Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(31)
Author: Erin McCarthy

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

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.

Alex had accepted his sin, embraced his title of Demon, but Gabriel tried to deny his. He didn’t feel evil, and he didn’t enjoy perpetuating sin in others, or hurting humans. He had a loud conscience, and he appreciated it, wanted to nurture it. His flaws, and sins, were his own, and to his core, he felt he was truly not Demon or Angel. He was human.

Yet irrefutably immortal.

He had to let Anne go. Had to know he hadn’t destroyed her life, so he could move on, to a future that wasn’t stagnant, a purgatory of his own making, as Alex had pointed out.

But he wasn’t sure how to get to the truth. Had no idea who the fingerprint could belong to.

If he had Anne’s DNA, he would have an answer of sorts, because if the blood flakes still preserved on the bowie knife didn’t match Gabriel’s or Anne’s, then there had been a third person in the room. One who had nicked and cut himself as he slashed Anne in a frenzy. It wouldn’t tell Gabriel who that person was, because there was no one alive to do a DNA comparison with, and no other suspects besides the mysterious man in the room prior to him, but it would be enough for Gabriel to know it hadn’t been him who had taken life.

He needed to know that in his weakness he hadn’t violated his own nature and the laws of morality so deeply as to kill a defenseless woman.

Through the open windows Gabriel heard someone come into the courtyard. It was probably Sara, since she had said she’d be there at ten. She had been a little nervous with him on Saturday, jumpy almost. He had figured it was because she was embarrassed that they had slept in his bed together, but for whatever reason, after lunch she’d gone back to her apartment and he hadn’t seen her since.

He was perfectly content with his own company, but he hadn’t realized how lonely he was until he’d met Sara. Or more accurately, he had known it, but been able to ignore it. Now that he had access to Sara, it was different. He enjoyed talking to her, sharing ideas, hearing her soft laugh. Smelling her feminine perfume and touching the small of her back. There was no denying the pleasure he took from her presence, and he was pleased to hear her pushing the gate open.

He’d given her a key to the gate, so she could come and go without having to stand there waiting for him to open it. Normally, he didn’t even remember to lock it on a regular basis, and neither did his neighbor, but Sara needed it locked. It was a crutch, an illusion of safety that she needed to have right now, and he respected that. She had been through a hell of a lot, and unlike him, she wasn’t immortal. She could die.

It took him a minute to realize that she wasn’t coming up the staircase to his apartment. He listened, allowing himself to utilize his heightened senses, and after deciphering movement, he knew she had actually stopped in the courtyard. She was walking around on the old bricks, pulling out a chair at the wrought iron table that had been in the same spot for a decade.

Gabriel stood up and went into his bedroom. He had washed the streak of blood off the glass, and the window was closed again against the August heat. But he could see her through the pane, sitting at the table, reading something from a manila envelope in her lap. She had propped her feet up on another chair, tucking her yellow skirt neatly around her legs. Her blond hair spilled back over her shoulders, and she reached up and buried her hands in it, tousling and piling it up on top of her head, before letting it drop again.

The sun shone across her legs, but the building shadowed her cheek and nose.

Without giving any thought to it, Gabriel went and got his camera and, as quietly as possible, lifted the window. Angling the lens down, to capture the feeling of watching her from above, he tested the light with several shots. Then he shifted to the left and zoomed in on her face, wanting her profile, wanting to capture the curve of her sensuous lip, the strength of her jaw, the delicacy of her petite nose, which struggled to hold her sunglasses in place. He clicked, over and over, moving in and out, shifting from her face to the whole image of Sara at Study, shoulders tense as she bent over, in contrast to the relaxed posture of her lower body.

As he grabbed shot after shot, Gabriel’s frustration grew. He didn’t want to preserve with the click of the button. He wanted to capture through creation. He wanted to see if his fingers could copy the curves of her body, the expression on her face, the duality of light, and the angle of descent. Setting the camera down on the bed, he went into his closet, yanking boxes out of his way and tearing into a case he had shoved to the back. It held a brand-new, never used sketchbook. With one single pencil, sharpened and ready to use. Bought in a moment of weakness, of longing for the feel of the slender pencil between his fingers, stroking and sliding across paper, generating thought and emotion on the page.