Archangel's Blade (41 page)

The other man leaned back against the wall beside a massive fireplace. Sliding his hands into the pockets of suit pants of a deep brown that appeared almost black in the candlelight, he angled his face to its best advantage. It was, Dmitri knew, an automatic act, but not an unconscious one—because as Dmitri had learned to use the scent lure as an offensive weapon, Kallistos had learned to use his face and body.

Now, he parted those perfect lips the slightest fraction. “There is a large bed upstairs . . . quite ready for use.” Sensual invitation in every word, the confidence of a man who had been able to bend both male and female to his advantage for centuries.

Even Isis, Dmitri thought, had cosseted him when she wasn't torturing him. It was no wonder the young human men the vampire had lured to his lair had come so sweetly to their deaths, surrendering their bodies for him to do with as he wished. “You failed in your attempt to Make vampires.”

“I thought to build an army.” A smile designed to make his audience smile with him, to see him as a pretty adornment, no threat at all. “A silly premise, I soon came to realize, but why not use the slaves I already had? It was fun leaving presents on your doorstep.”

Pushing off the wall with a look full of delight, he circled around the sofa until they stood only a few feet apart, his gait elegant. “Then it struck me—I didn't need to have an army to destroy you.” He spread his hands. “All I had to do was take someone you loved and make you watch while I slaughtered her.”

Memories, painful and brutal, threatened to roar to the surface, but Dmitri had had almost a thousand years to learn to think past the pain. “You were lying in a pool of your own blood when we discovered you.” It was a quiet reminder, a final chance. “She'd whipped you until she'd shredded the skin off your back, then ridden your cock while you screamed.”

A jagged anger marred the flawless lines of Kallistos's face. “You didn't understand her, peasant that you were.”

“And you were naught to her but a pretty toy,” Dmitri said with cruel honesty, “something she would have perhaps regretted breaking, but only for as long as it took her to find a new bauble.”

Copper burned hot, but Kallistos didn't strike, didn't react. “She broke your bauble, didn't she?” A vicious smile. “They said your wife squealed like a stuck pig while they rutted on her.”

Rage seared his bloodstream, but he would never give Kallistos the satisfaction of seeing what it did to him to think of his gentle, loving Ingrede's final moments on the earth. “Do you still love her, Kallistos?”

A dark silence, followed by a simple, “Yes.”

“Then there is nothing more to say.” He struck out with the scimitar, aiming to decapitate.

But Kallistos was no longer there, having moved with feline grace to shield himself behind a sofa. “Careful,” the vampire said, pulling a gleaming sword from its hiding place by the heavy piece of furniture, “or you'll never find out where she is.”

Dmitri breathed deep, caught Honor's scent near the doorway. “You have nothing.”

A mocking smile. “It wasn't difficult to take her. All I had to do was make a phone call threatening her younger brothers.” A smug satisfaction that was as chilling as it was impossible. “She slipped out past your guard and right into my arms, the delicious little thing.”

Ice steeled his blood. “Surrender to me now,” he said, catching tendrils of unexpected scent that told him Kallistos still had living protovampires at his command, “and I'll make your death an easy one.” Honor was out there alone, but the instant Dmitri went to her, he would give Kallistos another target.

Kallistos laughed again, a rough, broken, painful sound. “It amuses me to know you'll live the rest of your life knowing she died a slow, painful death—after servicing me until I tired of her. It's a pity you didn't arrive an hour earlier.” A smile that aimed to draw heart's blood. “She screamed your name at the end.”

Dmitri went after Kallistos without warning, shoving the raw fury of his emotions to the back of his mind. That would come later. After Kallistos was dead.

Avoiding the lethal strike, the other vampire twisted and almost flew over the sofa to land on his feet on the other side. “Neha,” Kallistos said as Dmitri circled around to face him, “is many things. One of which is a master blade fighter.”

“Her skills didn't help her daughter,” Dmitri taunted, aware of sounds in the hallway, bodies starting to stream into the room behind him, blocking the exit.

“Anoushka was arrogant.” Kallistos came at him in a blur that sliced a line across Dmitri's T-shirt, soaking the black material the dark red of his blood. “I, however, don't care about showing off. Only causing you pain.”

Dmitri swept out again, slid the wrong way on a thick rug. Kallistos used the opportunity to cut a deep gash on his back, the blade skating agonizingly off his spine. “How does it feel to be the weaker one, Dmitri?” A hissing question. “She begged you to spare her life,
begged
you!”

“She was a bitch who deserved to die.” With those cold words, he began to move in earnest. But rather than heading toward Kallistos, he spun out toward the edges of the room, cutting down the protovampires who thought to gun him down. But he was too fast, his blade sweet fire through the air, spurting blood onto the walls as Kallistos screamed and lunged after him.

Using his feet to push off a wall splattered with red, he flipped over Kallistos and down into a crouch below the barrage of bullets. But one caught him in the arm nonetheless. Shaking off the pain, he sliced out with the scimitar again, amputating his attacker's legs at the knees. The vampire was too young, too badly Made to survive it, his screaming high-pitched, endless.

The survivors were already shooting . . . but their shots suddenly went wild, their hearts blown out from behind by a hunter with deep green eyes burning with a fiery center.

Raising his head to see Kallistos rushing toward Honor, lip curled into a snarl, he shifted position to block the other vampire. The clang of steel rang through the room, vibrated down his wounded arm, but Dmitri had fought with body parts missing. This was nothing.

Kicking out at Kallistos's knees, he grazed him with the blade as Kallistos twisted out of the way and ran not toward the doorway, but toward the windows of thick old-fashioned glass that looked out over the grounds. Not stopping his headlong momentum, the other vampire slammed through the glass and out into the yard in a shattering cascade of sound and blood.

“Honor!”

“I'm fine. Go!”

Jumping through the same hole in the glass, he rolled up into a standing position to find himself facing a Kallistos whose face bore a blood-soaked smile. “Clever, Dmitri. Manipulating me until I'd tipped my hand . . . or maybe I was manipulating you.” Lifting two fingers to his mouth, he whistled.

Barking filled the air and suddenly hounds as black as night were boiling out from the woods toward the front of the house, their canines razor sharp and their aim obvious. Flowing around Kallistos, they came at Dmitri—but not all of them. Part of the pack headed into the house, likely drawn by the spilled blood . . . or by Honor's scent. Because Kallistos was laughing, a look in his eyes that said he'd played his endgame.

Seeing a flash of blue in his peripheral vision, Dmitri yelled, “Inside!” He sliced out at the hounds at the same time, cutting their thickly muscled bodies in half, but they continued to pour out of the woods. If he fell to the ground, they'd tear him to pieces, probably eventually succeed in the decapitation that was the only thing that would end his near-immortal life.

“A pity I won't get to personally kill your bitch,” Kallistos spat. “But I'll enjoy the thought of her mauled body nonetheless.”

Dmitri continued to cut down the hounds, the pile of bodies growing ever deeper around him.
Don't you dare die, Honor.

He knew Illium would do everything in his power to protect her, but it destroyed him that he was once more unable to protect the woman he loved. That was when he heard rapid gunshots from inside the house and remembered that, while Honor might touch him with the same gentleness Ingrede once had, she was a hunter, honed and blooded, no one's victim.

He bared his teeth in a feral grin.

Slicing out with the scimitar in one hand as he pulled his own gun with the other, he took out so many of the hounds that the others turned wary.

Not enough to back away, but enough to hesitate.

Using their hesitation, he lifted the gun and shot Kallistos in the face.

The vampire screamed and went to his knees, having obviously not expected an assault from the modern weapon. Dmitri cut his way through the dogs to put the gun to Kallistos's temple. The vampire was broken on a fundamental level, would never recover.

Isis had done this to him.

And so Dmitri would give him mercy.

But Kallistos clawed out with his hands before Dmitri could pull the trigger, smashing the gun from his hand and unbalancing him enough that he fell to the ground with Kallistos's mutilated face above him. Dropping the scimitar because it was no use in such close quarters, he fought bare-handed as Kallistos gouged and tore at him with hands that weren't human.

Feeling those nails cut into his flesh, he realized the man had been hiding some kind of a weapon tipped with short but razor sharp, serrated points and worn over his knuckles. Now it acted as a shredder, ripping through Dmitri's chest and the side of his neck. He blocked Kallistos when the blinded vampire would've clamped his hand around Dmitri's neck and, pulling a short knife from his belt, cut Kallistos's throat.

Blood gushed hot and wet onto his face, but Kallistos was older than Dmitri by about two decades. He didn't go down. Instead, clamping his free hand over his throat, he slashed out with the one he'd turned lethal. “I'll end you.” Spittle bubbled around his mouth, a fine red foam. “Like you ended her.”

Dmitri managed to grab Kallistos's wrist, halting his strike. That was when he felt a hound's teeth on his foot, beyond where Kallistos straddled his body.

Kicking out and hitting a thick, solid body, he dropped his
grip on Kallistos's arm, leaving his face and throat unprotected as he put all his strength behind thrusting the knife he still held into the spot just below Kallistos's heart. Hitting it, he wrenched upward, cutting the other vampire's heart in half.

Agony seared into him as those rough metal points dug into his face, raking across, but the impact of the blow faded toward the end as Kallistos jerked, blood pouring out of his chest and his throat at the same time. Twisting the knife deeper, until the vampire's heart was nothing but pulp, Dmitri pushed the body off himself, snarling at the dogs at the same time.

They retreated . . . but their eyes were on the fallen Kallistos, who twitched as he tried to heal himself. Dmitri knew that if he was left undisturbed, he would rise again. Vampires of their power and strength weren't easy to kill. However, if Dmitri walked away, the hounds would tear Kallistos apart like a hunk of butchered meat.

No, Dmitri thought. He could not leave Kallistos to suffer—even after the horrors the vampire had committed.

His gut clenched, anguish and rage burning in his throat, and he almost walked away, leaving the other vampire to the hounds' slavering hunger.

A flicker of memory, of Kallistos at the start of Dmitri's imprisonment.

The young vampire had tried to make his life easier, even distracted Isis from landing a blow that would've taken Dmitri's eye at a stage that meant it might not have healed.

Kallistos had said that to Dmitri once, after Isis had hurt him so badly, he hadn't been able to rise to feed. Dmitri, in chains, had been helpless to do anything at the time, but today he would.

Grabbing the discarded scimitar, he brought the blade down on Kallistos's throat. A single hard strike was all it took to separate the head from the body, but Dmitri made extra certain Kallistos would never again rise, using a shorter blade to carve out the vampire's damaged heart. As he turned to head toward Honor, having no choice but to leave Kallistos's body to the dogs, he saw her run out of the house with Illium, guns blazing.

The hounds stood no chance.

 

 

“No one can know of this,” he said to Honor as he examined
the nascent fangs of one of the protovampires inside the house, no longer surprised at what some would chance for immortality.

“I understand.” She crouched down beside him, that strange compassion on her face. “It wouldn't only rock the power structure of the world if angels were seen to be vulnerable, it might give someone else ideas.”

“Yes.” So intelligent, he thought, and with such a clarity to her thinking, Honor was a woman who would be an asset by his side, quite aside from the fact that he wanted only to hold her, breathe in her scent, hear the living beat of her heart. But first they had to examine the house room by room. It proved to be empty of living inhabitants, but they discovered several decaying bodies buried in shallow graves below the house, evidence of Kallistos's failed attempts to Make vampires.