Page 135 of Priest

I took the stairs two at a time until motion broke at the landing.

A man was coming down with Blue beside him.

For one suspended instant my mind refused to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. Dark hair. Familiar height. The shape of his face wrong only because it shouldn’t exist at all. Blue looked pale and unsteady, her hand braced against the wall, fear still all over her even as she moved.

My gun came up before the thought finished forming.

He saw it and stopped immediately.

Blue’s head snapped up. “No!”

Her voice hit me harder than the impossible sight in front of me.

“Priest, don’t!” she cried, breathless and wild. “He saved me. He came for me. He’s not with Joker.”

I should have lowered the weapon then.

I didn’t.

Because the dead were not supposed to come walking down stairwells with my woman at their side, and the face in front of me belonged to a brother I had buried in every way that mattered.

Archangel came up behind me, hard and fast, one of his men close on his heels. The second his eyes landed on the man above me, his expression darkened.

“Shit,” he muttered. Then, sharper, to the man himself: “You were told not to be here.”

The man’s jaw shifted, but he didn’t argue. He only looked at me.

Archangel’s hand landed briefly on my shoulder, not to calm me but to anchor me. “Stand down,” he said. “He’s with us.”

I lowered the gun because Blue was staring at me like one wrong move would shatter something she had barely survived, and because the certainty in Archangel’s voice left little room for anything else.

Still, my hand shook.

The man beside her shifted, and that was when I saw the torn sleeve, the dark smear of blood along his upper arm. He held himself like it didn’t matter. Like Blue staying upright was the only thing he had room to care about.

Blue came the rest of the way down the stairs as fast as she could, one hand under the swell of her belly, the other reaching for me. The moment she hit my chest, I caught her, my hands going to her face, her shoulders, her belly, needing to know she was whole and real and here. Her body was trembling hard enough to transfer through me.

“I’ve got you,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I was telling her or myself.

Behind her, the man I had once called brother came down the last few steps more slowly. Up close, he looked older than memory. Harder around the eyes. Leaner. Blood marked his sleeve, but he barely seemed to notice it. He was real in a way that made my head feel suddenly too full.

“It’s a long story,” he said, voice rough and maddeningly familiar. “Short version, the feds staged my death. I’ve been in WITSEC with Fallen Angels.”

I stared at him.

There were a hundred questions clawing at the inside of my throat. None of them made it out.

Because Blue made a sound I had never heard from her before.

It was small and strangled and terrified.

Her body tightened against mine, then she bent forward sharply, fingers clutching at my shirt. I looked down instinctively and saw the clear spill spreading over the concrete beneath her feet.

For one stupid second my brain refused to process it.

Then she lifted her face to me, eyes wide with pain and dawning alarm.

“The baby,” she gasped. “I’m going into labor.”