Archangel's Blade

by Nalini Singh

  Dmitri had also put out the word amongst the network of high-level vampires who either worked in or with powerful courts. The cooperation at that level was much more prevalent than believed by most people. It was only when issues of territory and power became involved that things got problematic. "Have you had any success deciphering the lines of text?"

  Her eyes sparkled, the first time he'd seen such a light in them. It fascinated him, the sudden, brilliant life of her. This, he thought, this was who she had been before she'd been broken . . . before she'd learned to taste fear in her every breath. He understood what it was to break, better than she could imagine.

  "Watch, Dmitri."

  "No, don't!" Pulling against his chains until his wrists bled. "I'll do whatever you wish--crawl on my hands and knees!"

  Laughter, beautiful and mocking. "You will anyway."

  "No! No! Please!"

  6

  "The language"--Honor's voice intertwining with one of the most painful moments of his hundreds of years of existence--"is close to Aramaic, but not quite. It's almost as if someone took Aramaic as the base, then wrote their own . . ." A puff of breath that lifted the fine tendrils of hair that had escaped the clip at her nape. "I'd call it a code. The lines are a code."

  Drawn by the softness of her, he walked closer, saw her stiffen. "Can you unravel it?"

  "It'll be difficult with so small a sample," she said, holding her position, "but yes, I think so. I've already begun."

  He was about to ask for more details when his cell phone rang. Glancing at the screen, he saw it was Jason, Raphael's spymaster and a member of the Seven. "You've found something," he said to the angel, his attention on the curls in Honor's hair.

  "In a sense--I'll be there in five minutes to discuss it."

  Hanging up, Dmitri glanced at the skies beyond the glass, searching for Jason's distinctive black-winged form. He didn't find it--not a surprise, given that Jason had a habit of flying high above the cloud layer and then descending in a burst of speed. Looking back to Honor, he caught her staring at him. "Usually when a woman looks at me like that," he murmured in deliberate provocation, "I consider it an invitation to take whatever I want."

  Hand clenching around the pen in her grasp, she stood to her full height. "I was thinking that you looked like a man who could break my neck with the same inhuman calm as you might a cell phone."

  Dmitri slid his hands into his pockets. "I'd be more worried at losing my cell." He said it to shock her, but part of him wasn't certain it wasn't in fact the truth.

  Honor's gaze lingered on his face, those midnight green eyes full of secrets too old to belong to a mortal . . . except this one had lived an eon in the months she'd spent trapped at the mercy of those who had none. "Everyone," she now said, "knows vampires were once human. I'm not sure you were."

  "Neither am I." A lie, made so by his awakening memories, memories that incited the same rage, horror, and anguish he'd felt so long ago that the time was nothing but an ancient legend to mortals. However, Honor had no right to that knowledge. Only to Ingrede would he have laid his soul bare, and his wife was long dead, ashes on the unforgiving wind.

  Dmitri.

  I'll meet you on the balcony, Jason. Though their ranges and specific abilities varied dramatically, every member of the Seven could communicate on the mental plane, an incalculable strategic advantage in certain situations. "Don't leave just yet, Honor. I wouldn't want to have to chase you down."

  Honor watched Dmitri prowl out through the small door that led onto the balcony. An angel with wings as black as the endless heart of night swept down to land with quiet grace on the very edge of the open space an instant later. Honor sucked in a breath as she saw the tattoo covering the left-hand side of his face--swirling lines, dots arcing along the curves to create a striking piece of art. Beautiful and haunting, it suited a face that carried the compelling strength of the Pacific intermingled with other cultures she couldn't quite identify. His hair, tied back in a neat queue, reached to midway between his shoulder blades.

  Dmitri, with his flawlessly cut black suit paired with a vivid blue shirt, his hair just long enough to invite the thrust of a woman's fingers, was as urbane and sophisticated as the angel was rough around the edges. But one thing was clear--both were honed blades, blooded and ruthless.

  Jason glanced through the plate-glass window. "Honor St. Nicholas," he said. "Found abandoned as a newborn on the doorstep of a small church in rural North Dakota. Named after the nun who discovered her and the patron saint of children. No known family."

  Dmitri wasn't surprised at Jason's knowledge--there was a reason the angel was called the best spymaster in the Cadre. "I assume you didn't come here to talk about Honor."

  The angel tucked his wings in tighter as a swift wind swept across the balcony suspended high above the frenetic beat of the city. "There's something in your voice, Dmitri."

  It was odd how good Jason was at picking up cues about people, though he was an angel who preferred to keep to himself. "Unless you have intentions toward Honor," he said, "it's not something you need to worry about."

  Jason didn't speak for a long moment unbroken by any sound but for the wind whispering over his wings. "Do you know what was done to her?"

  "I can guess." Unlike Jason, he had intimate knowledge of the bloodlust that lived within the Made. Dmitri had had control of his from the start--perhaps because he'd stabbed his rage into Isis's body, or perhaps because he'd been determined never to become a slave to anyone or anything--but that didn't mean it didn't exist. "She's stronger than she appears."

  "Are you certain?"

  "Why the sudden concern about a hunter?" Jason saw everything, but preferred to keep his distance from those he watched.

  Jason didn't answer. "I've had some news from Neha's territory."

  The Archangel of India was powerful and, ever since the execution of her daughter, walking the edges of sanity. "Is it something we need to worry about?"

  "No. It doesn't seem connected to anything else." He tracked a chopper coming in to land on a roof outside Tower territory. "An angel appears to have gone missing. A bare two years from the Refuge."

  Dmitri frowned. "She can't know anything about it." Angels that young were habitually put under the command of a senior vampire or angel.

  "No. The vampire--Kallistos--who did have a care of the angel, says he assumed the young one went back to the Refuge."

  That wasn't suspicious in and of itself. A senior vampire in an archangel's court had a lot on his plate, and it wasn't unusual for young angels to bolt to the security of the hidden angelic stronghold after their first taste of the wider world. "You've alerted the Refuge?"

  "Aodhan and Galen are making inquiries," the black-winged angel said, naming two of the Seven.

  Dmitri nodded. Territorial borders aside, the young ones were always looked after. "I'll speak to the other seconds in the Cadre, see if they can shed any light on the matter."

  "Angels do not just disappear."

  "No, but I've known the occasional youth to go a little wild after first leaving the Refuge." Jason dealt mostly with the oldest of the angels, archangels included, but Dmitri continued to have contact with the younger angels because he liked to take a look at everyone coming into Raphael's territory. "I once tracked a young male to a 'party island' in the Mediterranean." He shook his head at the memory. "The boy was sitting there in a tree, watching the revelers--he'd never imagined that level of hedonism."

  "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 ano
ther 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.

&nb
sp; 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.