by Nalini Singh
Another thing he hadn’t told her. Another illustration of the fact that while he might appreciate her skills in certain areas, when it came to treating her as an equal . . . But then the idea was laughable, wasn’t it? She’d lived a mere twenty-nine years to his centuries, was mortal to his powerful vampire.
However, none of the logic seemed to matter, and she was no closer to understanding or corralling the violent depth of her emotions by the time Dmitri drove deep into the Angel Enclave, an exclusive settlement along the cliffs that hugged the Hudson. In most cases, the houses were set so far back from the road that it felt as if they were driving through uninhabited land, the trees on either side of the road ancient behemoths that almost blotted out the sky.
When Dmitri stopped, it was in front of gates watched over by a vampire Honor didn’t recognize. Stepping out of the car, and to the ornate metal gates, she pushed them open while Dmitri spoke to the guard. Inside, she saw the drive was relatively short—though the gates disappeared from view when, walking forward alone, she turned a corner. It was beyond tempting to keep going, to see what might very well have been the lair of the monster who’d tortured her, but this wasn’t like with Jewel Wan. She could still think, understood that to go in without backup would be foolhardy.
“Honor.”
She turned to see Dmitri walking toward her—and suddenly the dam broke. “I have every right,” she said, referring to the strange compulsion between them for the first time.
Not even a blink.
Stubborn, always so stubborn. So sure he is right.
On that, she agreed with the voice inside her mind.
The wind whispered slow and easy through the trees, through Dmitri’s hair as she stood waiting for a response from a vampire used to explaining himself to no one. Her fingers spread, and she found herself closing the distance between them to stroke her hand through that thick dark silk. It was an intimate act, one for which she asked no permission, though he was a man no one would touch without invitation.
He didn’t stop her, lifting his own finger to trace the line of her jaw. “You’re asking me to act human,” he said after a long, quiet moment untouched by time. “I’m not human, haven’t been for a long time.”
“And you,” she said, fingers lingering at his nape, “are trying to make me believe you have no capacity for true emotion when I know different.” Dmitri’s heart wasn’t dead, his soul not irrevocably tainted, of that she was certain.
Sliding his free hand down to her lower back, he tugged her closer. “Who are you, Honor St. Nicholas?” It was a strange question, but one to which Dmitri needed an answer. Because this mortal, her scent was that of wildflowers from a mountainside lost in time.
Haunting pools of emerald green met his as she shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Her answer made sense to him, though it was an impossibility. “Come. Let’s explore this house.”
“I thought you would’ve already done it.”
“I had my men look through it, but it may be time for a deeper examination with everything else we know.”
Walking beside him, Honor was both grace and a lush feminine beauty. But she also had a deep vein of strength that had well and truly awakened . . . and that intoxicated. He wanted to reach out, to touch her again, the unrelenting need far beyond simple lust. However, that would have to wait—her desire to enter the house, to run Amos to ground, was a pulse against his skin.
Unlocking the front door, he pushed it open. At first, there was nothing, only the slightly musty smell of a house that had been shut up for a while. Then he caught a whiff of the most putrid odor, that of rotting flesh.
Honor went motionless beside him, her gun smoothly in hand. “There’s something dead inside.”
“Long enough to have decomposed.” Which meant that either Amos had somehow snuck back in past the guards and left a gruesome message, or something else was going on. “Yet not so long ago that the others who came here had reason to be suspicious.”
“Dmitri.”
Following the direction of Honor’s raised arm, he saw her pointing at a flat-screen television on the wall. The power indicator was dead. And when Honor flicked on a light switch, nothing happened. “The electricity’s down. Blown fuse maybe.”
“It’s an older home,” Dmitri said, following the fetid scent. “Such things happen.”
The rank smell took them not into a basement as he’d half expected, but to a large room at the back of the house. There was no lock, nothing to differentiate the door from any other along the corridor.
“God.” Honor put a hand up over her mouth and nose as he pushed open that door—the odor was vile here, so concentrated it felt akin to soup.
The room itself was barren but for a wooden shelf that held a number of books and magazines, and a single armchair that looked as if it had been banished here because it was too ratty for the main living areas. Beside it sat a small burn-scarred table set with a crystal tumbler and a bottle filled with dark red liquid. The rug on the floor was threadbare.
It was the kind of shabby, comfortable den a man might create to get a little peace and quiet . . . except if you looked carefully, it became clear the armchair was angled toward a particular section of the wall. Normally, there would’ve been nothing to differentiate it from the rest of the room, the reason his men had missed it, but right now, water seeped from beneath that section to soak the rug.
“Fridge,” Honor whispered. “There’s a fridge behind there.”
27
“I’ll do this,” he said, because though she’d demanded he not protect her, his need to do so was gut deep.
An intense look from those eyes that pierced him. “All right.” She positioned her body in a way that gave her a sight line to the door, but allowed her to keep an eye on him as well. A slight shake of her head when their eyes met again and he knew that nothing he said would send her from this room. He was more than strong enough to force her compliance, but force was the one thing he couldn’t use with this woman.
It would’ve been easy to explain his reluctance as part of the cold calculation necessary to get her into bed, but the lie would serve no purpose—not when she saw him in ways no other woman ever had. Ingrede, sweet, loving, strong Ingrede, wouldn’t have understood the darkness that lived within him now. Honor did. It felt a betrayal to his wife’s memory to think such a thing but that made it no less true. “Are you sure?”
No hesitation. “Yes.”
Shifting his gaze to the wall, he ran his fingers along it until he found a small indentation. A single push and a section of the wall opened to expose a large, squat refrigeration unit, the water pooled below it mute evidence of the loss of power. Trying not to smell the odor that spoke of putrid decay, he lifted the lid to brace it against the wall.
Then he looked down.
At the bodies.
The freezer was large enough that Amos hadn’t had to cut off limbs or separate the torsos from the victims’ lower halves. He’d simply bent the bodies into the fetal position and crushed them together like so many pieces of meat. “Detective Santiago is currently working on the serial abductions of tall, slender women of mixed race in the greater New York area, is he not? Specifically, women who have one black parent, one white.”
Honor crossed the small distance between them to glance inside the freezer, her expressive face touched with horror. “Yes. Everyone’s working on the theory that it’s a human predator—no trace of feeding or any blood at the scenes. The women just vanish.”
Dmitri ran his gaze over the body closest to the top. In spite of the putrefaction, her underlying bone structure was clear, enough undecomposed flesh visible that he could be certain of her skin color. “Such hatred,” he said, recalculating everything he thought he knew about Jiana and Amos. “Toward the one being who has always protected him.”
“Are you certain?”
Dmitri had made careful inquiries when the unnaturally close tie between mot
her and son became obvious and had been convinced the bond had formed as a result of Amos’s madness, Jiana doing everything she could to help and protect her son. Now he wondered if he’d missed the far more sinister truth. “No longer as certain as I once was.” He closed the lid.
“We’ll call Santiago, get the cops involved.” Everyone would assume Amos had gone insane with age. That facet of a long life was an unhidden truth, one that stopped none of those who wanted to be Made. Even two hundred years spent as a healthy, ageless vampire was a lot longer than the average human life span. “The more people we have watching for him, the better the chances of running him down.”
Honor nodded, taking small, shallow breaths until they were back out in the corridor with the door closed. “Why did he take me? I don’t fit the profile.”
Cold rage pulsed through Dmitri’s blood at the reminder of what Amos had done to Honor, but he gave the question serious thought. “He hates his mother, it seems, but he also wishes to please her.” A flicker of memory, Jiana at a cocktail party she’d given four summers ago.
“Dmitri, I’m so glad you could come.” A gracious smile, a kiss on his cheek. “Have you met Rebecca?” This time, the smile on her lips held an elegant sensuality.
“A pleasure,” he said, inclining his head toward the curvy brunette beauty with skin of light golden brown who hung on Jiana’s every word.
“You,” he said to Honor, “are not his type, but you are Jiana’s.”
“That’s sick . . . and put together with everything else, it raises certain questions.” She glanced at the closed door to the room that spoke of Amos’s twisted sexuality. “Let’s head outside, call Santiago.”
Dmitri let her lead them out through the back door. The sunshine was brilliant, the heat of it a slicing blade. As he watched, Honor strode down to the grass and used her cell to call the cop who had a way of ending up on cases linked to immortals. While she did that, he made a few calls of his own, including one to a senior vampire under his command. “Make certain Jiana doesn’t leave the house,” he ordered. “I need to have a chat with her.” Hanging up, he waited for Honor to walk back to him.
She halted a foot away. He closed that distance to take her into his arms, careful not to imprison her, but she didn’t freeze up at the contact. Instead, she sank into the embrace, her own arms tight around him. They stood there in silence for long sun-soaked minutes, Honor’s pulse a steady, thudding beat against his vampiric senses.
The last time Dmitri had stood thus, simply holding a woman because it felt right, he’d been mortal. “My wife,” he said, speaking words he’d spoken to no other, “loved the sunshine. She would come out into the fields with me, and while I worked them, she’d”—rock our baby boy—“work on the mending. I was always tearing my shirts.”
Honor’s laugh was soft, her voice gentle as she said, “A wonderful wife.”
“She was,” he continued, knowing that though the man Ingrede had loved had been as different from him as night from day, he’d never stop mourning the loss of her smile, “but she also used to drive me mad at times. I’d tell her I’d fix something in the cottage when I got home, and by the time I’d return from the fields, she’d have done it and have the bruises to prove it.” His heart had almost stopped the day he’d found her on the roof. “And she couldn’t cook.”
Honor looked up, eyes sparkling. “Did you ever say so to her?”
“You must have a low estimation of my intelligence.” He bent until their foreheads touched. “She pretended to love to cook and I pretended to adore her cooking, and we both lived for the village festivals when we could buy from the stalls.”
Honor’s laughter was a deep, husky sound, twining into his very blood. And for a moment, he was . . . happy, in a way he hadn’t been happy since the day the cottage turned to ash, taking his heart with it. “Witch, you are,” he said, dipping his head to claim her lips in a kiss that held both the sweetness of the sunshine—and a good dose of raw sex. “In my bed, Honor. That’s where I want you.”
Lips wet from his caress, she cupped his face. “I think”—a soft murmur—“that’s where I want to be.”
It was full dark by the time they arrived back at the Tower. Venom was waiting for them. “This came through the mail today.” He handed over an envelope.
It proved to contain a note written in the same code as the tattoo that had originally brought Honor to the Tower.
“I’ll be leaving to take the night watch on Sorrow in another fifteen minutes,” Venom said while Honor scanned the note. “Do you want me to find someone else so I can go over to the Angel Enclave, keep an eye on the cops?”
“No. Illium’s on-site.”
Honor, already working the code in her mind, tuned out the rest of their conversation. It wouldn’t take her long to translate this, she thought, not with the work she’d done on the tattoo.
An hour later, she looked up from where she sat on the sofa in Dmitri’s office and passed him the translation.
You took what I loved. Now I will take what you treasure.
Honor rubbed her hands over her face as Dmitri read the message in silence. “He has to have known what Isis did to you. And still . . .”
“Love, it seems,” he murmured, “is truly blind.” Putting down the piece of paper, he picked up his phone. “Jason,” he said when it was answered on the other end. “Describe Kallistos to me.” A pause. “Yes, beyond a doubt.”
Honor waited until he hung up to say, “Kallistos was Isis’s lover?”
“Yes, though he had a different name then. A youth, only decades into his Contract. He was bleeding from her attentions when we found him.” Letting him live had been an easy decision. “We believed him another victim.” But Kallistos, it seemed, had loved his mistress regardless of her cruelty.
“A young angel,” he said, choosing his words with care so as not to put Honor at risk of having her memory wiped, as had happened to Illium’s mortal lover, “has gone missing from Neha’s court. No one is quite certain when he disappeared.” Especially given this next fact. “Ask me the name of the senior vampire who was in charge of him.”
“Kallistos,” Honor said, blowing out a breath. “It’s how he’s making those protovampires.” A question in her eyes. “I know you won’t tell me the process, since even Candidates are put to sleep during the initial stages, but everyone knows it’s the angels who Make the vamps. I always thought it was the older ones.”
While the angels did nothing to negate that view, it was in fact the younger adults who built up the toxin more quickly in their bodies. The older the angel, the higher his level of tolerance—though even archangels weren’t immune, as Uram had proved. “Jason just told me that the angel was last seen by someone other than Kallistos a year ago,” he said, not answering her implied question. “If we assume he was abducted soon afterward, and taking his age into account, he would’ve been able to successfully Make one vampire.”
“Kallistos tried to Make more,” Honor said, walking to the plate glass of his window, the rain that had begun to fall forty minutes ago turning the city into a mist-shrouded mirage, “and it diluted the effect.” Brow furrowed, she recrossed the carpet.
“Quite likely.” Not only that, Kallistos hadn’t followed the correct procedures, the reason for the mutation in the dead males’ blood cells. “It should be far easier to run him to ground now that we have a name and a face.”
Having come to stand beside him, Honor leaned back against his desk, nodded. However, her expression was troubled. “I can’t stop thinking about Jiana. She seemed so loving, maternal.”
“There’s nothing as yet to say that she isn’t—Amos’s madness may be his own.” But Dmitri had deep doubts about that, because from what he’d seen over the years, this depth of hatred mingled with warped love had its roots in something that should never have been, an ugliness that seeded a twisted kernel deep within the soul.
Midnight green eyes met his, haunting and promising
him an impossible dream. “You don’t believe that.”
Closing the distance between them, he stroked his fingers over her jaw, the softness of her skin an irresistible enticement. “Do you think you can read me?”
“I think”—her hand closing over his wrist—“I know you far better than I should.”
Yes. Too often, he saw knowledge in her eyes that shouldn’t have been there, felt a familiarity in her kiss, her laughter that made him ache, and he wondered if he wasn’t giving in to a subtle insanity of his own. And yet he couldn’t pull away, pull back. “There’s nothing more to do tonight.” The phone call to Jason had set the search for Kallistos in motion, and as for Jiana’s son, Dmitri had already put the entire region on alert.
And sometimes a man had to seize the moment, regardless of the consequences. To allow it to pass might mean it would never again come.
“Dmitri, come dance with me.”
“My feet ache from the fields, Ingrede. After I return from the markets?”
A smile that lit up the room, though fear lurked a silent intruder in her eyes. “After you return.”
Except Isis’s men had taken him when he returned. His last memory of his wife was of her holding their children and trying not to betray the terror that had turned her warm brown eyes an impossible ebony.
He could never go back, never dance with his wife while Misha laughed and the baby kicked her legs in the air, but he could kiss this woman who had somehow become a part of him, her gaze holding mysteries he was driven to solve. “It’s time, Honor.”
He saw the skin pull tight over her cheekbones, knew she wasn’t certain she wouldn’t panic, slash out at him in self-defensive violence, but her answer was a simple, powerful, “Yes.”
Honor took in her surroundings in silence as Dmitri led her up off the level painted that gleaming, dangerous black and to the top floor of the Tower. It proved to be carpeted in white with glittering threads of gold, the paint on the walls that same gold-flecked white, the artwork a mix of old and new—a brilliant tapestry of a place of mountain and sky, on which perched dwellings whose doors opened out into thin air; a gleaming sword sharp as a razor; a framed poster of the ridiculous television show Hunter’s Prey, complete with the muscle-bound lead and his “vampire vixen.”
