Archangel's Blade

  So this was about pleasure.

  The assault had been about pain.

  "Are you ready, Honor?"

  Yes. But she didn't have the chance to answer, because that was when he put his mouth on her through the damp fabric of her panties. "Dmitri."

  Half of Dmitri wanted to tear off the last flimsy scrap of Honor's clothing and plow into her in a single deep thrust, claiming her in that most elemental of ways. The other half of him wanted to use every bit of the sensual skill he'd gained over the centuries to make her his slave.

  Her panties stuck to the plump, flushed curves of her intimate flesh when he drew back, slid his hands under those silly little ribbons that made him insane, and tugged. She lifted up her body and he was peeling that scrap of nothing down her thighs an instant later. He stood to get them completely off, and when he looked up at her, he knew he'd reached the limit of his patience. Leaning down, he licked at the honey over her breasts.

  "So now I'm your serving dish," she said with a smile that kicked him right in the heart. "I knew you had an ulterior motive."

  Laughing--and when had he last done that with a lover?--he kissed his way down her body, to the damp curls between her thighs. And found he had a little more patience after all. Enough to retake his seat, part her, and kiss her, hot and slow and with exquisite care, laving his tongue against the hard nub at the apex of her thighs.

  Her back arched, her fingernails scrabbling on the wood. "Dmitri." Her breath escaped her in a choked-off scream that made him tuck his thumb against the slick entrance to her body and push inside a mere fraction as he covered her with his mouth once more. It was enough. She came apart for him, a sweet burst of feminine spice against his senses.

  Rising to his feet even as the final tremors shimmered over her body, he stripped off his remaining clothing and sat back down before pulling her to the edge of the table. "On me, Honor."

  "I can't move." It was a breathless complaint.

  He kissed her hip bone, felt her shiver. Tugged a little more. She flowed into his arms, all liquid and pleasured and boneless, her legs spreading to either side of his body. Lazy, she kissed him before reaching down to squeeze his turgid arousal with strong, knowing fingers.

  Hissing out a breath, he tugged off her hands. "Later." He pulled her forward, lifted her using his considerable strength . . . and slid her down oh-so-slow onto his cock. Scalding heat and exquisite tightness.

  His mind blanked for an instant.

  "Oh." A long, breathy moan. "You feel . . ." Hands thrusting into his hair, cupping the back of his head as she settled more firmly onto him, rolling her hips and using tiny inner muscles to squeeze his cock.

  Dmitri swore a quiet blue streak, his hands clenching on her hips. When she continued to make the small sensual movements about to rip his control to shreds, he dipped his head and sucked one taut nipple into his mouth. She cried out and lost her rhythm, letting him regain a piece of his sanity. Licking her one more time, he insinuated his hand between their bodies to lightly circle her clitoris as he began to move inside her in the shallowest of strokes.

  "You'll kill me." With that, Honor found his mouth.

  Lost in the wild passion of her kiss, he stood, taking her with him, and perched her on the edge of the table, their bodies still joined. Her legs were wrapped around him, her mouth fused to his, one hand cupping his jaw, the other in his hair. He felt surrounded by her, adored by her. A startling thought . . . but welcome.

  Kissing his way across her cheek and down her jaw when she broke the kiss, he moved his hand to her hip, angling her exactly how he liked. Then he began to move. Their gazes locked. Stayed locked.

  Her eyes were shimmering midnight forests, her cry a single word. His name. He fell with her, so much pleasure rocking through him that it felt as if he'd broken into a million iridescent pieces.

  31

  A very sexy shower later--Lord, but Dmitri was inventive-- Honor cuddled up next to him, amused at the thought of cuddling up to a vampire so lethal he scared others of his kind. "You're a very clever man."

  He ran the fingers of one hand down the side of her face. "I know."

  Honor laughed because what else could a woman do when the man in bed with her had driven her to so many orgasms, she was still seeing stars? "That position--letting me be on top, while handing you all the power. I'm playing way out of my sexual league, aren't I?"

  "Don't worry." He wove his fingers into her hair. "I'm an excellent coach."

  Yes, she bet he was. Kissing her way up his body, she snuggled her face into his neck and drew in the warm scent of him. It felt like coming home.

  The awakening was as rude as the sleep had been pleasurable.

  "Amos has been spotted," Dmitri told her after reaching out to answer his cell just before a misty gray dawn.

  The vampire wasn't on the grounds of Jiana's Stamford estate when they arrived, but he'd left pieces behind--several of his organs sat in a glistening pile on the grass, covered with droplets of the fine, fine rain that beaded on their hair, dampened their clothing. Heavy steel spikes encrusted with blood betrayed where he'd been pinned to the earth, purple zinnias and sunny chrysanthemums crushed and splattered with blood congealed to black in pockets where the rain couldn't reach.

  "Whatever I might have dreamed of doing to him," Honor murmured to Dmitri as they stood on the small rise overlooking Jiana's home, the moisture-laden early morning wind lifting their hair off their faces, "this is worse."

  "He had to have been otherwise compromised or he'd have escaped those steel pegs before he was gutted, his intestines removed," Dmitri said, eyes on the flesh and blood ropes that looked obscene surrounded by flowers struggling to reach for sunlight that wasn't there.

  "Or maybe," Honor said, looking at the blood-soaked woman who sat rocking not far from the site of the carnage, runnels of red dripping from her arms and legs into the earth, "he didn't want to escape . . . not until he realized she wasn't planning to stop." And still he'd been unable to end the life of his attacker, this woman he both loved and hated.

  Dmitri's gaze followed her own, but there was a cold consideration in it that didn't seem to fit the circumstances. Jiana had, after all, attempted to execute her son in the most brutal fashion. The only reason Amos wasn't dead was because he'd apparently managed to rip out one of the spikes and hit Jiana so hard across the face with it she'd ended up unconscious with a broken cheekbone, a deep gash marring that mocha skin. He was long gone by the time she alerted the guards.

  "Payment for his crimes," the female vampire had whispered when Honor and Dmitri arrived on the scene.

  Honor wouldn't have believed the woman's violent change of heart if not for the fact that quite aside from the damage done by Amos during his escape, Jiana's face was horribly bruised, the elegant silk and lace of her nightgown all but torn off her, her ribs cracked.

  "He looked at me," Jiana had added, eyes dull, "in a way no man should look at his mother."

  That, Honor thought, was what had pushed her over the edge--it seemed there were some things even the most devoted of mothers couldn't accept. However, it was clear Dmitri had a different view of matters. Waiting until he shifted his attention back to her, she said, "What do you see?"

  "It's not what I see. It's what I smell."

  Rather than asking him to elaborate, she considered all the facts, hazarded a guess. "Some kind of a sedative or tranquilizer in his blood." There was more than enough of the latter splashed around, thinned though it was by the rain, to make a determination.

  A clipped nod. "This was no act done in unthinking rage. It was calm, cold, calculated." His eyes lingered on Jiana. "Consider the fact that in spite of her 'cooperation' earlier, she made no mention of the culvert that allows covert access to this property."

  "A mother's instinct to protect trumping her rational mind," she said, playing devil's advocate. "As for the drugs, could be she's lying and he didn't only say or do something she couldn't accept, but ac
tually succeeded in assaulting her.

  "Traumatized, she put something in his drink, waited for him to get disoriented, weak, and then she did this." Amos could've easily stumbled to this part of the estate, even drugged and less than lucid. It was less than a hundred yards from the house, and with the guard at the front door having been knocked unconscious, while the others were situated around the perimeter, no one could refute that version of events.

  "Plausible." Dmitri's eyes lingered on the pile of organs that were still pink with health, evidence of the vampirism that meant Amos would recover as long as he had a steady supply of fresh blood and a place to hide.

  "Except," Dmitri continued, interrupting her thoughts about how a man came back from being gutted by his own mother, "whatever happened here, it wasn't simply about execution, was it?"

  She looked at the scene again, consciously putting aside her impression of Jiana as a loving mother pushed to the brink, and focused only on the facts. One of which was that this had taken time. A lot of time. Because the organs . . . they'd been removed with neat precision, sat in a tidy pile.

  Heart chilling at the realization, she was about to turn toward Dmitri when she glimpsed the torn and bloody piece of cloth flung a couple of feet away. "He was gagged." And from the near-black quality of the blood caught in the wrinkles the rain hadn't penetrated, he'd bitten through his tongue, likely shredded his lips. The ground where he'd been pinned was drenched in so much of that same blood it appeared wetter than the surrounding area, pale pink dew gleaming on some of the chrysanthemums hanging from broken stems.

  The conclusion wasn't an easy one, but it had to be said. "She enjoyed this."

  "There is every indication." Turning, Dmitri walked to Jiana, a sleek shadow in the black jeans, boots, and black T-shirt he'd pulled on during a quick stop at the Tower.

  Honor forced herself to follow, though it tormented her to think of a mother taking pleasure in the murder of her child, no matter the evil done by that child. It was something she simply had trouble comprehending, the maternal instinct within her a staggering force . . . though she had no children of her own.

  Shaking her head to clear it, she came to a standstill beside Dmitri as he looked down at Jiana's apparently tormented form. "You were too clever, Jiana," he said in a purr of a voice that wrapped ice around Honor's throat.

  Jiana continued to rock back and forth, her tattered nightgown clinging to her slender body, the bruises on her face having turned a sickly yellow-green at the edges as she healed. She gripped a serrated blade in one hand, the entire thing encrusted with dried blood that resisted the rain.

  In a whiplash-fast move Honor didn't see coming, Dmitri slid out a razor-sharp hunting knife from his boot and went as if to slice off Jiana's head. The female vampire was flowing up and striking a defensive pose in the blink of an eye, her own knife slashing out toward Dmitri. He knocked it to the ground with inhuman speed, and, gripping Jiana's wrist, held her in place as he put the edge of his deadly blade to her throat. "Now," he said, "you will talk."

  Jiana's gaze skittered to Honor. "Help me." Such torment in her eyes, such a black depth of sorrow . . . and behind it, a prowling viciousness Honor would've missed if Dmitri hadn't pushed the blade a fraction deeper, startling Jiana into dropping her mask of emotional pain for a single split second.

  "You created him," Honor said, sickened. "Whatever his madness, you took advantage of it to twist him even further."

  Jiana's face morphed, the frail beauty of her transforming into something contemptuous and sneering. "He is my son." No remorse. "Mine to do with as I choose."

  At that instant, Honor understood the depth of both Jiana's malevolence and her intelligence. She'd had the foresight to play them from the start, her "penance" with the blood junkies a smokescreen set up just in case anyone came looking. Even if that hadn't happened till months or years in the future, Jiana would've always been able to point back to her apparent distress at the time to lend credence to her protestations of being guilty of nothing except loving her child too much--a child she'd clearly always been ready to sacrifice.

  And yet, Honor was certain the love Jiana had professed for Amos wasn't all a lie. Something had tipped the balance--perhaps the fact that Amos had not only slipped the leash and begun to act on his own, rather than as Jiana's creature, but that he'd started to attract the wrong kind of attention. "He'd become a liability," she murmured, "might've betrayed you if he was taken." Surrounded by the carnage Jiana had done--had enjoyed doing--Honor was convinced the female vampire's hands were stained with far more evil than anyone other than Amos realized. "He learned everything he knew from you."

  A flash of vicious rage in those onyx-dark eyes that turned Honor's guess into truth even before Jiana said, "I would've forgiven his taking of you--it was an intriguing amusement after all." Words designed to stab and cut. "But the stupid boy planned to take two more hunters after I warned him to stay quiet and out of sight."

  So Jiana had set out to torture, then execute him. If she had succeeded, Amos's death would've been far more painful than anything Honor could've ever devised . . . for he would've died looking into the pitiless face of the one woman who was meant to love him without corruption or condition.

  A woman whose mouth now curved into a nasty smile. "I did so enjoy being kind to you in the pit. I had plans to return, to earn your trust. Your anguish would've been all the sweeter when I turned on you."

  "Enough," Dmitri said, cutting Jiana off when she would've continued. "Where is Amos?"

  "If I knew, do you think I would've alerted the guards?" Not giving any warning, Jiana lunged at the blade against her throat, but Dmitri was faster, dancing the weapon out of her way.

  "There will be no easy death for you," he said, gripping the vampire by the throat and lifting her up off her feet. "You will come before Raphael."

  Jiana began to kick and scream. "We fall under your purview, Dmitri! You must mete out the punishment!"

  "First we must know all of what you have done." With those words, he snapped his hand.

  Jiana's head lolled, her body going limp, and Honor realized he'd broken her neck as he'd done Jewel Wan's. "It'll be easier to transport her this way," he said when he saw her staring.

  The violence of his world staggered her, but she was no innocent. She'd known from the instant she decided to step onto this path that it would be no gentle ride. That didn't mean she had to accept everything as it was. "She would've gone anyway."

  Dmitri passed Jiana's limp body over to another vampire, with orders for her to be taken to the Tower under constant guard. "I was getting sick of her voice."

  "Dmitri."

  A dark glance, fine jewel-like beads of water collecting on lashes black as the night. "Trying to gentle me?"

  "That line you walk," she said, knowing he was pushing her on purpose, "it's very thin. I'm trying to stop you from crossing it. Everything you do, every decision you make, it has a cumulative effect."

  He strode to the edge of the rise, a black silhouette against the chill gray of the morning, his eyes on the gracious home below. "Near to a thousand years, Honor."

  "You're an almost-immortal." Moving to join him, she touched her fingers to his. "You have another thousand to step away from that line."

  Dmitri's expression was unreadable when he looked at her, his thoughts hidden. "Can you track Amos?"

  Aware she couldn't hope to convince him to take another path when their relationship was barely formed, she held her peace for the moment. "The blood here survived, but I'm guessing the rain will have made a mess of any smaller traces. However, Amos was bleeding badly so there's a chance if he didn't manage to get to a vehicle."

  "It should be safe, but take someone with you." He raised his hand and she felt a rush of air above her head as wings of sooty black streaked across to land lower down the rise. "Jason will keep you company. I have something to attend to."

  She caught the edge in his tone. "Dmitri."
br />   "I'm going to personally tear apart Jiana's Enclave property, and I'll set Tower personnel to ensuring Amos has no hidden bolt-holes. If there are any files naming those who accepted his invitation, I'll find them."

  Drawing in a deep breath, she looked out over the flowers. "I think we tracked them all." There were no unknown scents or bodies in her memories, no voices that didn't fit. "Thank you."

  A brush over her hair, and then he was gone, leaving her to her task.

  She used every ounce of her skill, even asked Elena to drop by and confirm, but her instincts proved correct--Amos had bled through the culvert, but his trail ended there.

  "Car," Elena agreed when Honor showed her the tracks, her words crisp regardless of the dark circles under her eyes. "No hint of any further scent. You want me to tell the Tower to put out an alert on vehicles owned by him?"

  "He's too smart to have used anything that can be traced back to him." Amos's cunning was a vicious thing.

  A single bead of water rolled off the white-gold of a primary feather as the other hunter spread her wings a fraction. "Never know with immortals--arrogance can sometimes blind them to reality."

  "Yes." Honor took in the dark circles again, the lines of strain. "Tough night?"

  The other woman blew out a breath, strands of her hair escaping her braid to whisper across her face. "Was up until five a.m. talking with one of my sisters. She's going through some stuff." A shake of her head. "Love can kick you in the gut sometimes."

  Honor thought of Dmitri, of how vulnerable she was to him, and couldn't disagree. "But when it's right . . ."

  "Yes." Elena's eyes met her own, the silver shimmering despite the lack of sunlight. "I'm in no position to throw stones about getting involved with dangerous men, so I'll just say--living in the world of immortals can be brutal. You ever need anything, including support to tie Dmitri up so you can torment him with a fork, call me."

  Honor's lips twitched, an unexpected respite. "You still haven't forgiven him for that."