Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter 4)

Honor sucked in a breath. “That’s brutal.”

“It comes with the territory.” He’d stood over a dead schoolgirl’s body not long ago, tugged the sheet over her small, innocent face. “Vampires who don’t fear consequences create carnage.”

“I know—I wasn’t born yesterday.” Reaching back, she tightened her ponytail.

He wanted to fist his hand in that luxuriant ebony hair and kiss the temper right out of her. The only other woman he’d ever been tempted to do that with had bitten him hard on the lip and told him he deserved it. Later, after her anger had cooled, she’d turned to him in bed and kissed him, hesitant and sweet, his new wife who was too shy to make the first move.

A caress of wildflowers, the past and the present colliding as they were doing all too often since Honor walked into his life. But these memories . . . they were some of the good ones. “Tell me,” he said, because he heard a story in her voice, and he had the driving need to know everything he could about Honor St. Nicholas.

A long, cool silence.

Unexpectedly, he found his lips curving. “Illium did warn you I’m no gentleman.”

A feminine snort, but she began to speak. “One of my first hunts was an older vampire. He wasn’t under Contract, so it wasn’t about that.”

Intrigued because an infraction by a vampire who had served out his Contract was considered an internal matter, Dmitri said, “What did he do?”

“Stole something from his angel—an ancient artifact.” She tucked an escaped strand of hair behind her ear, the act so familiar that Dmitri felt as if he’d watched her do it a thousand times. “The angel had no one close to the small village where he knew the vamp was hiding, but I wasn’t very far away, so the Guild asked me to keep an eye on him until the angel’s people got there.”

Dmitri said nothing when she went silent, almost able to touch the heavy black that painted the tones of her voice, in stark contrast to the vibrant blues and white-gold of morning, the touch of rain having passed out into the Atlantic.

“One of his friends,” she said, “had called ahead to warn him that he was being hunted. He took out his rage on the villagers. The ground was sticky with blood when I arrived, the air so full of iron I could barely breathe. He’d butchered everyone—men, women, children, babies.” A shake of her head. “That was the first time I understood that vampires were no longer human, even if they’d started out that way.”

Dmitri remembered the case. It hadn’t been in Raphael’s territory but in Elijah’s, the archangel who ruled South America. “That vampire was found shot through the heart multiple times and staked to the ground with knives.” He’d been a power, the second in one of the courts that reported to Elijah.

“I didn’t have a control chip,” Honor said, referring to the weapon that immobilized vampires, “and he was on his way to another village when I tracked him down. Only way to stop him was to shred his heart and then, while he was down, pound so many knives into him that he couldn’t pull them all out before help arrived.” She rubbed her face. “I went through five clips—he kept reviving before I’d gotten enough knives into him, and then, afterward, when I thought he’d pull the blades out.”

“Beautiful and deadly,” he murmured, bringing the car to a halt by the park where Sorrow waited. “I find that an intoxicating combination.”

Honor got out, falling into step beside him as he headed into the park. “Every other man I’ve seen since the assault has winced after mentioning something that might be considered an innuendo, and you continually say things like that.”

“Some people,” Dmitri said, “survive. Others don’t. You did.” He knew because he knew what it was to stand in a place beyond desolation.

Wild blue flickered through the web of leaves in front of them at that moment and Dmitri’s priorities shifted. Stepping into the small clearing, he took in everything with a single glance. Illium, coming to land out of sight of Sorrow. The young woman herself sitting on an old tree stump with her arms locked tight around herself, her eyes diverted from the corpse on the grass in front of her.

The male’s fly was open, his gen**als spilling out. His head rested at an angle that told Dmitri it had been broken with force, while his mouth was caught in an expression akin to that of a blowfish. “What happened?” he asked Sorrow, while Honor went to crouch beside the body.

“I was walking”—rapid, staccato, as if she’d been hoarding her words—“and the next thing I remember, I’m standing here, watching his body slam to the ground.” Her eyes, eyes that bespoke the man—the monster—who had Made her, met his. “I’m becoming like him. A butcher.” The tang of her fear was unmistakable, but she held his gaze, this woman who had become Sorrow. “You have to do it, Dmitri.” A whisper. “End me.”

15

“Not yet.” His eyes went to the man’s exposed penis, shriveled and wizened in death. A normal man didn’t walk around with his c**k hanging out. But with Sorrow’s memory a blank, there was no way to know if she’d enticed or mesmerized the human to come close enough that she could murder him, or if she had reacted in self-defense.

That was when Honor rose to her feet, a grim smile on her face. “I thought I recognized him.” She passed over her smart-phone.

Taking it, Dmitri glanced at the newspaper article she’d pulled up about one Rick Hernandez, ra**st out on parole. His mug shot had been printed as part of the paper’s policy of alerting neighborhoods about violent offenders in their midst. A further scan of the article showed that the two women he’d been convicted of assaulting had both been small boned and of Asian descent.

Handing Sorrow the phone, he watched as she began to shake. “I’ll handle this.” He put a hand on her hair and felt something fundamental in him break, reshape itself. “Venom will drive you home.”

“Venom isn’t here,” Honor said. “I am. Give me your car keys.”

“Sorrow isn’t human.”

“The fact that she snapped the neck of a man twice her size was my first clue.” Folded arms, but there was no aggression in those eyes full of mysteries. Instead, he saw a quiet strength and an inexplicable tenderness that twisted around his heart, barbed wire that made him bleed. “I’m armed and she’s young.”