Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter 4)

“You sound certain you will.”

He didn’t answer—as if it was a given he’d hunt down his prey. “Come here, Honor.” A command twined with the faint taste of some exotic spice that made her br**sts swell, her breath catch.

It was a good thing she appeared to have only the merest drop of the hunting bloodline. “Even before the attack,” she said, digging her nails into her palms, “I wasn’t the kind of hunter who played with vampires.” While she had nothing against those of her brethren who took vampiric lovers, she knew herself well enough to know she needed commitment of a kind the almost-immortals couldn’t give. Their lives were too long, love an amusement, fidelity to a mortal laughable. “Being food has never appealed to me.”

Dmitri turned to lean against the plate-glass wall that looked out over Manhattan, his masculine beauty starkly outlined by the piercing light of the sun at his back. “Ah, but I think you’d be a delicious snack.”

Dmitri watched the hunter across from him tug her laptop bag off her shoulder and place it on his desk before pulling out the slim computer. Her face was flushed, her br**sts pushing against her sweatshirt, but there was nothing less than unyielding focus in her words. “We can play games all day, or I can show you what I’ve found.”

“Dmitri, stop playing games.”

Words spoken in a distant language, as clear to him as the sunlight. She’d been angry with him that day, his Ingrede. And yet in the end, he’d tumbled her into bed, stripped her down to her skin, and kissed every inch of her small, lush body. He’d loved sinking into her, of having his hands full of her br**sts, his thighs wedged between her softer, plumper ones as he sucked and licked at her mouth, her neck. That was the day Caterina had been conceived, or so Ingrede had always maintained.

“That’s why she is such a bad-tempered child, your daughter.”

“Dmitri?”

Lashes lowering, he fought to hang on to a memory that held nothing of the pain or horror that was to follow, only to have it flitting out of reach. “I’m listening,” he said, eyes on Honor.

Her gaze lingered on him and, for an instant, he felt the most disconcerting sensation—as if he had been in this moment before—but then she blinked and looked down and it passed. “The tattoo isn’t in our database. However, I’ve sent out some discreet feelers along the international hunter network.”

Dmitri had also put out the word amongst the network of high-level vampires who either worked in or with powerful courts. The cooperation at that level was much more prevalent than believed by most people. It was only when issues of territory and power became involved that things got problematic. “Have you had any success deciphering the lines of text?”

Her eyes sparkled, the first time he’d seen such a light in them. It fascinated him, the sudden, brilliant life of her. This, he thought, this was who she had been before she’d been broken . . . before she’d learned to taste fear in her every breath. He understood what it was to break, better than she could imagine.

“Watch, Dmitri.”

“No, don’t!” Pulling against his chains until his wrists bled. “I’ll do whatever you wish—crawl on my hands and knees!”

Laughter, beautiful and mocking. “You will anyway.”

“No! No! Please!”

6

“The language”—Honor’s voice intertwining with one of the most painful moments of his hundreds of years of existence—“is close to Aramaic, but not quite. It’s almost as if someone took Aramaic as the base, then wrote their own . . .” A puff of breath that lifted the fine tendrils of hair that had escaped the clip at her nape. “I’d call it a code. The lines are a code.”

Drawn by the softness of her, he walked closer, saw her stiffen. “Can you unravel it?”

“It’ll be difficult with so small a sample,” she said, holding her position, “but yes, I think so. I’ve already begun.”

He was about to ask for more details when his cell phone rang. Glancing at the screen, he saw it was Jason, Raphael’s spymaster and a member of the Seven. “You’ve found something,” he said to the angel, his attention on the curls in Honor’s hair.

“In a sense—I’ll be there in five minutes to discuss it.”

Hanging up, Dmitri glanced at the skies beyond the glass, searching for Jason’s distinctive black-winged form. He didn’t find it—not a surprise, given that Jason had a habit of flying high above the cloud layer and then descending in a burst of speed. Looking back to Honor, he caught her staring at him. “Usually when a woman looks at me like that,” he murmured in deliberate provocation, “I consider it an invitation to take whatever I want.”

Hand clenching around the pen in her grasp, she stood to her full height. “I was thinking that you looked like a man who could break my neck with the same inhuman calm as you might a cell phone.”

Dmitri slid his hands into his pockets. “I’d be more worried at losing my cell.” He said it to shock her, but part of him wasn’t certain it wasn’t in fact the truth.

Honor’s gaze lingered on his face, those midnight green eyes full of secrets too old to belong to a mortal . . . except this one had lived an eon in the months she’d spent trapped at the mercy of those who had none. “Everyone,” she now said, “knows vampires were once human. I’m not sure you were.”

“Neither am I.” A lie, made so by his awakening memories, memories that incited the same rage, horror, and anguish he’d felt so long ago that the time was nothing but an ancient legend to mortals. However, Honor had no right to that knowledge. Only to Ingrede would he have laid his soul bare, and his wife was long dead, ashes on the unforgiving wind.

Dmitri.

I’ll meet you on the balcony, Jason. Though their ranges and specific abilities varied dramatically, every member of the Seven could communicate on the mental plane, an incalculable strategic advantage in certain situations. “Don’t leave just yet, Honor. I wouldn’t want to have to chase you down.”

Honor watched Dmitri prowl out through the small door that led onto the balcony. An angel with wings as black as the endless heart of night swept down to land with quiet grace on the very edge of the open space an instant later. Honor sucked in a breath as she saw the tattoo covering the left-hand side of his face—swirling lines, dots arcing along the curves to create a striking piece of art. Beautiful and haunting, it suited a face that carried the compelling strength of the Pacific intermingled with other cultures she couldn’t quite identify. His hair, tied back in a neat queue, reached to midway between his shoulder blades.