Archangel's Blade

  "I like it."

  "Why are you in your pajamas?" The other hunter was dressed in an old gray T-shirt and a pair of faded fleece pants with dancing sheep on them. "It's two in the afternoon."

  "I'm on vacation today."

  No sounds except that of ice cream being seriously eaten and the repartee on the screen. It would surprise many people how tranquil being with Ashwini could be. Most had never seen the other woman without the prickly emotional armor that Honor had recognized the instant they met at a Guild bar in Ivory Coast, didn't understand that she was one of the most accepting people Honor had ever met. Flaws, scars, none of it scared her.

  Scooping up more mint and chocolate, Ash said, "You won't believe what Janvier did this time."

  "Can't be too bad since you're not inviting me to his funeral." Ashwini and the two-hundred-something vampire had a complicated relationship.

  Reaching over to the side table, Ashwini picked up and passed a small box to Honor. It proved to hold a stunning square-cut sapphire pendant set in platinum, the setting a little jagged, a fraction off center . . . as if the person who'd commissioned it knew that nothing too smooth, too perfect would've suited Ash.

  Point to you, Cajun. "Are you going to wear it?"

  "It'll only encourage him."

  "Oh, so it's okay if I ask him out?" she teased. "He is hella sexy, cher."

  "Funny." Ash stabbed her spoon at her. "Tell me about Dmitri."

  Of course her best friend had figured it out. "I feel like a moth drawn to the flame." Contact would hurt, might be fatal, and yet she couldn't stop herself. Obsession or compulsion, she didn't know, but she did know that before this was over, she'd either end up in Dmitri's bed . . . or one of them would bleed darkest red.

  16

  Dmitri wrapped Elena in tendrils of whiskey and night-blooming roses, rich and seductive, as the Guild Hunter walked into the library of the home she shared with Raphael in the Angel Enclave, the white-gold tips of her wings brushing along the carpet.

  Her jawline firmed, pale eyes narrowing. "Weak effort, Dmitri."

  It had been, his attention on another woman. "I was being polite." Elena was more sensitive to his ability than any other hunter he'd ever met, likely as a result of the horrific massacre that had ended her childhood.

  Dmitri would have sheltered and protected the child she'd been, but he couldn't, wouldn't, have mercy on the adult--because he wasn't the only vampire who could lure with scent. The other members of the Cadre wouldn't hesitate to use Elena's vulnerability to this most insidious of weapons against her. And Elena was Raphael's heart.

  "I heard about H--Sorrow." A solemn expression, quiet words. "How is she?"

  "Uncertain." The girl's future remained a fragile thing that could be destroyed with a single, brutal act. "She acted in self-defense today, but she seems unable to harness or channel the violence."

  Elena's head turned toward the door an instant before Dmitri sensed Raphael's approaching presence. Spreading out those wings of midnight and dawn behind her, she walked to touch her hand to Raphael's chest, something silent and powerful passing between the archangel and his consort.

  It remained incomprehensible to Dmitri how Elena, an angel with a weak mortal heart, had formed such a bond with Raphael. But he had taken a vow and he would defend that bond to his last breath. "Sire," he said when the two drew apart, "I would speak to you." It's about Isis. He didn't know how much the archangel had told his consort.

  I see. Eyes of an intense, infinite blue met his before shifting to Elena. "Your indulgence."

  Elena glanced between them, gaze perceptive. "I need to call Evelyn," she said, naming her youngest sister. "I'll do it from the solar."

  "Wait." Dmitri and Elena agreed on little, but he'd never questioned her loyalty to those who were hers. "You may want to talk to Beth as well. It appears Harrison has been forced to seek alternative accommodation." Andreas had mentioned it during their meeting after he spoke to Leon and Reg.

  Now Elena's mouth tightened. "Good on Beth if she's kicked him out." A pause. "Thanks."

  Dmitri held his silence until she left. "She doesn't know." He didn't find that the least surprising. Raphael was well into his second millennium of existence. A being that ancient had many memories.

  "She will before this night is out. I won't have her vulnerable." The archangel walked with him to step out on the sprawling green of the lawn that led to the cliff and the constant rush of a Hudson tinged red-gold by the setting sun. I will not speak that which is yours to tell.

  I know. He agreed with Raphael's decision to brief Elena, because while he couldn't accept the weakness she represented in the archangel's defenses, he understood that once a man claimed a woman, it was his task to protect her. Dmitri had failed in that task, failed his Ingrede, and it was a failure for which he would never forgive himself. "Did she truly save your life against Lijuan?" he asked, wrenching his mind from the raw agony of the past and the memory of a woman with eyes of slanted brown who had trusted him to keep her safe.

  "Do not sound so disgruntled, Dmitri."

  "I merely find it an impossible truth." And yet it was a truth, so he would add it to what he knew of Elena. "Isis . . . it seems we left a stone unturned." He told the archangel the full details of the dead vampire's dismembered body, the tattoo.

  "Bold and stupid both." Wings of white streaked with gold spread a fraction.

  Dmitri took a step back, examined the feathers. "Your wings, the gold is spreading." His primaries were almost totally metallic, the sunlight playing off the filaments in glittering sparks.

  "Yes," Raphael said, strands of hair lifting off his face in the early evening breeze. "It became apparent the night after I confronted Lijuan. Elena thinks I am evolving in some way. We shall see."

  The last time an archangel had evolved, she had raised the dead. But Raphael had never committed the atrocities that stained Lijuan's hands, and he was the son of two archangels. His evolution couldn't be predicted.

  "I've compiled a list of all those who remained loyal to Isis till the end," Dmitri said, even as he considered the tactical advantages of obscuring the truth of why Raphael's wings had altered in color. "Jason is tracking down their whereabouts." None had been seen entering the country, but that meant nothing.

  "I'll speak to him. I've kept a discreet watch on certain people through the centuries." A glance out of those eyes of inhuman blue. "As have you, Dmitri."

  "None of them could have done this." He'd already made certain of it. "However, games," he said, "no matter how vicious, are something I can handle with ease." Even if those games attempted to awaken the ghost of an angel who hadn't deserved the quick death they'd dealt her. "It's the second situation that's become more critical."

  Raphael listened in silence as Dmitri laid out the facts of the mortal "hunt." "This Honor," the archangel said when Dmitri finished, his tone icy with anger, "she is competent?"

  "Yes." Brilliant mind, human heart, ancient eyes.

  "Elena is a better tracker."

  Impossible to dispute, since Elena was hunter-born, a bloodhound as far as vampires were concerned. "That skill isn't necessary at present." And this was Honor's hunt, as Isis had been Dmitri's. "We're digging out the snakes, not chasing them."

  "An apt analogy." Wings rustling as he folded them tight to his back, Raphael turned to look Dmitri straight in the eye. "Many believe such depravity is exactly what you would savor."

  Dmitri knew that, understood full well how close he was to crossing lines that could not be uncrossed. "It seems even I am not yet that degenerate."

  You would never harm a woman in such a way, Dmitri. The archangel's voice in his mind, the purity of it almost painful. We both know this. It's why I allow you to push Elena in ways for which I would kill another.

  Some would say you trust me too much, Sire.

  And some would say you are wasted as a second when you could rule your own territory.

  It seems neithe
r of us cares much for the opinions of others.

  Together they walked back into the library and down the corridor that led to the front entrance. "Venom will need to leave the city soon," Raphael said. "Galen is strong, but I want him to have another of the Seven in the Refuge. Naasir must remain in Amanat."

  Dmitri blew out a breath. "Aodhan is serious about coming to New York?"

  "Yes."

  "He'll cause chaos." With eyes of fractured glass and wings of diamond brilliance, Aodhan stood apart even amongst immortals.

  "He is apt to fly so high that mortals will glimpse only a shadow that splinters light."

  Dmitri nodded. Aodhan had an aversion to touch, one Dmitri understood. He'd been in the Medica when the angel had been brought in two hundred years ago. Raphael had carried Aodhan's emaciated and dirt-encrusted body in his arms, laid him down with the utmost care so as not to crush his wings, which were nothing much more than a few slivers of tendon hanging on to bone.

  It had been, Dmitri thought, the last time anyone had held Aodhan in any way, shape, or form. "I'll work out the transfer." He rubbed his jaw. "I need someone on Sorrow, and Aodhan won't be suitable."

  "Janvier."

  "Yes." The smooth-talking Cajun was no longer under Contract, but he'd given his loyalty to Raphael and it was a loyalty that went to the core. "I'll contact him closer to the transfer date."

  "Dmitri."

  "Sire."

  "Are you well?"

  Dmitri knew what the archangel was asking. "Isis is dead and buried, this sycophant nothing but an irritation." The ghosts who haunted him were far gentler . . . and cut so deep that he bled inside without surcease.

  The dream wasn't a nightmare. That fact startled Honor enough that she almost woke, but the pleasure, oh, the pleasure was too much to resist.

  A strong male body over her own, a rough-skinned hand on her throat as he kissed her with a lazy patience that she knew could turn demanding without warning. But today, today he wanted to play. And she was his willing plaything. "Open," he murmured and she parted her lips, let him slide his tongue inside.

  It was a wicked, decadent act, one she'd allowed him early on in their courtship, her resistance to him so flimsy as to be smoke. Her reward for such sin had been a pleasure that had stolen her breath, the taste of him an addiction. Now that beautiful mouth explored hers with open possession as he thrust his thigh between her own, pushed it up to rub against the softest part of her.

  She cried out at the feel of the crisp hairs on his leg, the hard flex of muscle. Bare to the skin as she was--he'd made her strip for him, made her go slow as he devoured her with the only eyes that had ever seen her thus--no part of her was safe from the proprietary heat of his touch. Moving the hand on her throat down to a breast that had grown heavy and even fuller over the past spring, he squeezed. Not too hard for the sensitive flesh. Just hard enough.

  "Please," she whispered, knowing he would have no mercy on her tonight.

  A husky chuckle that vibrated through her body. "We've just begun." Tugging at her nipple, twisting it a little. She bucked against him, his skin slick and damp where it pressed against her. Reaching down, he insinuated one hand between his thigh and her swollen flesh. "Is this what you want?" A flick over the hot nub at the apex of her thighs.

  "Oh!" It was a frustrated cry as he slid his fingers through her sensitive folds before withdrawing. "More."

  Smiling at her in the musky dark, he brought those fingers to his lips instead, sucked deep. Her womb clenched, because he used that sinful mouth to suck her most intimate flesh as deep when the mood came upon him. Tonight, however, he seemed content to pin her to their simple bed and tease her to fever pitch with callused hands that knew her every secret, her every fantasy--he had talked her into whispering them in his ear this past winter, as the world lay quiet around them. And then he had told her his own.

  When his mouth descended on the stiff peak of her breast, she almost sobbed at the relief of it. He rolled her nipple in his mouth, bit down a fraction to remind her he was in charge . . . before sucking so hard that she rubbed herself against his thigh with frantic need, no longer shy with him, not now. Right when she would have gone over, found that secret place he'd shown her on a sun-golden field three summers ago, he withdrew his thigh.

  She shuddered. "Beast." He'd been so careful with her that day, so gentle, even as he seduced the most good of girls into lying down with him in the grass, his hand stroking up under her dress to touch her in ways no one had ever touched her.

  She'd been shocked at the raw pleasure he'd coaxed from her with hands rough and marked from a life carved from the earth, his skin dark from the sun. He'd sipped at her tears, caressed her through the trembling, and then he'd stroked up her dress and bared her to the sun, to the kiss of his eyes . . . his mouth. Yes, he was a beast.

  Her beast.

  Now, still smiling, he lowered his head to her neglected breast, pushing upward with a thickly muscled thigh at the same time, to grind her delicate flesh in the most exquisite of ways. Oh, yes. Gripping the black silk of his hair, she arced up into his mouth as her body trembled and broke in a burst of liquid heat.

  "There," he murmured against her mouth when she could see again, when she could hear again, though her chest continued to heave, "now you will behave, will you not?"

  Stroking one hand down his stubbled jaw, she tugged him down. "Kiss me, husband."

  "Husband." Honor woke with the word on her lips, the images from the dream as vivid as the tiny spasms low in her body. She moaned at the realization that she'd orgasmed, her thighs clenched tight around a pillow. But instead of jerking away, she rubbed herself against it, trying to hold on to the vestiges of a dream more erotic than any real-life experience she'd had--a dream that returned a sense of sexual pleasure to her she'd thought forever stolen.

  "There, now you will behave, will you not?"

  Her nipples tightened to near-painful points, aftershocks rippling between her legs. "Oh, God."

  The strange thing was, she'd never been drawn to dominant men in bed, wouldn't have expected to find the dream so very sexy--especially after the assault. If she did have sex again, she'd assumed it would be with some man who'd be gentle and patient with her fears.

  A brutally beautiful face, dark eyes with an edge of menace.

  Yes, Dmitri wasn't gentle in any sense of the word, but there was no doubting the sexual energy between them. He was, she was forced to admit, the likely inspiration for her faceless dream lover. Her hand fisted on the sheets at the sensory memory of her lover's weight on her, so heavy and rough, the feel of his callused hand molding her breast, the clever wickedness of his mouth, the hard ridge of a sizable erection pressing against her.

  Muscles low in her body clenched, wanting that thick heat pushing inside her.

  "Cold shower time," she muttered, shoving off the sheets to see that she was naked.

  Panic spiked and she went to reach for the gun under her pillow--until she saw the clothes strewn on the floor, as if she'd thrown them about in the night. Laughing, she said, "Some dream." One she wouldn't mind repeating, if she was being honest. Being tormented to orgasm by a man her dream self clearly trusted . . . yeah, it was far better than remembering that black pit filled only with pain.

  The clock showed that she'd actually slept for a serious amount of time--it was half past five in the morning, and she'd fallen into bed at six the previous day. Showering, she got dressed, weapons included, and was about to call Dmitri when her cell rang.

  She picked up to find Sara's deputy, Abel, on the other end. "There's some kind of a situation in Little Italy," he said. "Can you check it out?"

  Every part of her hungered to get to the Catskills, but she was a hunter and that meant something. "Signal's going to drop in the elevator," she said. "Call you back when I reach the ground floor."

  Once there, she headed out onto the street. "So, details?"

  "Yeah, not so much," Abel said. "Cops ar
e out there. No one's quite sure what's happening, but if you think it's ours, call me back and I'll assign someone--your Tower contract takes priority. Here's the street." He read it out.

  "Got it," she said, hailing a cab and sliding in. "I'll call you after I've had a look at the scene."

  The cabbie began to drive. "Hunting?"

  She nodded and gave him the address. It felt oddly comforting to be pegged as a hunter, because for months after the abduction, she hadn't been. "Fast as you can."

  The cabbie's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, down, back again. "Hey, aren't you that hunter that was missing?"

  Her gut twisted. "Yes."

  There was lurid speculation in the eyes in the mirror this time. "I heard you came into the hospital covered in vampire bites."

  The Guild had done everything in its power to tamp down the gossip after her return, but there'd been nothing they could do about the non-Guild personnel involved in her recovery. Add in the numerous tests she'd had to undergo to find out if the bastards who'd taken her had left her with anything other than bruises, bites, a body on the edge of starvation, and more than a few fractured bones as well as a number of internal injuries, and she'd been seen at her weakest by dozens of people.

  Most of those people had been good and kind. Some had been like this cabdriver.

  The cabbie's gleaming eyes, his lips half parted, threatened to shove her back into the pit, those ugly, probing hands violating her until there was nothing left. A month ago, she'd have curled into herself and gone silent. A month ago, she hadn't shot bullets into two of her attackers. "Vampires' tongues," she said, sliding her finger carefully over the blade she'd pulled from the sheath on her thigh, "grow back when you cut them off. Humans, unfortunately, don't have that ability."

  He whimpered and dropped his head. Sweat was rolling down his temples when they arrived at her destination, and he couldn't even get the words out to ask for the fare. Swiping her credit card, she paid and got out.