"Tell me you've got something," Olivia said urgently, quietly into the phone, tucking her legs up underneath herself and staring around the empty cribs in paranoia. There was no one there, not at 7:30 in the morning on a perfectly normal day when there were no kidnapping plots or other pressing cases going on to merit officers sequestering themselves inside the station house. The far corner of the cribs, on the most comfortable mattress in the room, with a clear line of sight to the door, that was the safest place to make a private phone call, and it was there Olivia sat now, anxiously waiting to hear an update from Marcus.
"It's nice to hear from you, too," Marcus said dryly. "And you're welcome, by the way, for all the work I've done covering your ass after you stole a child."
"I didn't steal her," Olivia insisted, not for the first time. "What was I supposed to do, just leave her there? What do you think social services would do if they found a child with wings?" Olivia decided before she even dialed the phone that she would not say McKenna's name out loud; she cared for the girl too deeply and Marcus knew her too well; he'd spot her attachment to the child at once, and it would worry him, she knew, and she didn't want the headache of it.
"You gotta lighten up, sister," Marcus said. "You've been a cop too long."
He was probably right about that. She had been doing this job, in various forms, for so long now she forgot sometimes that she had not always been a cop. Marcus remembered, though, and Marcus could not have been more different from her. There were very few things Marcus took seriously, and he had always been allergic to the concepts of duty and responsibility. He had been a playboy from the very first, but a curious one, and it was his lackadaisical approach to human laws and his curiosity that made him valuable to Olivia now.
"Look, mostly the last twenty-four hours I've been trying to backstop your little story about the FBI. That Captain of yours is a determined fella - " that might have been an understatement, Olivia thought - "and he was making a lot of calls yesterday. I got it squared away, though, I think he's buying it."
"That's all you've got?" Olivia had been hoping, desperately, that Marcus's uncanny knack for technology might have helped him unearth some clue, some piece of evidence, some whisper about a renegade angel, and while she was grateful for his efforts to keep her out of prison she was restless, and frustrated, her skin crawling with anxiety as the time passed and they drew no closer to their mark.
"What have you got?" Marcus fired back. "Did you develop working phone numbers and email addresses and aliases for FBI agents that don't exist? Did you hack the FBI's internal employee records and create an entire profile for the guy who's saving your ass? It's me, by the way, I'm the guy."
He had a point.
"We found a feather at the crime scene," Olivia said. "Adult, not one of the girl's. The girl remembers her mother shouting at someone named Michael the night of the attack."
"Shit," Marcus said softly. "You don't think-"
"I don't know what to think!"
Too late she realized how loud she was speaking, and curled in on herself, ducked her head and tried again, a little quieter.
"There's no way it's him, right?" she asked, a little plaintively. "That's just not possible, right?"
"I don't think it's possible," Marcus affirmed, and that did help, a little, did reassure her somewhat. "I don't think Michael is capable of going off-script."
"That's what I'm worried about. Look, they tried to wipe us out once before, right? The guys upstairs. What if…what if Michael was sent to take the girl?"
"Take her where? She's like us, she's not going to heaven. You think…you think Michael was sent to take her…down there?"
I hope not, Olivia thought. It was a bridge too far, a cruelty beyond belief, the idea that McKenna was damned, that anyone, man, angel, god, could wish such a fate on such a little girl.
"Maybe just to take her away," Olivia suggested. "It's not like it was in the old days. What happens in one corner of the planet is echoed in another. There's no such thing as a secret anymore. Maybe Michael just wanted to keep her safe."
"But someone raped the kid's mother and slit her throat," Marcus pointed out. "That doesn't sound like someone who wanted to keep the kid safe."
"Doesn't sound like Michael, either, does it?" It wasn't really a question.
They were quiet for a moment, both of them, considering the quagmire they'd found themselves in, mulling over the questions they'd raised, and all the unpleasant possibilities.
We need help, Olivia thought. Marcus hadn't found anything, and neither had she, and she was gonna have to go and talk to Fin soon, and they were gonna have to brief the Captain, and they needed something, anything, to go on. They needed -
"We need Antony," Olivia and Marcus said together.
"I'll patch him into the call, hang on."
She was quiet, waiting for Marcus to finish pressing his buttons, waiting for Antony to join them. Those two, she'd known them for so long, known them back in the old days, the dark days, when they spoke a language no one heard outside the halls of the most deeply orthodox scholars anymore, when they were called by names they could barely remember, when the world felt small, and slower than this. Marcus had always been playful and Antony had always been serious, and though they had worn many names and many faces and lived in many places over the endless centuries of their lives they were still the same as she remembered, the same young men - men, for lack of a better word - who had been her family once, though she could not recall when last she'd seen either of their faces. Too long, she thought; it had been too long.
"You there, man?" Marcus said suddenly, and Olivia listened as another voice answered.
"I'm here," Antony said in his usual serious, steady voice, "though not a man, brother."
"As pedantic as ever, I see," Marcus said, laughter in his voice.
"As much fun as this is," Olivia started to say, started to try to draw them back to the topic at hand, but Antony finished for her.
"You want to know if I've found anything."
"Yes."
"Yes."
A pause then, while Olivia waited for Antony to continue, and he did not.
"Are you going to -"
"I'm simply gathering my thoughts, habibi," Antony told her. Of course he was; Antony was always gathering his thoughts. Gathering dust, more like, she thought, though she kept that to herself, just plucked impatiently at the wrinkles on her trousers and waited for him to speak.
"There's been some whispers in the Vatican," Antony began, finally. "They've been trying to keep it quiet, but you know what they say. Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead. The whispers are audible, to those who know how to listen."
"Thank you for those words of wisdom, oh great and powerful-"
"Shut up, Marcus."
"Yes, ma'am."
"As I was saying," Antony continued. "There have been a number of reported angelic visitations in Central and North America over the last five or so years. The young ladies report their experiences to the parish priests, the parish priests call their Bishops, the Bishops call Rome, Rome says keep it quiet, and they do. Miracles are spectacles, in this day and age, it's remarkable, really, that the news hasn't spread further."
"Well, the church has always had a knack for controlling the spread of information," Marcus said dryly.
"Not like this. We've all seen the stories. A grandmother sees what she thinks is the visage of Christ in a piece of toast and the thing becomes a holy relic. But there have been six sightings of an angel, and there's no articles? No feverish television coverage? It's alarming, really."
"Do we know who it is?" Olivia asked, growing impatient with the boys' banter. "The angel, I mean."
"He tells them his name is Michael. Physical descriptions are meaningless, of course; the accounts agree with one another, but we all know the face he wears will be one of his choosing, not his natural shape."
The natural of shape of angels, whatever that might be, remained a mystery, even to Olivia and the rest of the nephilim. Angels assumed a form not unlike the physical bodies of men when they walked the earth, but what they looked like beyond the mortal realm was anybody's guess. It was the sort of thing she didn't like to think about too much; far too existential for her liking.
"Has he been here in New York?"
"That's the strange thing - well, one strange thing of many. There have been no reports from New York, but obviously there has been an angel there, or else where would the nephilim child have come from? We need to learn more about the child's mother, habibi." Olivia liked that, the way Antony still, always, called her habibi, an old familiarity, a constant form of address when she changed her name the way other women changed their clothes. "We need to know where she's been, where she came from."
"She's barely left her apartment since the girl was born, and her family's all dead."
"Yes, but how? That is the question, I think. Has she always lived in the city? If you can find out where she was before the child was born, I can check your information against my list of reported angelic sightings. Perhaps there's some overlap."
"We know she met an angel at some point," Olivia protested. "We don't need to prove that, the girl proves that. We need to know where the angel is now."
"You think he had something to do with the murder?"
"I do, and I -"
"And you, dear sister, are missing the bigger question," Marcus cut in smoothly, smugly, though he did not immediately explain himself.
"Which is?"
"Is your little foundling the only one out there? Or has our heavenly friend left a trail of children in his wake?"
God damn it, he was right. Olivia was too much a cop, too focused on her own case, and she'd not thought about that, not really. What if this Michael - whoever he was - had more children out there? What if he was trying to gather them to himself? What the hell kind of game was he playing?
"Ok," Olivia said. "Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to dig into the mother's past today. Find out where she's been, and get that info to Antony. Antony, I need you to find out more about these sightings. What did the angels do or say, did they visit men or only women, are there any children born to these women after the sightings. Marcus, I need you to…do whatever it is you do. Scrape the internet, poke around in back channels. I can search our state database for similar crimes but I need you to go wide. Go back five years, look for murdered parents with young children, especially if the children were taken, get me a list."
"She does sound commanding, doesn't she?"
"You tease her too much," Antony chided Marcus gently. "It's a good plan. Shall we reconvene this time tomorrow?"
"Unless you find out something we need to know urgently, that'll work," Olivia said.
"All right, then. Off we go."
They said their farewells, and Olivia hung up the phone, her mind racing. It was a good feeling, though. Now she had a plan, and as long as she had a plan, as long as she had a purpose, she had hope.