McKenna did not scream.

It happened so fucking fast; he heard the sound of the door shattering, blasting inwards with the force of a bomb, with a sound not unlike the explosions of IEDs he recalled from his tour overseas, and when he heard that sound, his body moved on instinct. Fast, lightning fast, faster than he could think or rationalize, his body moved; his body knew better than his head what was needed, what to do next. It was muscle memory, or something like it, some deep, primal piece of his subconscious, buried so far he'd never be able to touch it, taking over in the moment he most needed salvation.

His body moved; he was holding McKenna by the hand, and he spun, fast, dove for the ground with her in his grasp, rolled them both so that the sofa was between them and the doorway, covered McKenna's body with his and ducked his head to his chest. The speed with which he'd moved was all but violent, and he'd have to worry, later, if McKenna had been hurt in the scramble to bring her to safety, but a broken wrist was better than a bullet wound. Part of him was braced for her screaming, prepared already to ignore her pleas and wriggling and simply hold her captive beneath the bulk of him, but she did not try to escape his grasp, and she did not scream, or cry, or make a single sound, and instead lay motionless beneath him, paralyzed by fear.

Not that he could blame her; he was scared out of his fucking mind, too.

There were bullets flying through the air above him, maybe even flying through the couch cushions, but he was low down, as flat as he could go, and McKenna was lower still, and covered by him, and there was no way, he thought, there was no way a bullet could go through the couch and him and still cause her serious harm; surely his body would slow it down enough to save her. McKenna was protect, as safe as he could make her in that moment.

But Olivia wasn't safe behind the couch. Olivia wasn't tucked up beneath his chest, her face buried in the crook of his neck. Olivia was there, on her own, caught between whatever nightmare had come bursting through the doorway and the place where Elliot was lying, and he couldn't remember if her gun was still on her hip and he wasn't even sure it would matter, anyway. Whoever - whatever - had just broken into his apartment, they had the element of surprise, must have caught Olivia on the back foot, and they were shooting, shooting, bullets ricocheting everywhere, and he couldn't tell if there were two guns, or just one, if the shooter was coming closer or falling back; the cacophony was deafening, defeating, and he couldn't do anything, because his own gun was in a safe in the bedroom and it was too far away for him to reach it and he couldn't leave McKenna alone to try to make a mad dash for it and he damn sure wasn't gonna try to carry her across the apartment with a hailstorm of bullets cascading around them. He was trapped, and his only option was to play defense, and hope that Liv would prevail.

There was no way she could, though. How could she survive such a viscous onslaught, when she had been barefoot and tired and utterly unprepared for such horror? He'd seen her survive one bullet, but two? A dozen? How many shots would it take, to bring down a nephilim? How many times had she been hit already?

His heart was screaming in his chest and his ears were ringing and McKenna was silent and suddenly there rose a great and terrible voice upon the air, a scream the likes of which he had never heard before, so loud it made the windows rattle in their casings, so loud it damn near stopped his heart, and just like that the gunfire ceased. For a moment all was still; for the length of a heartbeat an impossible, gut wrenching silence descended upon them while the burning smell of gunpowder danced on the air.

"Oh," a voice said. A man's voice, from the sound of it, rich and threatening; the voice of the shooter, though Elliot did not dare raise his head above the sofa to look.

"You're one of them," the man continued, his tone dripping with derision.

"I am," Olivia answered defiantly.

"Why do you waste your life pretending to be human?" the man asked, curious, maybe, but judgmental most of all. "You are so much more than they could ever comprehend. You are so much better than they are. These men, they are like little children, fumbling through the darkness. You could be their queen, if you wanted."

"What the fuck makes you think that's what I'd want?"

The stranger laughed.

"I suppose it doesn't matter what you want. What matters is what I want. Give me the child, little one. Don't make this harder than it has to be."

The sound of one single footstep, a boot heel on laminate, creaked from the other side of the couch, but there was only one; Olivia must have done something to make the stranger stop in his tracks.

"You really, really don't want to try me, Michael," Olivia said.

It must have been the angel. The stranger who had broken down Elliot's door, who was trying to kill them all, trying to take McKenna, he must have been the same angel who'd killed McKenna's mother, who'd started all this chaos. Olivia must have known, though how she knew Elliot could not begin to guess; he was alone, down there on the floor, out of sight, unable to come to her aid, unable even to watch.

"You are a brave one, aren't you," Michael said. "You aren't afraid of hell?"

"No," she said. "Are you?"

"No," Michael laughed.

"Good," Olivia said darkly, grimly. "Let's go there together." And then Elliot heard her move, as if approaching Michael; he knew it was her, because he'd know her footsteps anywhere.

No -

The word swelled through Elliot's mind, not so much a coherent thought as it was a great and towering sense of no, a desperation to stop it, to prevent it from happening, to scream, to end whatever had begun in the middle of his apartment before it tore Olivia away from him. No, a feeling and not a word, a negation in every possible sense, recoiling from the implication of Olivia's words, recoiling in horror, and even as that no drowned out his other senses, he heard it, the scrambling of feet, the landing of blows, and then the scream again, the same, but different, and then the flapping of wings, and then a terrible black shadow flew over him and burst through the window beside the TV, and disappeared into the night.

That was good enough for him; the threat was gone - for now; he could not say how long they would be safe, only knew that they needed to move, now - and so he leapt to his feet, hauling McKenna with him, and looked for Liv.

She would have been impossible to miss.

The shell of the door remained, the door itself in splinters across the floor, and Olivia stood in the square of empty space that served as a foyer, stood, still, between the doorway and the sofa. Stood, somehow, was still standing, was still on her feet, was still breathing, and the relief he felt when he saw her was so profound his knees nearly buckled.

On the heels of that relief came another emotion, a feeling unlike anything he had ever known, a feeling that made him think of the saints, a feeling like the ecstasy of touching the face of God, a feeling like awe, in a way he had never before experienced it. There was Olivia, standing, but there was something else, too, something else sharing the same space, the same body as Olivia, something she had never truly let him see before. He had known Olivia the woman, but this was Olivia the nephilim, the mighty, the holy, the damned, and she was righteous.

At some point in the scuffle her wings had burst through her shirt, left it tattered and torn, and now they stretched proudly behind her, blood red and vibrant as rubies dripping from the glittering whiteness of her feathers. There were bullet holes in her shirt, her pants, blood all over her skin, but she was standing, still. However many times Michael had shot her it had not been enough to put her down.

There were signs, here and there, of the struggle, forensics left behind, evidence Elliot knew how to interpret after so many years on the job. Micahel had begun shooting towards the sofa, towards Elliot, but Olivia - she had been armed, after all, and she had fired more than her fair share of shots - had diverted his attention, let him to the kitchen, where she had traded her gun for the biggest knife in the block, eight inches long, three inches wide, sharp as sin, still clutched in her hand, still dripping blood. Hers, maybe, but maybe Michael's; it was impossible to say.

She was standing, Olivia, bloodied but defiant, unbent, and there was glory in her, in those vibrant, powerful wings, in the knife she clutched in her hand, in the fire that burned in her dark eyes. She was standing, and she was the most devastatingly beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his entire goddamn life, and he could not speak, looking at her, could hardly breathe, could only gaze upon her in a reverent, shaken sort of wonder.

"Are you ok?" she asked him urgently, quietly, letting the knife clatter to the floor as she approached him, and the sound of her voice, the sound of his partner's voice, returned him to himself, a little.

"Yeah," he said. "McKenna? Are you ok, sweetheart?"

He was holding the girl on his hip, and he could feel her breathing, could feel her little arms wrapped around his neck, clinging to him, and when he asked his question he could feel her nod.

"We have to go," Olivia said. "Everybody on the block probably heard that, and local cops are gonna be here any second. We can't explain any of this to them and we can't risk them seeing her. We have to go."

"Wait, Liv, we gotta-"

"I know," she said. "I know you wanna talk about Cragen and Kathy and the job and your stuff and your phone and all the shit we need and where we're going but there's no fucking time. We have to leave, now."

The choice in front of him was a perilous one. His years of training as a police officer, as a Marine before that, as the son of a cop before that, told him that running now was a bad fucking idea. Whichever cops responded to this call would know whose apartment had been hit, would see the blood everywhere. They'd look for him, would use his credit cards, his car, his phone to track him, and they'd talk to Kathy, and scare the shit out of her, probably, and probably at least one of his neighbors had seen a pretty, dark-haired woman walk into his apartment, and Cragen was gonna notice if Liv didn't come into work tomorrow, and this was insane.

But Michael wanted to take McKenna, by any means necessary, and Elliot didn't really work for Cragen any more, and Olivia was telling him to go.

They went.