Alex looked down at the floor between them. This was it. Her moment of decision. Speak the words and destroy the man she loved, or swallow them and condemn the planet. She crossed her arms over herself, knowing the gesture was defensive, needing the protection.
“You could help.”
Time itself stood still as a hundred different emotions flashed across Seth’s dark eyes. Sadness. Betrayal. Bitterness. Bottomless hurt. But not surprise.
“I see.” He didn’t pretend not to understand. “So you would give it all up. Everything we have, for the sake of a single girl whose life you can’t even save?”
“Not just for her.” She lifted a hand to the ache in her heart. “Your mother came to see me last night. She said—”
He cut her off. “Last night.”
Shit. “It wasn’t like that—”
“So you’d already decided to do this before you came to me. Before we made love.” Cold anger displaced all else in the black depths. “I waited for you, Alex. I was patient and understanding, I respected your need for time and space, and when you finally let me touch you it was because you felt sorry for me?”
“I didn’t feel sorry for you—at least, not any more so than for myself.”
“But you’d decided.”
“I tried to tell you. I—” She stopped. He deserved truth, not excuses. “Love isn’t supposed to be like this, Seth. It’s not supposed to come with the responsibility for billions of lives tied into it. Last night—” Her voice broke, and she paused for a steadying breath. “Last night was about you and me, and having something to remember between us that wasn’t weighed down by choices and decisions and the future of an entire world.”
Leaving the support of the door, she crossed over to him, putting her hand out to his arm. “I know this is difficult, but—”
“Difficult?” Wheeling away, he stalked into the living room, smacking his open-palmed hand against the door frame on the way. “Difficult? Fucking Hell, Alex, you’re asking me to sacrifice everything I want, everything I am, for souls I will never know or care for. Souls that don’t have a chance of survival in the first place! That’s not just difficult, it’s pointless.”
Everything I want? Everything I am? A shiver rippled down her spine. Was that really how he defined himself, by their relationship? She remained in the doorway, wariness holding her in place. He swung back to her, his face hidden in the shadows of the unlit room.
“Tell me what she said.”
She didn’t have to ask who he meant. “She said the angels can hold back the Fallen, but if Lucifer comes after humanity, she can’t stop him as long as she has to contain your powers. Keeping them in check is making her weak. She doesn’t know how much longer she can hold out.”
“What else?”
She hesitated. Should she tell him about the One’s plans to bind with Lucifer? To become other? She shook her head. The same caution that held her in place made her hold her tongue. “Isn’t that enough? Earthquakes, volcanoes, flooding, tornadoes—your powers are ripping the planet apart at the seams. People are dying.”
“They’re also deliberately killing each other—wars, shootings, bombings. Look at what happened to you today. My powers have nothing to do with any of that, and taking them back won’t make a bloody bit of difference.”
“It will make a difference to the ones who aren’t like that. The ones who deserve a chance to fix things. To make things right.”
“War between the angels and the Fallen is coming. There are eighty thousand Nephilim about to be born. You can’t fix those, Alex. And you sure as Hell can’t survive them.”
“You don’t know that.”
Two strides brought him towering over her. “I do know that,” he snarled. “And it’s about time the rest of you—my mother included—admit it. She’s been fighting a losing battle on your behalf for six millennia. She’s lost her helpmeet, a third of her angel host, her son—and now I’m supposed to sacrifice my own chance at happiness for the cause?”
A frisson of uneasiness threaded through her. “I know you’re angry—”
“Don’t tell me how I feel!”
“—and hurt,” she continued, the cop in her striving to keep her voice level and not escalate the situation. “But try to understand—”
“Understand what? That you choose mortals over me? Oh, believe me, you’ve made that crystal clear.”
“It’s not that simple!” she exploded. “This isn’t about you and me, it’s about what’s right. I won’t give up on all of humanity—I can’t.”
“And I won’t give up on us,” he growled.
It took everything she had not to step away from him. Away from the cold that had reached out to wrap around her heart, brush against her soul. She shook her head. “There is no us. Not anymore. We’re done, Seth. We have to be.”
Anger wrestled with something else on his face. Something uglier. She saw him shift, saw his hands curl into fists. Her already damaged heart faltered. He wouldn’t—
He didn’t. Instead, he pushed past her and stalked to the door. He pulled it open. Then his vicious black gaze met hers over his shoulder. “You’re wrong. We’re nowhere near done, Alexandra Jarvis.”
The door slammed behind him.
Chapter 65
“It’s time.”
Lucifer watched a withered leaf drop from the tree outside the window.
“Did you hear me?” Samael asked. “I said it’s time. The births are beginning.”
“I heard you.”
“I thought you’d like to come to Pripyat for their arrival. It’s what we’ve been waiting for—what you wanted.”
What he wanted. Another leaf drifted down to join the growing pile at the tree’s base. A Nephilim army to finally do what he could not. Because pacts and agreements aside, Heaven would have always found a way to stand between him and the mortals, to prevent him from destroying them as he had wanted to do since their very beginnings. The One had never hesitated to pit angel against Fallen, might against might. But the Nephilim were different. They could not stand against the divine, and so she would not interfere with them. She would let them do as they might, let her precious nature run its course.
An army of untouchables. The certain extermination of humanity. Everything he’d wanted for millennia, and he felt the same nothing he had when he’d finally fathered the child that would lead them. No triumph. No exhilaration.
Just that yawning emptiness that seemed to take a little more of his soul with every passing day.
He closed his eyes. “Has Seth agreed to your idea?”
“I’m on my way to him now. I believe he has made his decision.”
“Then let him take my place at Pripyat.”
“But—”
“Samael.”
His aide fell silent.
“Just leave,” Lucifer said. “Please.”
Seth stalked the streets with long, vicious strides. He’d left the apartment hours before and had covered miles of the city. With every step he took, a little more of him unraveled, a little more fell away. Alex had been everything to him—no. She was everything. His anchor, his reason for being, his entire identity.
From the moment he had given back her life when Aramael failed to save her, from the moment he had touched her soul to do so, she had become part of him, as vital to his existence as breath itself. Twice he had brought her back from where no other could. Twice he had connected with her on a level so deep, so profound, that they were inextricably, eternally entwined. Without her—