Gabriel scooped Angel up off the couch and held her with one hand against his chest. His fingers scratched behind her ears. Sara followed them, wanting to make sure Angel was settled.

Then was sorry she had. When she walked into Gabriel’s bedroom, the first thing she saw was an oblong red streak of blood on the outside of his window. “Oh my God! What is that?”

He moved toward it, dropping Angel onto his unmade bed. “A bird must have hit the window. It’s probably down in the courtyard.”

Sara shuddered. She worked with, or had until the past year, blood samples in the lab on nearly a daily basis. Her entire adult life had been spent knee-deep in blood, by choice.

But now she was starting to wonder why it seemed to follow her everywhere.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Gabriel opened the results of the fingerprint analysis on Monday, before Sara was due to arrive. The e-mail was long and convoluted, but the conclusion was that the fingerprint, preserved in blood, on the sketch of Anne’s hand that he had drawn the night of her murder, was not a match to the right thumbprint of the set of fingerprints he had submitted for comparison.

His fingerprints.

So that wasn’t his finger in blood, which surprised him, because he remembered picking the sketch back up after he had thrown up. After his fingers had been wet and sticky from touching the blood on the mattress. So it should have been his fingerprint. But it wasn’t. Which meant his memory of events was unreliable.

Which did not make him happy.

What else did he remember inaccurately?

There was only one other person still walking the earth who had any knowledge of the events of that night, and the months that followed, but Gabriel refused to contact Raphael. Didn’t even know where he was at this point.

Gabriel had spent the last century cutting off all ties with the Grigori, denying the truth of his status, pretending that he was in fact just another mortal. But he wasn’t. He had been an angel. Sent to watch, guide, and protect mortals. And like Alex and the other Watchers before him, he had succumbed to human vice, to one of the seven deadly sins. For Alex, it had been lust. He had copulated with human women, and had fathered two demonic daughters. For Raphael, it had been wrath, his anger simmering under a passive exterior, boiling over in his obsession with violent sports, both as spectator and participant. But for Gabriel, it was gluttony, the overconsumption of drugs and alcohol. Addiction was the ultimate form of gluttony, the inability to stop consuming even after it was dangerous, detrimental, destructive.