Archangel's Blade gh-4

by Nalini Singh

  “Looks like he got attacked by a dog.” The young male’s neck was shredded, as if it had been gnawed on.

  Santiago grunted. “Yeah, except the only places he’s been gnawed are the neck and the inner thigh.”

  The carotid and the femoral arteries.

  Leaning in close, she visually examined both wounds. The victim’s pants were bunched around his ankles, but he still had on his underpants, so the attack had been about the blood—though his attacker had wasted a great deal of it, from what she saw around the body. “I’m no pathologist, but looks to me like the wound is too degraded to determine if this was a vampire.” The fang marks had been obliterated in the mess of flesh.

  “One of the hunter-born could scent the skin,” she said, “see if they catch a vampiric scent. Ransom’s in the city, not sure about Elena—I’ll call the Guild, ask if one of them can swing by.” Everything about this scene felt off. Another hunter’s input would be welcome. “Blood splatter makes it clear he was killed here,” she murmured after making the request. “Pretty public at night.”

  “Yeah, but this street’s almost all daytime businesses, no restaurants, one hole-in-the-wall bar,” Santiago said, salt-dusted eyebrows heavy over eyes of faded brown. “Bar staff had cleaned up and were out of here by three thirty, according to the manager I just woke up. Launderette down the street opens at six thirty. Given the time our anonymous tipster called in the body, I’d put money on this going down between four and five.”

  “Before it would’ve been light.” Honor nodded. “Otherwise, there’s probably a few folks who’d cut through to the subway entrance.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have my men canvass the area tomorrow morning, see if we can catch any of the regular foot traffic.” He looked up as a shadow swept across them.

  An instant later, an angel landed beside them, her wings the most stunning black, segueing to midnight blue and indigo, then to a gleaming shade that reminded Honor of the dawn, until the primaries were a shimmering white-gold. Tall, with lithe muscle over her frame, Elena had the kind of grace that came only with knowing how to move your body against opponents who were usually stronger and faster.

  Honor had seen the photos, of course, but the reality of a fellow hunter with wings was surreal. “I know I’m staring,” she said into the hush that had fallen, “but, Elena, you have wings.”

  Elena laughed, her eyes appearing silver in this light, her damp, near-white hair pulled back into a neat French braid. “I still wake up surprised some days,” she said, her face losing its shine when she turned toward Santiago. “I’ll check the scent.” Those incredible wings spread out on the dirty street as she knelt on the asphalt.

  Elena didn’t appear to worry about it, peeling back the tarp to examine the neck, then the thigh wound. “No scent on him that might possibly be vampiric.” Her voice was decisive. “I’d expect something strong, given how long the attacker had to have spent with the victim.” She glanced up at Honor, frown lines marring the deep gold of her skin. “This one’s weird. Human with filed-down teeth, maybe?”

  Filed-down teeth.

  It was the cue Honor’s mind needed, flicking back to a short article in a Guild newsletter she’d read while in the hospital. “Santiago, can we move him just enough that I can see the back of his right shoulder?”

  “Yeah, no problem.” Placing his gloved hands under the body, he shifted it to the side. Elena quickly gloved up, too, so she could help hold the body as Honor went around to push up the victim’s T-shirt. Neither the cop nor the winged hunter said a word, but Honor could taste the tension on her tongue, it was so pervasive.

  Deciding to pretend she hadn’t noticed what was clearly a private rift, she managed to bare the victim’s shoulder. “Damn, I didn’t really think I’d find it.”

  Two heads twisted around to examine her discovery. It was a small tattoo—the letter V in a ring with a wing coming out from each side. Elena scowled. “I’ve never seen that.”

  “That edition of the Guild newsletter came out while you were off growing wings.”

  “You actually read the newsletter? I thought people like you were urban legends.”

  “Kinda just saw it out of the corner of my eye,” she said with a grin that felt natural. “This ‘movement’ ”—she tapped the tattoo—“apparently originated in London. Looks like it’s crossed the Atlantic.”

  Lowering the body back down, Santiago rose to his feet, his joints creaking like old timbers. “Tell me about this.”

  Honor stood, too, aware of Elena pulling her wings tight to her back as she followed. “My info is out of date, but it’s an underground clique started by older teens and people in their early twenties. They emulate the ‘vampire lifestyle.’ ” Shaking her head, she looked down at the lump beneath the tarp, saddened by the loss of a life hardly begun. “Mostly it’s an excuse to have sex.”

  “Aren’t most things at that age?” Santiago muttered.

  Honor hadn’t ever been that young, couldn’t imagine such innocence. “Yes, it’s fairly harmless—except some of the adherents take it one step further and drink blood from one another.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Santiago said.

  “Afraid not.”

  “Vampires can drink from any donor because their bodies process out any problems in the blood,” Elena said, scowl darkening her eyes to storm gray. “These kids are messing with who knows what diseases.”

  “If they can even digest it,” Honor said, unable to see the lure of a life ruled by blood.

  Santiago pushed back his jacket, hands on his hips. “You saying we should look for vomit?”

  Elena was the one who answered. “It would depend on how much he or she actually drank, but yeah.”

  “Great, that’ll make some uniform’s day.”

  “Could be some of these kids start to think they are vampires,” Honor added as Santiago called over a young officer, who curled up his lip at the task given him but began to circle out from the scene. “I’d take a look at who this boy’s friends were. Seems to me he was playing donor to someone else’s vamp and things got out of hand.”

  “From the location of the bites,” Elena said, “I’d bet on sex being in the mix.”

  Santiago rubbed a hand over his face, his stubble scraping on his palm. “Good old-fashioned sex and violence.”

  Honor was about to agree, when her phone vibrated with an incoming message. “Excuse me.” She stepped a small distance away, but could still hear Santiago and Elena.

  “I got the harness,” the cop said with a sort of gruff curtness.

  A pause before Elena replied. “I didn’t expect you, too.”

  “Yeah, well.” The rustle of cloth, the scrape of a shoe on the asphalt. “I guess it’s about adapting—some old dogs might be able to learn new tricks.”

  Elena’s answer was quiet. “Thank you.”

  A longer pause before Santiago said, “This case is the last thing I need,” in his normal tone of voice. “We’ve got that cross-jurisdictional serial sucking up resources.”

  “The one who’s targeting young mixed-race women?”

  “Yeah. No bodies, but my gut says they’re dead.”

  When Honor joined them, the tension was gone, to be replaced by a cautious familiarity—two people who’d often worked together trying to find a new balance. Looking at them both in turn, she said, “I have to head to the Tower.”

  Dmitri’s message had been simple. I hear you’re awake. So am I. Let’s go.

  The cabin was located in the middle of thick woods, an almost cutesy place built of logs, complete with a rocking chair on the porch. That chair was motionless now, the woods so silent not a single leaf appeared to stir. It was as if the trees themselves knew the horror that had taken place in this charming setting straight out of a holiday greeting card.

  In autumn, she thought, the ground would be covered with leaves the innumerable shades of fall, but it was deep into spring, the leaves bright green overhead. Go
ld shimmered high above but the heavy canopy meant the light was diffuse by the time it reached the ground, adding to the bleak gray of the atmosphere.

  “When I was a child,” she said to the vampire who walked beside her, “I used to dream of going on vacation to a place like this. It seemed like the kind of thing families did.”

  Dmitri glanced at her, the shadows of his face harder, more defined in this light. “Did you ever attempt to trace your parents?”

  “No.” By the time she’d had the resources to mount a search, she’d known that nothing good could come of it, no happy ending that would take away the loneliness of her childhood, erase all those school plays and sports days where she’d watched other kids’ parents clap and cheer while she stood by and pretended it didn’t hurt.

  The decision not to search hadn’t filled in the hollow space inside of her, but it had set her free to live her life without being hamstrung by thoughts of what could’ve been. “Do you still remember your parents?” she asked as they reached the cabin.

  Dmitri skirted the bloodstains on the steps where it appeared Tommy’s beaten body had been dragged up, and glanced at the similarly stained rocking chair. “Whoever executed Tommy,” he murmured, “set him down, questioned him, after making it clear defiance would result in pain.”

  It was what Dmitri would’ve done with a pompous asshole like Tommy—the vampire might have survived for four hundred years, but only because he stayed out of the way of the predators, playing the big dog within his coterie of similarly useless friends. “Makes you wonder what made him a target.”

  “He might’ve brought Evert in without permission,” Honor said, staring at the door on which Tommy’s head had been pinned, a thick blade shoved into his mouth and out through the back of his skull. “I get the feeling the game was meant to be by invitation only.”

  “So, the second invitation notwithstanding, we probably saved Evert’s life.” Somehow he didn’t think the vampire would be grateful for the long years he would live in Andreas’s care. “My parents,” he said, pushing open the door, “are as clear in my mind as if I saw them yesterday. Perhaps it’s an effect of immortality, but certain faces will never fade.”

  “Dmitri!” Laughter, hands pushing on his chest. “Behave or you’ll wake Misha and the baby.”

  Deep green eyes connected with his own even as warm brown lingered in his memory, the impact far more visceral than it should’ve been. “I see so much pain in you,” Honor whispered, “so much loss.”

  He wasn’t a man used to being read. “Don’t fool yourself about me, Honor,” he said, because while he intended to have her, he wouldn’t do it with false promises. “The human part of me died a long time ago. What remains isn’t that different from Tommy.” Stepping over the threshold, he took in the splatters of blood that decorated the walls, the rugs, the varnished floor.

  “After he—or she—questioned him,” Honor said from behind him, picking up a PDA that looked as if it had been crushed under a heavy boot, “the attacker brought Tommy in here and played with him.”

  Played.

  Yes.

  If this had simply been about an execution, the entire cabin wouldn’t have been splattered with red congealing to black—more to the point, handprints wouldn’t streak the floor and the walls. “He was allowed to believe he could escape.” The vampire’s panicked fear would’ve been even greater when he was wrenched back.

  Dmitri waited to see if he felt any kind of pity. No. “Here,” he said, pulling out a tiny plastic case from his pocket when Honor put down the damaged PDA. “Copy of the memory card. My people are mining it for data.”

  Taking it, she slid it into her jeans. “I’ll go through it, too. My mind has a way of seeing patterns.” She scanned the room. “The violence appears random, but it was structured to inflict maximum terror.”

  “The vampires who abused you,” he said, glimpsing what appeared to be a fingernail embedded in the wall, “did any of them betray this kind of behavior?”

  Boot swiveling on the wood of the floor, Honor walked out and down the steps into the trees. Closing the cabin door behind himself, Dmitri followed at a slower pace, heading toward the gentle sound of water. He came out on the pebbled shore of a small stream—Honor stood only a couple of feet to his left.

  Today, she’d teamed a fitted khaki shirt with sleeves to the elbows with those jeans that skimmed her form, well-worn boots on her feet. Simple and strong and beautiful. But even the strongest of women had nightmares that couldn’t be conquered in a day or even a year.

  Saying nothing, he crouched down on the pebbles, picking up one and rolling it between his fingers. The water was clear, the air crisp and touched with the scent of a hundred thousand leaves, the space above the stream wide enough that the light was bright, the sky a searing blue. A lovely place in which to consider the most unspeakable violence. “Isis,” he said, accessing a section of his memory that had grown dusty with age, “was used to being adored, considered one of the most exquisite women in the world.”

  That had been no lie—with skin of finest cream, hair of shining gold, and eyes of entrancing bronze, Isis had embodied the mortal ideas of the angelic race. Men and women both had run to see her when she’d stopped in his village on what he didn’t realize until later was a well-planned journey to avenge herself against Raphael.

  “Do you know my crime, Dmitri?” Raphael’s voice, echoing in the cold stone chamber beneath the keep. “I was overheard to say that I would prefer a snake in my bed to Isis.”

  Vain and cruelly intelligent, Isis hadn’t been satisfied with simply capturing and torturing Raphael for what had been nothing but a passing comment. No, she’d intended to corrupt Raphael’s mortal friends until they joined her in hurting the angel; she had chosen Dmitri because the archangel’s friendship with his family went back generations.

  Then she’d seen Dmitri.

  “At first she took my polite refusal to her offer with good humor. She thought I was playing a game, wanting a courtship.” He dropped the pebble but remained in his crouching position. “It amused and delighted her that I was so apparently proud. Gifts of exotic meats, precious spices, tapestries such as had never been seen in my small village, it all arrived day after day.”

  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 aro
und 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.