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There’s nothing you or Henderson can do.”
    “I can’t stand by and do nothing, either.”
    The phone on the desk rang. Seth stared at it, then turned on his heel and left.
    ***
    Alex lifted the receiver on the third ring, when she was certain her voice could be trusted. “Hey, Hugh, thanks for calling me back.”
    “It was about bloody time you called
me
back,” came the unceremonious rejoinder. “When I call you at eight a.m., Jarvis, and again at ten, noon, two, and four, you don’t bloody wait until after nine at night to call me back.”
    Refraining—only just—from hanging up on the Vancouver detective who had become her friend, Alex let silence be her answer for a long moment. Then, her voice silky sweet, she inquired, “Done?”
    A deep exhale sounded on the other end of the line. She pictured Henderson slumped at his desk, rubbing one hand over his cropped, graying hair.
    “I was worried about you,” he said, his voice quieter. “We both were.”
    “Both? Hell, don’t tell me you called Riley.” She didn’t care how many good words the Vancouver psychiatrist put in for her with the brass, she still didn’t like her—or her habit of poking at the unseen scars Alex preferred to think of as healed.
    “She’s my friend,” Hugh answered her, “so yes, I stay in touch with her, and yes, she’s worried, too.”
    “I’m fine, Hugh. I was fine when you called yesterday, I was fine when you called the day before, I was fine when I left Vancouver—”
    Henderson snorted.
    “—and I’m fine now,” she finished. “Really.”
    “Right. You damn near die sticking a knife into your own gut, get buried under a goddamn building, and now you’re living with Lucifer’s son. Of course you’re fine. How could I possibly think otherwise?”
    Alex pushed back the images his words conjured. Extracting her nails from her palms wasn’t so easy. “Did Riley put you up to this?”
    “I told you, she’s worried about you,” Hugh replied.
    “I’m—”
    “If you say
fine
again—”
    “Surviving,” Alex said. “I’m surviving. But I have to tell you, conversations like this don’t make it any easier.”
    “Well, I guess that answers my next question of whether or not you’re talking to anyone.”
    She snorted. “Right. And who do you suggest I talk to? I already have the department shrink watching my every move. If I so much as breathe a hint of what’s going on—”
    “You have Seth there. Talk to him.”
    Seth, who wanted nothing more than to put his past life behind him and have nothing to do with his parents’ machinations. Who, through no fault of his own, had become another insurmountable barrier in her life—and one of her greatest sources of guilt.
    “I don’t want to talk to anyone,” she said, her voice harsh. “I just want to do my goddamn job.”
    “Saving humanity from imploding is a little more than doing your job.”
    “Is this all you called for? To harass me?”
    “You can be awfully stubborn, can’t you?”
    “You have no idea.”
    “Fine,” he growled. “But just for the record, you’re the one who wanted to talk to me, remember?”
    Alex tried to think past the headache forming at the base of her skull. She considered reminding him he’d actually been the one trying to call her all day, but an argument over semantics would take way too much effort. Massaging her neck, she re-focused her thoughts. “Two things. First, Roberts called me in this morning. We had a woman turn up in a parking lot with her belly ripped open and the baby missing.”
    Silence. She listened to the faint ringing of a phone at Henderson’s end. Another long exhale.
    “We found one in a Dumpster two nights ago,” he said. “Same thing.”
    Alex’s stomach tightened, cramped. She touched the scar that remained from her own brush with a Naphil pregnancy, drew back her fingers as if scorched. “Are you sure?”
    “That she was ripped open? Fairly.” Henderson’s attempt at