Archangel's Blade (31 page)

When he said nothing, she clamped her hand on his arm. “How long have you suspected Amos?”

Dark eyes pinned her to the spot, told her nothing. “What good would it have done you to know who I had in mind?”

“Stop protecting me! I don't need it anymore!”

Dmitri's expression shifted, the stone becoming a piercing arrow. “When have I ever protected you?”

“What?”

She clasped her hands to her temples. “That voice.” So deep inside of her.

“Honor?” Dmitri's hand on her lower back, his breath lifting the curling tendrils of hair along her temple as he leaned close. “Tell me what's wrong.”

“No, it's nothing,” she said, because to give any other answer would be to acknowledge the aural hallucination. “Just the . . . echo of a dream.” Seeping over into her waking life. “You should've told me.”

“I'm almost a thousand years old.” His hand moved in slow, circular motions on her back, but his words were as calculatedly harsh as his touch was tender. “You're so young it's laughable. You have neither the strength nor the right to question my decisions.”

With those words, he negated the commitment they'd made to each other. Perhaps he didn't see it as such, but she couldn't be with a man who expected to maintain that chasm of distance between them. “Do you know how to find Amos?” she asked, putting aside the hurt she felt, though it was a raw, tender thing. Giving up wasn't an option. However, she needed time to regroup, to sit down and figure out if Dmitri was
ever
going to be ready for the kind of relationship she needed.

The idea that the answer might be no . . . it caused a crushing blackness in her soul.

“I've already checked his normal haunts and bolt-holes.” His gaze lingered on her face, as if he'd read her very thoughts, but thankfully that was one ability he didn't possess. “He'll eventually surface. In the meantime, my men will continue to watch this house—he's always had an unhealthy attachment to his mother.”

“Yes.” No normal son would think of inviting his mother to join in a sexual game, to attempt to please her with his choice of victims. “What will you do with her?”

“That's up to you. You're the victim.”

“No, Dmitri, I'm a survivor.”

“Yes.” No hesitation. “But recompense is still yours.”

“That woman is going to punish herself for the rest of her very long life. Let her be.”

“I'll speak to her.” He turned to walk toward the entrance. “Are you coming?”

“No, I think I'll stay here.” But she didn't. Stepping down to the drive as soon as he disappeared inside, she took a seat on the edge of the fountain. The water fell in a soothing cascade of sound behind her, the breeze a caress over her cheek as she tried to understand the irrational depth of her anguish. She'd always known Dmitri was never going to be human in any sense.

Again that voice, from so very deep inside of her. As if it came from her soul itself. This time, rather than fighting it, she listened.

Whoever this figment of her imagination was, Honor thought, she truly was living in a fantasy world. Dmitri was no one's knight in shining armor and if it scraped her to bloody rawness to admit that, then she had only herself to blame. Because Dmitri had never lied to her, never pretended to be something he wasn't.

 

 

“Where are we going?” she asked when the Ferrari pulled
away from Jiana's estate.

“Angel Enclave—Jiana owns a house there.” His words were cool, practical, and she wondered if he even understood how he'd damaged the fragile something between them. “It's standing empty, but I've had men watching it for a while. However, I think it's time I had a look inside.”

Another thing he hadn't told her. Another illustration of the fact that while he might appreciate her skills in certain areas, when it came to treating her as an equal . . . But then the idea
was
laughable, wasn't it? She'd lived a mere twenty-nine years to his centuries, was mortal to his powerful vampire.

However, none of the logic seemed to matter, and she was no closer to understanding or corralling the violent depth of her emotions by the time Dmitri drove deep into the Angel Enclave, an exclusive settlement along the cliffs that hugged the Hudson. In most cases, the houses were set so far back from the road that it felt as if they were driving through uninhabited land, the trees on either side of the road ancient behemoths that almost blotted out the sky.

When Dmitri stopped, it was in front of gates watched over by a vampire Honor didn't recognize. Stepping out of the car, and to the ornate metal gates, she pushed them open while Dmitri spoke to the guard. Inside, she saw the drive was relatively short—though the gates disappeared from view when, walking forward alone, she turned a corner. It was beyond tempting to keep going, to see what might very well have been the lair of the monster who'd tortured her, but this wasn't like with Jewel Wan. She could still think, understood that to go in without backup would be foolhardy.

“Honor.”

She turned to see Dmitri walking toward her—and suddenly the dam broke. “I have every right,” she said, referring to the strange compulsion between them for the first time.

Not even a blink.

On that, she agreed with the voice inside her mind.

The wind whispered slow and easy through the trees, through Dmitri's hair as she stood waiting for a response from a vampire used to explaining himself to no one. Her fingers spread, and she found herself closing the distance between them to stroke her hand through that thick dark silk. It was an intimate act, one for which she asked no permission, though he was a man no one would touch without invitation.

He didn't stop her, lifting his own finger to trace the line of her jaw. “You're asking me to act human,” he said after a long, quiet moment untouched by time. “I'm not human, haven't been for a long time.”

“And you,” she said, fingers lingering at his nape, “are trying to make me believe you have no capacity for true emotion when I know different.” Dmitri's heart wasn't dead, his soul not irrevocably tainted, of that she was certain.

Sliding his free hand down to her lower back, he tugged her closer. “Who are you, Honor St. Nicholas?” It was a strange question, but one to which Dmitri needed an answer. Because this mortal, her scent was that of wildflowers from a mountainside lost in time.

Haunting pools of emerald green met his as she shook her head. “I don't know.”

Her answer made sense to him, though it was an impossibility. “Come. Let's explore this house.”

“I thought you would've already done it.”

“I had my men look through it, but it may be time for a deeper examination with everything else we know.”

Walking beside him, Honor was both grace and a lush feminine beauty. But she also had a deep vein of strength that had well and truly awakened . . . and that intoxicated. He wanted to reach out, to touch her again, the unrelenting need far beyond simple lust. However, that would have to wait—her desire to enter the house, to run Amos to ground, was a pulse against his skin.

Unlocking the front door, he pushed it open. At first, there was nothing, only the slightly musty smell of a house that had been shut up for a while. Then he caught a whiff of the most putrid odor, that of rotting flesh.

Honor went motionless beside him, her gun smoothly in hand. “There's something dead inside.”

“Long enough to have decomposed.” Which meant that either Amos had somehow snuck back in past the guards and left a gruesome message, or something else was going on. “Yet not so long ago that the others who came here had reason to be suspicious.”

“Dmitri.”

Following the direction of Honor's raised arm, he saw her pointing at a flat-screen television on the wall. The power indicator was dead. And when Honor flicked on a light switch, nothing happened. “The electricity's down. Blown fuse maybe.”

“It's an older home,” Dmitri said, following the fetid scent. “Such things happen.”

The rank smell took them not into a basement as he'd half expected, but to a large room at the back of the house. There was no lock, nothing to differentiate the door from any other along the corridor.

“God.” Honor put a hand up over her mouth and nose as he pushed open that door—the odor was vile here, so concentrated it felt akin to soup.

The room itself was barren but for a wooden shelf that held a number of books and magazines, and a single armchair that looked as if it had been banished here because it was too ratty for the main living areas. Beside it sat a small burn-scarred table set with a crystal tumbler and a bottle filled with dark red liquid. The rug on the floor was threadbare.

It was the kind of shabby, comfortable den a man might create to get a little peace and quiet . . . except if you looked carefully, it became clear the armchair was angled toward a particular section of the wall. Normally, there would've been nothing to differentiate it from the rest of the room, the reason his men had missed it, but right now, water seeped from beneath that section to soak the rug.

“Fridge,” Honor whispered. “There's a fridge behind there.”

“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.

“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.”