by Nalini Singh
“Such innocence.” Jason stepped to the very edge of the balcony. “Astaad,” he said, “there’s something there. Maya hasn’t been able to get any details but she’s working on it.”
Astaad was the Archangel of the Pacific Isles and one who did not appear to play political games. “I thought his behavior was connected to Caliane’s awakening.” There were always side effects when an archangel rose to consciousness, and Raphael’s mother was one of the most ancient of Ancients.
“It may be nothing, rumors begun by another source.” Eyes on the city, dazzling under the sunshine, he said, “You’re older than me, Dmitri.”
“Only by three hundred years.” A joke between two men who had lived longer than most could hope to imagine.
“I asked Elena what it was like to be mortal. She said time is precious in a way an immortal will simply never know.”
“She’s right.” Dmitri had been both, and if he could go back in time, destroy Isis before she ever came near him and his own, he would do so in a heartbeat, though it would mean he would die in a few short decades. “I felt more as a mortal than I have in the centuries since.”
“Will you love me when I’m fat and unwieldy with our babe?”
He put his hand on the curve of her belly, touched his lips to her eyelids, the tip of her nose, her lips. “I will love you even when I am dust on the wind.”
Honor watched Dmitri walk to stand beside the blackwinged angel and hissed out a breath at how close he was to the unprotected edge. Unlike the angel, he had no wings should he fall, and yet he stood there with a confidence that said he wasn’t the least worried about the eventuality.
A change in the air at her back.
Swiveling, she discovered the vampire with the wraparound shades in the doorway. “Dmitri’s outside.”
He headed through to the balcony without a word, just as the black-winged angel stepped off the edge. Those incredible wings disappeared for a moment before he rose up at dizzying speed. On any other day, she would’ve followed the trajectory of his flight, but today her attention was locked on Dmitri—whose face turned to granite after hearing whatever it was the other vampire had to say.
Stalking in, he said, “Leave that. We’re heading out.”
An arrogant command, but she read the tension in the air, made the connection. “Did you find the rest of the body?” Even as she spoke, she was removing the data card from the laptop in case she couldn’t immediately return to retrieve it.
“Yes.” Dmitri’s phone rang as they entered the elevator, but clearly the signal didn’t drop because he had a quick, curt conversation.
Meanwhile, the other vampire turned to look at her. He said nothing, and those mirrored sunglasses made it impossible for her to get a reading on him. Wanting to distract herself from the fact that she was trapped in a steel cage with two deadly predators, she said, “Sunglasses in the dark as a fashion statement went out with perms.”
He flashed his teeth—but not his fangs—at her. “You don’t want to see what’s behind the shades, sweetheart.” The last word was a mockery of an endearment that made every hair on her body rise in defensive warning.
“Venom.”
The vampire turned to face the front again, but the corners of his lips continued to tug up at the corners. “You want me to drive?”
“No, we’ll take the Ferrari. Take another car so I can leave you there.”
“I might make it faster on foot and it’ll give me a chance to observe the crowd without them being aware of it.”
“Go.”
Stepping out into the artificial light of an underground garage had never felt so good—she was fairly certain that without Dmitri to hold his leash, Venom would’ve shown her his fangs in more ways than one. “Now I know you’re important,” she said when the currently open-topped Ferrari proved to be parked in the spot nearest the elevator.
“If it took you this long, Honor, you’re dimmer than you look.”
As a taunt, it was only mildly irritating, especially when it was clear Dmitri wasn’t paying full attention. Sliding onto the butter-soft leather of the passenger seat, she looked over to where Venom had exited the garage. “What’s with the sunglasses?”
“You haven’t heard? He’s been in the city long enough to have come into contact with a number of hunters.”
“I didn’t work in the country much . . . before.” She took her first real breath in what felt like an hour as Dmitri drove them out of the secure Tower zone and into the music of Manhattan—complete with beeping horns, yelled-out insults, and a thousand cell phone conversations taking place at once. “Had no reason to interact with Tower personnel when I was in the city.”
“In that case”—an amused tone—“I’ll leave it to Venom to surprise you.”
The city picked up in volume the farther they got from the Tower. New York had overwhelmed her when she’d first arrived—fresh off a bus from North Dakota. This wasn’t home—no place was home, really—but at least the Guild was here. Ashwini and Sara lived here. So did Demarco, Ransom, and Vivek. Friends who had searched for her with relentless persistence, who would die for her if it came down to it. That was something. And it gave her an anchor when everything else was spiraling out of control. “Where did they find the body?”
“In Times Square.”
Disbelief was followed by a sudden mental connection. “The same spot where Raphael punished that vampire?” The incident was legend. The archangel had broken every single bone in the vampire’s body, then left him in the center of Times Square for three long hours. Cold, calculated, brutal, it had been a punishment no one would ever forget.
At the time, she’d felt pity. Now she knew exactly how sadistic the almost-immortals could be, their minds capable of thinking of the most depraved, dehumanizing of horrors. Now she understood that Raphael’s punishment might have been nothing but a warning.
“Close enough.” Swerving around a delivery truck, Dmitri ignored the cussing of a cabdriver—who bit off his tirade midword—and stared at a suited business executive about to jaywalk across the road. She froze in place, her coffee dropping unheeded to the asphalt. “Condition of the body parts says he wasn’t dropped from the air,” he said after they flew past the woman, “so the pieces had to be carried in.”
Parts. Pieces.
Not such a surprise, given the decapitated head. “Surveillance?” she asked as they hit the edge of the wonderland of flashing billboards and crushing humanity that was Times Square.
“It’s being pulled.” Parking illegally in the middle of a street that had been blocked off, the crowd pressing at the police cordon, he got out. Everyone within a foot of him moved back . . . and kept moving as he walked through to the scene.
Honor followed in his wake, saw people’s eyes take in the knife strapped to her thigh. The tense expressions disappeared, to be replaced by wary smiles. Hunters were generally well enough liked by the general public, since folks knew that if it all went to shit and the vampires bathed the streets in blood, it would be the Guild that would ride to the rescue. Even the weaker vamps in the crowd gave her friendly nods—law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear from the Guild.
A minute later, she ducked under the police tape to find herself looking at a scene more suited to a slaughterhouse than the chaotic, vivid center of one of the most well-known cities in the world. A thousand scents surrounded her—the sweet, sweet taste of sugar from the chocolatier across the street; coffee, bitter and rich, from the place on the corner; tobacco smoke and car exhaust mixed with the sour tang of human sweat—but none of it could overwhelm the ripe, wet smell of rotting flesh.
7
The police had left the majority of the body parts in the large sports bags in which they’d been found, but even a cursory glance at the top half of the torso—which appeared to have fallen out of a bag, likely when someone got curious—showed that the vampire had been dismembered with the same hacking slices she’d noted along the neck.
“Either someone was really angry or they just didn’t give a damn.”
Dmitri crouched down by the torso. “Don’t ascribe human motives to this, Honor.”
Memories of slaps that had split her lip as a child, carefully aimed punches where teachers and social workers wouldn’t see the bruises, the slice of her knife into fatty flesh as the bedroom door opened late one night. “Humans can be as vicious.” She wasn’t sorry for what she’d done to protect herself and others as a child—she’d decided the first time a foster “father” looked at her in a way no man should look at a child that she’d never be a defenseless victim.
And she hadn’t been . . . until the basement and the softly mocking laughter as elegant, manicured hands roamed her naked body.
Fuck them, she thought, the anger that had awoken inside her the previous night blazing ever brighter. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t give the bastards the satisfaction of seeing her curl up and die.
“Yes,” Dmitri said as she let that vow settle into her very bones, “but this has the touch of an immortal.” His hair gleamed blue-black under the sunshine, a sensual invitation. Her fingers were halfway to it before she realized what she was doing.
Face burning, she retracted her hand, clenching it into a fist. What was wrong with her? Forget the fact that they were about as much in public as it was possible to get; she was certain he was capable of doing things to her that would make the basement seem like child’s play.
And still she wanted to touch him, until she could almost feel the cool silk of his hair sliding through her fingers.
“Have you seen anything like this before?” she asked, giving herself a hard mental slap to snap the seductive thread of compulsion.
“Dismemberment isn’t new,” he said with the cool pragmatism of a man who had lived through the dark ages of both mortal and immortal. “But this isn’t about how the body was torn apart—that, I think, was a practical exercise.”
Easier to transport, to leave in such a public place. “So it’s about the spectacle.”
Dmitri’s nod sent strands of hair sliding across his forehead. “That and a challenge. Why else go to the trouble of dumping the body here, in the heart of Raphael’s territory?”
She saw it then, akin to pieces of an ancient language coming together in her mind to form a perfect sentence. “But Raphael is famously not here right now, Dmitri. You are.”
He went motionless, in a way a human being simply couldn’t. It was as if every part of him went quiet. He didn’t breathe, didn’t so much as blink. “Very good, Honor. Seems like it was a good idea to keep you around.”
Perhaps it was a taunt. Or perhaps it was nothing but the arrogance of an almost-immortal who had lived centuries, seen empires rise and fall, fought on blood-soaked fields of battle, and seen a million, billion human lives extinguished under the inexorable march of time. It was a thought both fascinating and disconcerting. Unsure why she was so . . . disturbed by the idea, she rose to examine the other body parts as well as she could—she was no pathologist, but she’d had the basic training all hunters received.
The flesh had begun to decompose, maggots crawling in several of the pieces. “Not refrigerated, even though it appears as if the body was dismembered soon after death,” she said. “If this dump was planned—and it had to have been, for so many pieces to have been left here at one time—I’d have expected the murderer or murderers to have taken better care of the body.”
“Why?” Rising to his feet, Dmitri stripped off and disposed of the gloves he’d grabbed from one of the cops. “The whole point was to create a show. I’m fairly certain hunks of human meat crawling with maggots had the right impact.”
He was right. It wasn’t hard to guess that the scent of decomposition had been critical to the early discovery of the remains—and that spoke not of rampant madness but of a sly kind of intelligence. “I’d like to know if the pathologist finds any other markings.” The more text she had to work with, the easier the decoding process.
“I’ll arrange it.” He took out a cell phone. “Do you want the skin or will photographs do?”
Such a beautiful male. Such a pitiless question.
“Photographs will do for now,” she said, wondering if he was capable of the raw depths of human emotion any longer, this creature formed for seduction and honed in blood, “but they should preserve the skin if possible.”
“It’ll be done.”
Not long afterward, he drove her to the Academy. “Your quarters are here?”
She shook her head. “I moved out this morning.” Another step out of the pit, another “fuck you” to the bastards who had hurt her.
Dmitri’s smile was slow, dangerous. “Good.”
Her hindbrain screamed a warning even as her abdomen clenched in visceral sensual awareness. “The building has security.”
He raised an eyebrow.
Yeah, she didn’t think that would stop him either.
Getting out, she took in the picture he made in that car, a gorgeous, sexy creature, his skin kissed to warm perfection by the sun, the stunning blue of his shirt an exotic contrast. “You look like some rich playboy.” If said playboys were sharks.
“And?”
“And playboys prefer the glossy model type, in bed and out. It’s a rule.”
“While you’re in the library, look up a painting titled Asleep by Gadriel,” he said, slipping on a pair of sunglasses. “That’s my idea of the perfect woman.”
Of course it was the first thing she did—and felt an electric current of wicked heat singe her blood when the computer screen filled with the nude image of a couple asleep in bed, the man on his back, the woman lying on top of him, his hand fisted in her abundant ebony hair. There were tangled sheets aplenty, but none covered the woman’s honey-colored skin. Her heavy breasts were crushed against the man’s chest, his free hand lying proprietarily on her lush bottom, her body all curves and softness.
But for the lack of muscle that underlay every hunter’s form, it could’ve been a painting of Honor.
Returning to the Tower with his mind full of images of what Honor would look like in place of Gadriel’s model, Dmitri headed up to his office. “What have you got?” he asked Venom when the vampire returned from his duties overseeing the removal and transportation of the body parts. His question, however, had nothing to do with the morning’s find.
“The vampires who took Honor were clever,” Venom answered, removing his sunglasses to reveal eyes no human would ever, ever possess. “They used weaker, younger vamps to do the dirty work, and it was those vamps the hunters cornered when they went in.”
Dmitri knew the two survivors had been shot and sliced all to hell but left alive. However, according to the vampire who’d had charge of the case till now, neither had provided any information of value. The mastermind behind the kidnapping had kept them scrupulously out of the loop.
Dmitri decided he needed to pay them a personal visit. This was his hunt now. “Keep on it.”
His private line rang just as Venom left. Answering, he found himself talking to Dahariel, Astaad’s second. “What news of Caliane?” the angel asked.
The query wasn’t unusual, given the fact that the oldest of the archangels was allowing only Raphael and those he called his own through the shield around the newly risen city of Amanat. “Concerned with helping her people make the transition from sleep to wakefulness.” Those people, mortals and—it had been discovered—a number of immortals, had slept more than a millennium beside their goddess in a city of stone gray now sparkling under the light of a foreign sun.
From what Raphael had told him in their last conversation, the residents of Amanat were content to re-create and live in the time in which they had gone to sleep, filling the gardens with blooms, the fountains with water. They would not hear of modern things, had no curiosity to explore a mountainous new homeland far from the place where they had last walked.
“She holds them in thrall,” Raphael had sai
d of his mother. “But she did not sing them to it—their devotion is true.”
“Does she wish for more territory?” Dahariel asked in a tone some would call emotionless, but that Dmitri recognized as icily practical.
“No. Land, it seems, has never been the source of Caliane’s madness.” The archangel had sung the adult populations of two bustling cities into the sea in order to protect the world from war, creating “a silence so deep, it echoed across eternity”—words Jessamy had written in her histories of Caliane’s reign.
“I spoke to Jessamy,” Dahariel said in an uncanny echo. “There has never been an awakening such as this.”
And so no one knew the rules of engagement. “We’re immortals, Dahariel. Time isn’t our enemy.” Better to wait, to learn the truth of Caliane’s sanity or lack thereof before preparing for a war that would drench the world in blood, turn the rivers red, make the sea a silent graveyard. “How’s Michaela?” Astaad’s second was the archangel Michaela’s lover, a clash of loyalties that made Dmitri wonder exactly who Dahariel served.
“Some women,” Dahariel said in that same hard tone devoid of any hint of humanity, “get under a man’s skin until digging them out makes you bleed.”
Hanging up, Dmitri wondered at the undertone of violence in Dahariel’s statement. Dmitri knew about loving a woman, but he’d never wanted to rip Ingrede from his heart, no matter the associated pain. Favashi hadn’t ever made a place for herself that deep. And Honor . . . yes, she was getting under his skin, but it was a compulsion that would end when he took her to bed, had her naked and writhing beneath him.
But first he would fulfill his promise, lay the screaming, bloodied remains of her abusers at her feet. Vengeance, as he’d told her, could taste sweet indeed.
“I will give you your freedom, never look your way again.” Attempting to be regal even when her eyes fell on the blade in his hand. “Wealth beyond imagining, it’ll be yours.”
