Archangel's Blade

18

Honor had covered the distance between them as he spoke, until she stood right by his side, close enough that his shoulder touched her leg. “I sent them all back, but she didn’t take offense.” Isis had believed he wanted more, considered himself worth more. “Hunks of pure gold, jeweled swords, a cascade of treasures that would’ve made a dragon proud, began to land on the simple doorstep of the home from where I farmed the land.”

“Dmitri, I never even imagined such beautiful things.”

He looked up, saw raw fear in those familiar eyes of darkest brown. “Ingrede, you are my wife, not Isis.” Anger that she’d doubt him made his tone harsh.

“I know you won’t break your marriage vows, husband.” Trembling hands tucking the blanket around the baby. “But I’m afraid of what this angel will do to possess you.”

He’d shrugged off Ingrede’s concern, because, after all, he was a farmer, no one important. “I thought she would eventually tire of my refusals and move on.” He had been a fool, an innocent in a way he couldn’t comprehend now. “But like Michaela,” he said, naming the archangel most people considered the most beautiful woman in the world today, “Isis was used to getting anything and everything she wanted.”

Her vampires had taken him as he returned home after a trip to the markets, a sweet for Misha tucked safely in one pocket, a pretty ribbon for his wife in the other. For the baby, such a small thing she was, he had bought a piece of scented wood with which to make a rattle. He’d seen Isis’s creatures coming, had had time to give Misha his sweet, caress his sleeping daughter’s cheek, and kiss his beautiful, strong wife good-bye.

He would never forget the words she’d said to him that day, the love she had wrapped around him—though she had known he would soon be in another woman’s bed, committing a terrible betrayal of the vows he’d made to her one bright spring morning a turn of the seasons before Misha’s birth.

“Will you forgive me, Ingrede? For what I must do?”

“You fight a battle.” Her hand touching his cheek. “You do this to protect us. There is nothing to forgive.”

“If I’d said yes at the very start,” he said now, swallowing the rage and anguish that had never died, “I think Isis would’ve used, then discarded me. I could’ve gone home.” To the only woman he had ever loved, to his son, his daughter. “But because I’d made it clear that I didn’t want her, she played with me as a cat does with a mouse.” First she’d taken him to her bed, viciously pleased by the knowledge that he couldn’t say no.

“Such beautiful children you have, Dmitri. So young . . . so easily broken.”

Later, after she’d had her fill, he’d been dragged to the cold, mold-lined bowels of her great castle, where she Made him with methodical care. Only after the conversion was complete, his body stronger and more able to bear damage, had he been stripped naked and chained in a spread-eagle position, every part of him exposed. “She started with a whip tipped with razor-sharp metal.”

“Stop, Dmitri.” A hand clenching in his hair. “I can’t bear it.”

He heard the tears, was astonished by them. Honor had almost shattered in that hellhole she’d been held in for two interminable months, but according to her psych records, she’d never once cried during her months in the hospital. Not once. Her doctors had been highly concerned, worried she was internalizing her emotions, would implode. But as she knelt down on the stones in front of him and cupped his face in a way he’d allowed no woman to do for near to a thousand years, her eyes were awash in dampness.

Reaching out, he traced the path of one tear over her cheek, down to her jaw, where he caught the droplet, brought it to his mouth. The salt of it was strange, an unfamiliar thing. Dmitri hadn’t cried either. Not after the day he broke his son’s neck. “In my time,” he said, “they believed in witches. Are you a witch, Honor, that you make me say these things to you?” Causing him to rip open wounds that had stayed safely scabbed over for so long that, most of the time, he managed to forget they existed.

Her hands, so very, very gentle, continued to hold his face as she tugged him down until their foreheads touched. “I’m no witch, Dmitri. If I was, I’d know how to fix you.”

Such a strange thing to say when she was the one who’d been fractured.

Perhaps he should’ve been angry at her arrogance, but his emotions toward this hunter were nothing so simple. “Tell me.” An order.

Dropping her hands, she got to her feet and walked to stand at the very edge of the stream, the water kissing her boots as it worked its way down the slight slope and deeper into the woods. He stood, too, taking a position beside her. It took her long moments to speak, but what she said returned him to a time in which he’d lived for the blade alone.

He’d learned to fight at Raphael’s side, a simple man of the land become one who knew only the dark caress of death. Nothing else would quench the fury within him, not for decades, not for centuries. The sole mercy was that he’d been Made in a time of blood-soaked battle between immortals, his sword never lacking for fodder—that time was long gone, but Dmitri had lost none of his deadly skills.

“There was one man,” Honor began, staring out over the water but seeing nothing of the spring green wood shot with golden light. “The one in charge.” Blindfolded, the sole thing she’d been able to sense of him had been the pine of his aftershave . . . and the ugliness of his presence. “He taunted me with the possibility that I might be able to convince him to let me go.”

Instead of shutting up, she’d made the decision to keep talking, because her voice had been the only weapon she’d had. “As he walked out the first day, he slapped me so hard my ears rang.” She’d been stunned by the unexpected blow, the inside of her cheek bleeding into her mouth. “I didn’t see him for what might’ve been an entire day.” She’d spent it naked and bound on the concrete floor, tethered to a metal ring set into the concrete.

Furious in her determination, she’d spent the entire day attempting to free just one of her hands, had even made the conscious choice to try to break her wrist. But the restraints had been too tight, too well constructed.

“The next time, he apologized, loosened the tension in the chains after he hung me up from my arms once again; and he brought me something to drink.” She’d gulped it with focused greed, aware she’d need every advantage if she was going to survive this. “He wanted to condition me to the point where I would begin to be grateful to him for allowing me to live.” But Honor had gone through the compulsory and rigorous psychological warfare course at the Academy, been prepared for the eventuality in which she might find herself a hostage.

Even that might not have been enough, given the duration of her captivity, but she’d also grown up across thirty different foster homes. Some had been good; most livable; others horrors. But the experience had taught her one thing—always, always look beneath the surface for a person’s true face. “I don’t know how many days he took that tack. I lost my sense of time fairly quickly.”

Since her prison could only be reached by an internal staircase, she hadn’t even been able to count on a burst of light when the door opened, to orient herself. “I tried to play along, but he figured out I was manipulating him.” She forced herself to tell Dmitri the rest. It was the first time she’d spoken of the ordeal to anyone, and that it was Dmitri . . . but maybe it was always going to be him.

“He fed from me, from my throat. His hand . . . he touched me.” In a foul travesty of a lover’s caresses, the gentleness of his touch making it no less a violation. “Afterward, he whispered to me that he knew he’d been my first.” That, too, was true. She’d always had a revulsion against allowing anyone to feed from her. It hadn’t been a mere dislike, but a deep, nauseating abhorrence of the act, inexplicable in its intensity. “I think that’s why he chose me.”

“Planning,” Dmitri said, his voice glacial, “and the patience to carry it through. Put that together with his knowledge of the appetites of Valeria, Tommy, and the others, and it means we’re looking for a strong vampire of at least three hundred. Anyone younger would find it difficult to gain their trust.”

“Yes.” His pragmatic manner made it easier, made her feel a hunter, not a victim. “I got that impression from his speech—it was modern for the most part, but he’d occasionally use old-fashioned words or phrasing.”

“How did he dress?”

Honor’s gut clenched as her mind brought back the sensation of her attacker pressing against her, his aroused body making what little food she’d had rise into her throat. “Double-breasted suits.” She could still feel the buttons cutting into her skin.

“That would seem to eliminate several of the old ones from the equation”—no hint of emotion—“but I won’t disregard them just yet.”

“Yes, he’s clever, could’ve altered his normal style.” Seeing the banded tail of a Cooper’s hawk riding a thermal wind overhead, she followed its progress over the trees. “The house where they found me, it was in the middle of an abandoned housing project about an hour out of Stamford.”

“I read the file.”

She shifted to face him . . . and almost stumbled backward at the untrammeled rage in those dark eyes burning with black flame. “Dmitri.”

He didn’t respond, his hair lifting in the breeze that whipped through the trees, exposing the brutal lines of a face of such sensual beauty, she understood how an angel had hungered to possess him. But then, that angel had hurt him—the idea of it made an incandescent rage form in Honor’s soul, so deep it was as if it had been a part of her since the moment of her birth.

“I need to return to Manhattan,” Dmitri said at last, turning to head back in the direction of the clearing where the chopper waited. He looked beyond remote at that moment, a man who followed no rules but his own. But he waited for her at the edge of the wood, shortened his stride to match her own. She didn’t make the mistake of thinking that meant she had any kind of a claim on him. Whatever it was that drew them to one another, it was a fragile, almost brittle, construct.

Dmitri was anything but that; a man who had been formed in rivers of blood.

Yet once he’d lived in a small village, made his living from the land. A simple life, but one for which he had turned down the offers of an angel renowned for her beauty. Most men would have accepted such an invitation, if only for the novelty of it. Perhaps he’d been too proud to be an angel’s fleeting plaything . . . or perhaps his heart had already belonged to another.

A shimmer over her skin, a sense of indisputable rightness.

However, she swallowed the question on the tip of her tongue—about the woman whose memory had brought an intimate cadence to his voice the one and only time he’d mentioned her. Not just because this wasn’t the right time or place to ask, but because whatever the answer, it could be nothing good. Not when Dmitri walked alone. “Any word on the tattoo?” she asked instead.

“The three master tattooists we consulted were of the opinion that, regardless of the surface intricacy, it was an amateur job.”

“Damn.” It would make the doer so much more difficult to identify. “And those who might be loyal to Isis?”

“Her name appears dead, forgotten.” Turning to face her, he stopped in the shade of a tree with almost dainty branches hung with shivering leaves, the area around them relatively clear. “Whoever it is that seeks to resurrect her, he’s kept his intentions secret.”

“Devotion?” Her eyes locked with his, and in them she saw a thousand secrets, potent and swathed in velvet shadows formed of violence and pain. “If he—or she—has revered Isis this long, he must consider her his goddess.” Too precious to stain with the scrutiny of those who might look on her with a more jaundiced eye.

“Perhaps.” Not breaking the intimacy of the visual connection, Dmitri touched his hand to the side of her face.

It was no longer strange, no longer jarring, the rough heat of his skin against her own. And though her heartbeat accelerated, it did so as any woman’s would at the caress of a man so sinfully compelling. The decision instinctive, she cupped his face in her hands when, an erotic rain of bitter chocolate and liquid gold cascading over her senses, he angled his head and bent to press his lips to her own.

A flicker of black, of nothingness . . . and she was on the other side of the clearing. Glancing down at the blade in her grip, then at Dmitri, she bit back a scream. “How badly did I cut you?” A harsh question, twisted through with anger and despair and a wrenching sense of failure.

He held up a hand painted red by a diagonal cut across his palm. “Nothing major.”

The same injury might well have cost a human man the use of the nerves in his hand. Shoving the knife back into her boot after wiping it on fallen leaves, she thrust her hands into her unbound hair, her chest heaving as if she’d run a mile. “Well, that answers that, doesn’t it?” The divide between dreams and reality was a gaping chasm.

A single thick drop of blood running down his fingers, to hit the ground in crimson silence, Dmitri raised an eyebrow. “It tells me only that I need to be faster.”

Her laugh was jerky, bitter. “You are fast.” A vampire of his age and strength could snap her neck before she ever saw it coming. “You’re letting me hurt you.”

“No, Honor. I don’t let anyone hurt me.” Black silk across her skin. “I was, however, looking at your lips, not your knife hand. Next time, I’ll strip you of your weapons first.”

The sheer arrogance of the statement cut through the barbed ugliness of her emotions to incite a languid heat in her veins. “Yeah? Well, maybe next time, I’ll cut off that hand,” she said, though the sight of his blood, it did something to her, birthing a visceral repudiation.

“So long as you understand”—stalking closer, his finger brushing her lower lip, smoke tangible as a lover’s touch stroking her in places that made her gasp—“that there will be a next time.”

Honor didn’t know what she would’ve said to that announcement, because a strong wind swept over them at that instant, to be followed by an angel with wings of white-gold landing a bare three feet away. Her heart stuttered—most mortals who met the Archangel of New York ended up dead.

That was when eyes of absolute, unrelenting blue fell on her, beautiful beyond bearing . . . and utterly without mercy. The moment hung suspended in time, and she knew she was being judged. Her death, she thought, would mean as little to him as that of an insect. Dear God. How could Elena call this inhuman being her mate, take him to her bed?

“Raphael.”

The archangel shifted his attention to Dmitri, his feathers sliding against one another as he folded back his wings. “There’s been a second incident.”

Honor, drawing in air to ease a painful chest, snapped up her head as Dmitri said, “Another public location?”

“No. The victim was left in a warehouse run by a vampire who still has ten years to go on his Contract.”

“No chance of the body not being immediately reported to the Tower.” Dmitri spoke to the archangel with a familiarity that made it clear their relationship was nothing so simple as lord and liege. “You could’ve contacted me without flying here.”

Raphael glanced at Honor. “Leave us.”

No one had ever before spoken to her in that tone. “I might,” she said, not certain where she found the guts to challenge this being who made every tiny hair on her body rise in an alarm so primal, it came from the part of her brain that was without sentience or reason, “be able to help.”

The Archangel of New York looked at her for a long, chilling moment. “Perhaps. But that is not for you to decide.”

Dmitri’s lips tugged upward a fraction at whatever he saw on her face. “Go, Honor. I’ll make sure you get to examine the body.”

It was galling to realize she’d been dismissed, an overly ambitious child, but she was smart enough to know it was nothing personal. Raphael might have taken a hunter for his consort, but he wasn’t, and never would be, anything close to mortal. Turning on her heel, she headed for the stream once more. As for Dmitri—she’d settle that account later.