by Nalini Singh
"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 mother 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."
"Illium bought it for Elena," Dmitri said, following her gaze. "It should be interesting to see her reaction."
Honor's lips twitched. "They're good friends."
A shadow drifted across Dmitri's expression, but all he said was, "Yes," before adding, "Raphael's suite occupies half the floor. The rest of the area is divided into quarters for the Seven, though mine takes up double the space of the others since I spend the most time in the city."
She hesitated. "You don't have another home?"
"It never seemed necessary."
Honor heard a thousand unsaid things in that statement, understood that the idea of home held a pain for him he would never seek to re-create.
"Don't worry," he said before she could say anything, "the square footage of each apartment is larger than that of most stand-alone houses, and the walls are soundproofed to ensure total privacy."
Honor had nothing against the setup and was quite certain his apartment was a sprawling space ten times the size of her own. But--"No, Dmitri. Not here."
"Why?" A question asked with a cool sophistication that might've intimidated her once, but now made her wonder what Dmitri didn't want her to see that he'd put up those silken shields.
"It isn't right." Honor stood her ground, the voice inside of her whispering that this moment was critical to how Dmitri would see her. "I refuse to be just another woman you take to your bed."
Dmitri rubbed his thumb across her knuckles, no hint of any readable emotion on his face. "You think which bed it is makes a difference?"
There was, she thought, such cruelty in him at that moment. He could hurt her badly and walk away as if it mattered nothing. "Perhaps not for you," she whispered, knowing the time for breaking things off, for protecting herself, had long passed, "but for me, yes."
A silence. As taut, as dangerous, as the garrote worked into Dmitri's belt.
28
It was the sound of the elevator opening down the hallway that seemed to decide Dmitri. "Yes, interruptions are far more likely here."
Such a practical reason, but one she was willing to accept for the present.
Leaving the Tower, they drove to her building and headed up to the apartment that she was slowly, carefully making into a home. Hunters did that. Ashwini's apartment was a lush place full of color--cushions of gold-shot silk, sculptures picked up here and there, postcards of spice-heavy stalls in faraway markets. Honor's was less exuberant, but she'd taken her personal mementos out of boxes--items Ash had left as they were--started to unpack them.
Now, framed snapshots cascaded down one wall of her living room--a laughing grandmother snapped during a hunt in Mexico, a mountain storm captured in Colorado, a single elk against the snow in Alaska--while her battered but beloved camera sat on the dining table, ready to be checked after its time in storage. Her bedroom, too, she'd begun to make her own. The sheets were a fine blue cotton, the pale cream walls hung with more photographs from her personal collection.
"Wildflowers," Dmitri said, halting on the doorstep. "Those weren't here last time."
Startled that he'd focused on the photographs when the sexual tension between them was at fever pitch, she said, "I just put them up. I was tracking a vampire across Russia a few years ago when I found this field." The memory of it had haunted her for months, until she'd put up the photos where she could see them before she closed her eyes, again when she woke.
Dmitri walked to stand in front of the array of fine black frames, touching his finger to one particular shot with a bright blue flower nodding in the cor
ner. "There was a ruin here once."
Spine tingling, she crossed the carpet to join him. "I had the strangest feeling something had once stood there, even though there was no evidence of it." She'd also had the insistent sense that she'd be disturbing something precious should she cross the border of tiny blue flowers that separated one small section of the riotous field of color from the rest.
"How did you find out, Honor?" Dmitri's eyes were hard black stones, his tone the same one he'd used on Valeria, on Jewel Wan.
They'd stripped themselves of weapons as they entered, neither wanting a violent interruption, but now instinct had Honor calculating how fast she could get to the knife hidden down the side of the bedstand.
"I was," she said, forcing herself not to act on the instinct, "driving through a fairly isolated area when I lost my way." The truth was, she'd driven off the path and into an uncharted wilderness on purpose, unable not to follow the painful tug that drew her onward.
"I must've driven for hours, and this is where I stopped." She shrugged, trying to make light of an experience that had pierced with such aching sorrow, she'd cried for hours after she finally returned to civilization. "I'd never seen a place as beautiful." As eerie, as heartrending.
Dmitri continued to stare at her, such lethal calculation in his eyes that it took all her control to stay in position, to not lunge for the bed and the blade so close. "What do you see in the photos?" she asked instead, feeling as if she stood on a precipice, her entire life balanced on this moment. "Dmitri?"
Face stripped of all sophistication, until he was only the sleekest of predators, he reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears. "If this is a game, you won't like the price you'll have to pay."
The hairs rose on the back of her neck. This time she stepped away . . . but didn't go for a weapon. She couldn't. She had to trust him, because if she couldn't . . . if she couldn't, then her world would simply shatter into a thousand fragments. "Threats aren't sexy." Don't do this. Please. "Take your black mood and leave."
