A/N: a warning for the beginning of this chapter; this one starts with a case, so there is some discussion of the crime.

One month later…

"Morning," Fin said grimly, offering her a paper cup of coffee, which she accepted gratefully. Morning was technically accurate, but it was only just after 4:00 a.m. and the world was still all in darkness, no sign of the coming dawn. The call had come in, though, and they had answered, Fin and Liv, and when he stopped at the bodega for his own much needed caffeine he'd picked some up for her, too, two sugars and a splash of milk because they'd been partnered up more often than not since Elliot's suspension, and he'd learned by now how she took her coffee.

"What've we got?" Olivia asked as they made their way into the apartment together. The place was crawling with crime scene techs; there were a couple unis, too, but most of them were hard at work canvassing the neighbors. From what Olivia had seen of the corridor on her way to the crime scene she didn't anticipate getting much from the canvass.

"It's ugly," Fin said.

Isn't it always? She thought, but he was leading her through the living room - the place had been trashed, every piece of furniture upturned, couch cushions cut open as if with a knife, pages torn from books; it was a fucking disaster - and into the kitchen, and when she saw what waited for them there she figured ugly was the best word to describe it.

"Jesus," she breathed in horror.

"Guy basically garroted her," Fin explained. "Cut so deep he damn near took her head off. Used this," he reached out, grabbed an evidence bag from the counter to show her its contents. "Vic was into making pottery, apparently they use the wire to cut through the clay when it's wet."

The wire was thin but tough, with little handles on either end, and bits of the vic were still sticking to it. There was blood everywhere, and shattered fragments of pottery, too.

"And it's our case because -"

"Looks like he raped her," the ME's assistant on the ground by the victim's head piped up cheerfully, and Liv fought a sudden urge to kick him.

"We got a problem, though," Fin said, ignoring the guy completely.

A mostly decapitated vic, raped in her apartment, no witnesses; it seemed to Liv they had a lot of problems.

"What's that?" she asked, because she could tell Fin was waiting, looking at her like he was wondering where her head was at, if she was even listening.

"Vic's got a kid."

As he spoke he pointed to the fridge, and she saw at once what he was trying to show her. Very carefully she picked her way across the kitchen, trying her best not to step in any blood, and stood for a moment looking at the pictures plastered across the fridge, held in place with a myriad of brightly colored magnets.

"McKenna," she read the child's name aloud; it was spelled out in big block letter magnets across the fridge. If Olivia had to guess she'd estimate that McKenna was about four, a sweet little thing with a wealth of dark hair and the bluest eyes Olivia had ever seen. The girl had a wide, brilliant smile, and Olivia's heart clenched in her chest, looking into that precious little face.

Where are you, sweetheart? She wondered. And then please, please don't let him have her. It was a horror her heart recoiled from, the idea that the sweet little girl staring back from the pictures on the fridge might even now be in the clutches of the beast who'd murdered her mother so brutally. In that moment, Olivia prayed, not that she thought it would do much good; God was not in the habit of answering the prayers of monsters.

"No sign of her," Fin said. "But I'm thinking we sweep the place again. These unis, they're green. Might be there's some place they missed."

It was a feeble hope; the apartment wasn't terribly big, and there were only so many places for a child to hide, and what were the chances, Olivia wondered, that the girl had stayed quiet through all this noise? What were the chances that she was alive at all? If Olivia discovered McKenna's body now, she wasn't sure she'd survive it herself.

"All right," she said. "Let's go."

They started in the kitchen, opened every cabinet door. Looked under all the furniture in the living room, double checked the coat closet by the front door. Ducked into the bathroom, pulled back the shower curtain, opened the cabinets there, too. There were two bedrooms, and they each took one, Fin disappearing into the vic's room while Liv took McKenna's.

The perp had been in here, too; he'd ripped the sheets from the bed and flung the mattress up against a wall, had opened every dresser drawer and spilled their contents on the floor, had ripped the closet door straight off its tracks and tossed it carelessly aside. It was hopeless, but Olivia looked, anyway. Laid down on her belly and peered beneath the bed, opened the little toy chest in the corner, and found no sign of McKenna at all.

"I got nothing," Fin called to her from the doorway; she hadn't seen him search the vic's room, but she trusted him, and she knew he'd looked everywhere possible.

"One last thing," she said, and went to the closet. Even though there was no door left on it, even though she could clearly see there was nothing on the floor, she went to the closet, and for the rest of her life she would wonder why she did, and be glad of it.

There was in fact nothing on the floor of the closet, nothing buried in the corners, just the child's clothes and a few storage boxes. Olivia sighed, and titled her head back, feeling defeated and trying to avoid the moment when she would inevitably have to tell Fin she'd had no luck, either. She lifted her head, and gazed upward, as if she were looking towards the heavens she could not see, and when she did she found two bright blue eyes peering down at her from the top shelf of the closet. It was high up, taller than Olivia herself, maybe a foot below the ceiling, covered in a jumble of boxes, and there, squeezed into the very back corner of that shelf, was a little girl, watching her in terror.

"Hey," Olivia said as gently as she could, and behind her she felt Fin tense.

"It's ok, McKenna. My name's Olivia, and this is my friend Fin. We're the police. See?" She unclipped her badge from her belt and held it up for the child to see. "Will you let me get you down from there?"

The little girl retreated further into her corner, shaking her head.

"Did your mommy put you up there?" Olivia asked, her heart heavy with sorrow. The vic, had she known something bad was coming? She would have had to, there was no way McKenna had climbed up on that shelf by herself. The vic had known danger was at the door, and she had done her best to protect her child, and Olivia wanted to weep at the injustice of it all, but tears were not a luxury she could afford right now.

"The bad man is gone," Olivia said. "And we're here to keep you safe. It's ok, McKenna. We're here to help."

Olivia held out her arms to the child, and waited. Waited, holding her breath, to see what might happen next. The shelf was just a little too tall and McKenna was just a little too traumatized for Olivia to risk just grabbing the girl; she would need McKenna to come to her. Please, she thought, please, just come, just-

Very slowly McKenna shimmied forward on her belly, little hands outstretched towards Olivia, and Olivia caught her carefully under the arms and pulled just a little, and then McKenna was coming down, and Olivia swung her easily onto her hip, and as she did the world seemed to stop turning.

"Fin," she said in an unsteady voice. "Close the door, please."

He didn't even question it. They had known one another too long, seen too much horror together, entrusted too many secrets to one another, for him to doubt her now. He simply closed the door, very quietly, and stood with his back against it while Olivia lowered McKenna to the ground, and then knelt down beside her.

The girl had been dressed for bed in a sweet little pink nightgown covered in a pattern of flowers. The straps of the nightgown were thin, and they crossed low in the back, low enough that they did not impede the pair of brilliantly white wings that sprouted just below McKenna's shoulders. Wings, shimmering and soft, their feathers gently rustling. Wings, just like Olivia's.

She's one of us, Olivia thought in wonder. It had been thousands of years since the last nephilim was born; the renegade angels had all been wiped out by the flood, and God had not permitted angels to walk the earth since. Nephilim themselves could not reproduce; Olivia knew that all too well, to her sorrow. Where, then, had this child come from? Someone had made her; either she had been fathered by angel - though how such a thing had been allowed to happen Olivia could not begin to guess - or one of the Others had found a way to make new nephilim after all this time.

The Others were not a union, not a regiment, not a cult or a corporation or anything so organized as that. It was just what the nephilim called the people who hunted them. The humans who had learned, through whatever means, the truth of the nephilim's existence, and sought them out, either to kill them or experiment on them. The hunters and the experimenters weren't exactly in league with one another, but they both meant to hurt Olivia and her brothers, and that made them the same in her book. There had been men, over the centuries, who wanted to harness the power of the nephilim for themselves; it was too tempting, the way a nephilim's body healed, the idea that it could be bottled and sold, that immortality could be within a human's reach, and there had always been men, always would be men, who were foolhardy enough to try. Perhaps McKenna was the end result of one of their experiments. Perhaps not. There was no way to know, right now, and no time to find out, because Olivia had to get McKenna to safety, and there would be no safe quarter for her among the humans. She was so small; likely she had not learned to hide her wings yet, and even if she had, she could hardly be expected to hide them at all times. Suppose she was placed with some foster family? Suppose they found out what she was? At the very best she would terrify them; at the worst, her very life could be in danger. No, McKenna needed to be sheltered by her own kind. And there was a nephilim in that room with her, one who wanted, desperately, to keep her safe.

First, though, Olivia would have to get her out of the house.

"Your wings are beautiful," Olivia told her gently, and McKenna smiled at her hesitantly. So far the girl hadn't spoken a word, and Olivia found herself wondering if she even could. Her mother had gone to such lengths to keep her safe, it seemed unlikely the vic would've sent McKenna to a human daycare or preschool. Had she ever even ventured out of her home? The pictures on the fridge, they had all been taken inside the apartment, Olivia realized. McKenna might not have ever even seen the outside world. It had been the same, for Olivia; she was ten before her mother ever let her play out of doors, and it was only a growing negligence on her mother's part that had allowed her such liberty in the first place. Her mother would've kept her locked up forever, if she could have.

"Liv," Fin said, very softly, and she turned to look at him over her shoulder, a warning in her eyes, confusion in his. Maybe he'd thought the wings were just a costume, at first, just part of a child's make-believe game, but when Olivia praised her McKenna had fluttered her wings in apparent happiness. They had moved, and Fin had seen it.

"We have to get you somewhere safe," Olivia said, to Fin as much as to McKenna. "Will you let me wrap you up, sweetheart? You look cold, and I want you to be warm. I'll be careful, I promise."

McKenna nodded hesitantly, and Olivia reached down, grabbed up the sheet from the floor, and began to very swaddle the girl in it, carefully, folding her wings against her body in the way she knew from her own experience would be the most comfortable for her. When she was done she scooped McKenna up into her arms, and turned to face Fin.

"What are we dealing with here, Liv?" he asked her seriously.

"I can't tell you right now," she answered. McKenna wasn't speaking, but she gave every appearance of understanding Olivia's words, and Olivia would not tell Fin the truth where McKenna could overhear. "But I will. Right now, the important thing is we have to get her somewhere safe. I have a contact at the FBI I can call, someone who works on…cases like this."

It was a bald-faced lie.

"I'll take her to DCS myself."

Another lie.

"And wait for my contact there. But I need you to run interference for me. Give me the keys."

It was, she knew, a lot to ask of him. To ask him to go along with her plan, to trust her blindly, when he had no frame of reference for what he'd just seen. To ask him to lie for her, when she was herself lying to him. If he had been anyone else, he might have refused her. Might have asked more questions, might have insisted on going with her. But he was Fin, and he understood her. He knew that she was good police, and he knew her heart was in the right place, and he knew that she could be reckless, but only ever with good reason.

"Here," he said, fishing the keys from his pocket and holding them out to her. "But I'm gonna need answers soon, Liv."

"You'll get them," she promised.

And then she took the keys, and drew in a very deep breath, and watched him open the door for her. When they stepped out into the noise of the apartment McKenna buried her face in Olivia's neck, and Olivia's heart constricted. This little girl; probably she had no father to speak of, and her mother had just died, and there was no evidence that there was anyone else in her life who cared for her. Whether she knew it or not, McKenna was completely, utterly alone, and there was no telling what horrors she had overheard from her hiding spot in the closet. How scared must she be, how lonesome? Olivia's arms tightened around her, and she held McKenna close, let Fin do all the talking as they made their way out of the apartment.

They kept booster seats for kids in the trunks of the squad cars, and Fin put one in the backseat for Olivia while she stood on the sidewalk, holding McKenna close. When Fin was done she strapped the girl in, closed the door, and exchanged a single glance with him before sliding behind the wheel.

The question now was, where to take her? Olivia's one bedroom apartment was small, and there was no guarantee it was entirely safe; if there was an angel on the loose, if the Others were working in New York City, they might be keeping tabs on the nephilim. They might know that one of the nephilim was a cop, might even know she worked sex crimes, might look to her for answers first. No, Olivia needed to take the girl somewhere else, somewhere the Others would never look, somewhere safe.

Somewhere, she thought, like a little two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where an SVU detective was cooling his heels, on leave from the job and looking for something to occupy to his time. Somewhere, she thought, where there might be someone who knew what the nephilim were, and did not hate them, where there might be someone who wanted to help.

"It's going to be ok, McKenna," she said as she began to drive, watching her mirrors closely, checking to see if anyone was following her. "We're going to see a friend of mine."