are the most important things in my entire universe and I damn near lost both of you this summer. I will
not
stand by and let you put yourself back in the center of that mess again—I don’t care what your reasons are. I’ll stop you, Alex. I’ll go to Dr. Bell if I have to and—”

“Seth is supposed to stop the Apocalypse.”

Jen’s throat convulsed. “The Apocalypse isn’t real. It’s just a myth. A legend.”

“Like angels and demons?” Alex demanded, her voice harsher than she intended, making Jen flinch. Alex pushed away a wave of pity. Her sister had to know. She wouldn’t put it past Jen to carry out her threat to speak to Bell, and
who knew what the repercussions might be? “You saw them, Jennifer. You saw what Caim did to those people. To me, to Nina. That was just the beginning. There are tens of thousands like Caim. If they go to war with the angels—”

Jen’s grip tightened on Alex’s wrist. Prying her sister’s fingers loose, Alex gathered her into a hug and rested her cheek against the gray-streaked brunette hair. “I have to help him if I can, Jen. He saved my life. He may be the only one who can save
all
our lives.”

“I know,” Jen whispered into her shoulder. “But I don’t have to like it.”

H
E STARED OUT
the window at the trees and grass and buildings beyond, at the sky, the clouds, the people, the vehicles. Stared, and recognized none of them. He only had names for them because they had been named to him over the past week; only knew it had been a week because he had been told so.

But he still didn’t comprehend what a week meant.

He comprehended little, in fact, of what he’d been told by the people who had taken him in, who placed him in this room, who locked the door behind him. His world began and ended with the four walls that surrounded him, the view out his window, and the few hundred words he had learned in his time here. Before that, there was nothing but emptiness. Darkness.

Pain.

He sucked in a breath, a piercing sharpness beneath his ribs. Pain. The ones who cared for him had used the word—
are you in pain?
—but he hadn’t understood its meaning. Now he did. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. Knew it, felt it deep inside. A key clicked in the lock. Looking around, he watched as the woman who had found him, the one who brought him to this place, came into his room. Dr. Riley, she called herself.

“Good morning, John,” she said.

That was the name they had given him. He knew it was
wrong but could not correct them. Could not tell them what was right.

Dr. Riley looked at the clipboard she held. “You had another quiet night, I see. But you’re still not sleeping much. I think I might prescribe something to help you with that.”

He watched her. Listened. Had no idea what she said.

Her face changed to a frown. He knew that word from having been asked by a nurse this morning why he frowned; knew it meant Dr. Riley felt the same inside as he did.

Didn’t know what to call the feeling.

“Still not talking, either,
hmm
?” she asked. She put her pen on the paper and made some marks. “Have you remembered anything? A name? A place?”

He turned back to the window. Behind him, Dr. Riley sighed.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’m sure it will come in time. In the meantime, you have someone coming to see you this afternoon who may be able to help. A detective from Toronto thinks she may know you. I’m picking her up at the airport at three and then we’ll come by to visit, all right?”

Toronto. Airport. Detective. More words without meaning. He watched a bird in the sky. The door behind him opened, closed. The key clicked in the lock once more.

H
e found her in the gardens, as Raphael said he would.

For long minutes, Mika’el stood at the edge of the trees and watched the One, seated on a swing beneath a massive maple, gently moving back and forth with the breeze. His breath lodged in his throat, refusing to move further. Just as his feet refused to carry him forward, held captive by the memory of harsh words that still lingered after more than four thousand years.

He closed his eyes against the agony of turning his back on her, as fresh now as if it had only just happened. An agony he carried with him every second of every day since leaving her presence.

Preternatural awareness shuddered through him and, without looking, he knew the One had turned her gaze on him. He sensed her stillness, felt her ambivalence. It took every ounce of willpower he could summon to open his eyes and meet hers, and then to make himself walk across the lawn.

“Mika’el,” she said as he stopped before her.

The sound of her voice speaking his angelic name
reached inside him and laid bare places he hardly knew anymore. He drew himself tall, against the urge to bow, afraid he might not be able to straighten again to face her. “One.”

“You came,” she said.

A quiver went through Mika’el’s wings, echoing the spasm in his heart. “You doubted me?”

A tiny smile curved the One’s lips. “I have never doubted you, my Archangel. Myself, yes, but never you.”

She studied him for a long moment, and then rose and brushed her fingers against his cheek. Her touch radiated through his body. His soul.

“I have missed you,” she said.

Mika’el’s breath snagged in his chest and for a moment, all of eternity stood still, centered in that one, feather-light touch. The first connection he’d had with his Creator since leaving her side.

Countless times in his years among mortals, he had observed the bond between mortal mother and child; a love that drew them together fiercely, completely, sometimes to the exclusion of all around them. He had envied humans that bond, not for its strength but for its smallness, and would have given his soul to be able to reduce what he felt for his Creator to that level. To be free of the anguish caused by her rejection of him. His rejection of her.

Now, with just a few words and a brush of hand against cheek, the One had renewed their connection and reminded him not just of the endurance of that bond, but its beauty, too. The all-consuming intensity that tied them to one another.

His Creator’s gaze slid away and her hand dropped to her side. “Walk with me.”

Mika’el fell into step beside her, hands clasped behind his back, and together they crossed the lawn to a path leading toward the rose garden. For a long time, silence sat between them, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, just there. Until the One stopped and faced him.

“He shouldn’t have survived.”

“Who shouldn’t?”

“Seth. He should have died in the transition.”

Mika’el’s entire being went still. “Excuse me?”

“After Aramael killed Caim, when Mittron came to me to see what punishment the Power would face, I read his intent. I knew the Highest Seraph wished to eliminate the Appointed.”

“Wait.” He shook his head to clear it. “You
knew
what Mittron intended and you let him continue? But why?”

The One’s timeless, ageless face became old and weary and unbearably sad.

“My son had become weak. Too weak to carry out what we asked of him. Something in him had changed. Turned wrong. He hid it from me and I couldn’t see what it was. I believe in humanity, Mika’el. I’ve always believed in them. I would never have suggested the agreement to Lucifer otherwise. You know that. But I no longer trusted Seth’s ability to become one of them, to learn to have faith in them as I do. I couldn’t allow the transition to go forward.”

Mika’el shook his head, unable to believe what he heard. “You wanted him to die.” A statement, not a question. “Your own son.”

The One’s chin lifted a fraction. “There were seven billion souls at stake. Whole and unharmed, Seth would almost certainly have chosen in our favor—at the very least we would have had an equal chance and an additional few years before I—” Her mouth pulling tight, she stopped and gazed into the distance. “I couldn’t risk it. I had no choice.”

“You
did
have a choice. Then. Now. Six thousand years ago. Stopping Lucifer has always been a choice, but you just don’t want to see it.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It
is
that simple,” Mika’el snarled, old angers surging up in him. He stalked the broad width of the path. “The only complication is you. If you had done what needed to be done when all this began—if you had let
me
do what needed to be done—we would not be here now. But you refused, because you wanted to believe in
him
, in his potential. Even
when your decision nearly decimated your angels, you would not move against him. Instead, you took away your angels’ free will—all that made them individual and unique, so you could try to contain the one who had
chosen
to fall from your grace.

“Even now you engage in some kind of cat-and-mouse game with your former consort,” he accused, “and to what end? The hope he might yet change? That he might see the error of his ways? The mortals you created are suffering because of him, One. I’ve witnessed their torment every day since leaving your side, and now—now you tell me you would have sacrificed your own son for him?”

Mika’el stopped pacing and looked down on her, and then, his voice hoarse, laid bare the depth of his own and Heaven’s anguish.

“Why?” he asked. “Why choose Lucifer over all the rest of your creations?”

For a very long time, the One stared past him, her face white and marble-still. Above them, a passing breeze rustled through the treetops, carrying with it the song of a distant bird.

“Is that what you think?” the One asked at last.

Mika’el could not answer past the thickness in his throat, could not tell her it was what all her angels thought. What they’d always thought.

His Creator shook her head. “You’re wrong, Mika’el. It is not in my nature—not in my capacity—to favor any one life over another. Every living thing in this universe is a part of me, created from me. Who I am,
what
I am, demands I love them all.”

“But Lucifer is evil, damn it—how can you continue to love him when you know what he has done? What he is capable of?”

“Because I must,” she snapped, taking up the pacing Mika’el had abandoned. “Because I am the One, and all life flows from me, and I cannot value that life based on whether or not it meets your standards any more than I could based on Lucifer’s.”

Mika’el’s head snapped back at the comparison and the One paused before him, reaching to grasp his hands.

“I’m not saying you’re like Lucifer, Mika’el. I’m saying my love is not defined by worth. It simply is.” Her voice softened. “As for the mortals, remember that much of the pain they endure is inflicted upon them by their own hands and those of their fellow humans. Not by Lucifer’s, and not by mine. Each and every soul on Earth has the capacity for both good and evil, and the capacity to choose between those paths.”

“And you,” Mika’el grated, “have the same capacity for choice. It is wrong to let this continue, One. No matter how much you
love
him, you cannot continue to sit back and do nothing.” A sudden idea occurred to him, reaching down to squeeze his heart in an iron fist.

No. That would be impossible…

“You
can
stop him, can’t you?”

The One released his hands and returned to pacing. Slower steps this time, with a measure to them—a precision—that made the thought-fist tighten a little more.

“One?”

A dozen feet away, the Creator of the universe stopped, her back to him. She sighed, and then, voice quiet, said, “The short answer to that would be yes.”

…unthinkable…

“And the long answer?”

“The long answer, Mika’el, is it’s not that simple.”

A
lex slipped her carry-on bag from her shoulder. Setting it on the tiled floor in front of her, she scanned the airport throng for the woman who was to meet her. Fiftyish, Elizabeth Riley had told her. Gray hair pulled back, glasses, wearing trousers—she’d actually called them that—and a white blouse because Alex would be arriving on Thursday and she always wore a white blouse on Thursdays.

Of course.

The crowd parted for a moment. Alex spotted a woman beside a car rental booth who matched Riley’s general description but looked more like a hippie grandmother than a police psychiatrist. Her “trousers” were of the baggy, multi-pocketed cargo variety. The white blouse involved appeared to be unbleached cotton. And she wore Birkenstocks.