Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(41)
Author: Nalini Singh

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. Gold 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 ass**le 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.”