Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(64)
Author: Nalini Singh

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.”