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    Except she hadn’t, had she? Not lately. Hadn’t given any of her colleagues more than a passing thought for two solid weeks, never mind had their backs. Alex’s gaze traveled the white boards lining the room’s perimeter once more.
    Choices .
    She rose and, coffee in hand, wove her way through the clutter of desks. Greg Bastien, the sole remaining occupant in the room besides her, raised his head as she approached. Her steps slowed. She should ask about his wife, whose first pregnancy had been confirmed a scant few weeks before, just as the chaos of the Nephilim births had begun to consume the world. Should ask, but wasn’t sure she could.
    Bastien’s cell phone rang, and he reached to pick it up. Alex breathed a sigh of relief and walked past.
    She stopped in front of the board nearest Roberts’s office. She’d read the details a dozen times today, but not a single one had stuck. This time needed to be different. This time she needed to make a decision: stay on the job, or go after Nina? Her grip tightened on her cup. Reaching deep, she found the fragments of a focus that had once been second nature to her and turned her eyes to the case before her.
    Janine Todd, age 23, 12 weeks pregnant, knifed in the subway on her way to work, suspect still at large. Board number two: Amala Prakash, age 28, 26 weeks pregnant, burned in her bed. Suspect, her brother, in custody. Board three: a list of seven names, all women, all pregnant, killed in the church basement bombing of a prenatal class a week before. Suspect, one of the husbands, dead by suicide.
    Continuing her tour of the room, Alex skimmed the remaining boards. Of fifteen cases, two involved men. The remainder were women. Pregnant women.
    The birth of Lucifer’s Nephilim army hadn’t changed a thing. People hadn’t even noticed that the bizarre pregnancies had ended. They were still terrified, and still reacting to that terror by lashing out at mothers-to-be. And the fear was spreading, because if all of this was happening here, in Toronto, it meant that things were much, much worse in other parts of the world.
    Which meant whatever message governments were putting out wasn’t working. Roberts was right. The world needed her. It needed every rational head it could get.
    Choices .
    With careful deliberation, Alex set her coffee on a nearby desk and crossed her arms over the aching emptiness of her belly. From behind her came the murmur of Bastien’s voice, pitched low. A personal call, most likely. She closed out the sound and conjured an image of Nina, pale and limp in the Fallen One’s arms. Jen, silent and unresponsive in her hospital room. Both damaged not by human hands, but by the Fallen.
    Closing her eyes, Alex breathed in the unending pain of utter powerlessness. Tentacles of grief wrapped around her core, squeezing out the last of the denial that had driven her for the past two weeks, leaving behind the despair of an admission she could no longer deny.
    She couldn’t fix them.
    She couldn’t make them better.
    Nina would die giving birth to Lucifer’s child; Jen would remain inaccessible, her mind shattered by what had happened to her daughter; and Alex would live forever, unable to repair the damage inflicted by beings she could never hope to stop.
    She opened her eyes again to the boards and the victims outlined there, the families they had almost certainly left behind. She couldn’t help them, either, but maybe she could help others. Maybe.
    Choices .
    Leaving her coffee where it was and files strewn across her desk, she picked up her jacket, returned Bastien’s farewell wave, and headed out of the office. Fuck it. She couldn’t think straight anymore. She needed to get away from those damned boards and the hideous cases that accompanied them and the impossible responsibility that pressed in on her. She needed to see her sister. She needed sleep.
    And she definitely needed that drink or two Roberts had mentioned.

CHAPTER 8
    “LET ME GET THIS