by Nalini Singh
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.
My Honor.
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.
36
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.
"This one is my special pet." A smile as Isis stroked long, gleaming nails over the slender body of a boy barely become a man. That boy, tied to the bed, arched up into her touch . . . then screamed as she dug her nails into his balls and ripped them off.
No, Dmitri thought. He could not leave Kallistos to suffer--even after the horrors the vampire had committed.
Sorrow.
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.
A soothing balm over his back.
"She can be demanding, I know, but she is a good mistress."
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.
"Help me."
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.
However, that wasn't the biggest discovery.
"Dmitri?" The questioning female voice came on the line as he stood with Illium and Honor surrounded by the dark scent of death. "I missed your call--I was at my brothers' music recital."
A kick to his chest, radiating out through his body. "You're safe."
/> "Is everything okay?"
"Yes." He passed the phone to Honor, needing a minute to rebuild the emotional shields that had somehow crashed at the sound of Sorrow's voice.
It wasn't until evening the next day that they returned to New York, having stayed behind to ensure everything was processed and cleaned up, until no one would ever know what had taken place in that quiet spot surrounded by the bright green of hundreds of sugar maples. However, he didn't pilot the chopper to Manhattan and the Tower, but to a derelict condemned building not far from the New York-Connecticut border. "Are you sure?" he asked the woman with eyes full of mysteries he wanted to explore as she lay tumbled, pleasured, and smiling in his bed.
"Yes," Honor said. Amos, she'd realized, wasn't the monster who haunted her.
It was the cage he'd put her in.
Getting out of the gleaming machine, she waited for Dmitri to join her and then she led them into the bowels of hell. The building was stickered with Do Not Enter signs, but she strode forward and through to an internal door that led to a cement-floored basement.
"He told me," she whispered, nausea churning in her stomach, "that he planned to do up the place, turn it into an old-fashioned salon where only the privileged would gather, but first he had to make sure all his guests had the right appetites." Appetites that meant Honor had almost died before Amos ever got the walls painted, much less replaced the mildewed carpet and broken floorboards.
A male hand closing over the doorknob. "I'll go first."
"I need to--"
"Face your demons." Dmitri brushed her hair off her face with unexpected tenderness. "That doesn't mean you have to do it alone and unshielded."
Looking into that face that still bore remnants of the brutal gouges from the fight, she realized that he needed to do this, too, to protect her. She couldn't pretend his protectiveness, his care, was unwelcome. Not here. Not when it was Dmitri. But--"Together." She touched her hand to his. "I won't hide from any part of this, not even behind your broad shoulders."
A long, taut pause before he nodded and opened the door that led down into her own personal hellhole. But as she navigated the steps, Dmitri by her side, her nausea was wiped out by anger, cutting and bright . . . and then, as she stepped into the pitch-black room where she'd been held and tortured for two long months, by pride.
I survived this.
The thought had barely passed through her mind when the thing came at her out of the dark, teeth bared and fingers clawed, eyes glowing red.
She began to shoot, yelling, "No!" when Dmitri would've lunged past her. "I have it!"
The creature kept coming and she kept shooting, the noise deafening in the enclosed space. Finally it lay wheezing on the floor. Taking out her flashlight, she aimed the beam at whatever it was that had made this foul place its lair, never moving her gun off it.
"You." A bubbling, blood-filled word.
He no longer looked anything like the photos Dmitri had shown her, his elegance buried under animalistic hunger. The skin had retracted from his mouth to bare his gums, his fangs; his face was hollow, falling into itself. As was his body under the tattered remains of his shirt, his broken ribs not yet completely fused, other parts of his torso pulverized with bullet wounds.
"I had you," Amos whispered.
"No," she said again, speaking to Dmitri.
"Honor."
"He's no danger." Walking to look down at Amos's emaciated form, she realized he'd somehow gotten himself here after Jiana carved him up. However, once safely hidden, he hadn't had the strength to go out to feed, even as his body cannibalized itself to heal his massive injuries.
A pitiful creature.
But one with a reservoir of strength.
He lunged up at her with a hissing roar. Not losing her cool, she emptied her clip into his heart, blowing it to smithereens. "Will he rise again?"
"No. He was too weak." Dmitri's hand touched her hair. "It's done."
Turning, she looked around the smoke-filled room and saw just that. A room. "Yes. It's done."
Exhausted and emotionally drained, she didn't protest when Dmitri flew them to the Tower and took her to his suite.
"I had a new bed delivered," he told her as he drew her into the shower and began to help her strip. "You'll be the only woman who ever sleeps in it."
He owned her heart, this vampire with his scars and his darkness. "Come here." Cupping his face as he leaned down toward her, she rubbed her nose against his, felt his body stiffen for an inexplicable second before he took her mouth in a raw claiming of a kiss, the kind of sinful, debauched kiss no good man would ever give to his woman. The resulting shower was decadent and welcome, but her body gave out when she hit the bed.
They wanted to dishonor her, the vampires with the hot eyes and the hands that roamed over her flesh as they pinned her to the wall. She knew that, understood that. "Forgive me, Dmitri," she whispered inside her mind, and turned quiescent.
They laughed. "There, she wants it. I knew these peasants were all happy to spread their thighs for a real man." Rough, clawing hands pushing up her skirts, another pair mauling her breasts.
In spite of her shame, her rage, she told herself to be quiet, to not fight.
But then the third vampire walked into the nursery and came out with Caterina in his arms. "So sweet and soft," he murmured, his tone chilling in its gentleness. "I have heard such blood is a delicacy."
Quiet, quiet, she told herself even as fury turned her blood to flame. If she protested, the monster would know he held a piece of her heart in his hands and he would hurt Caterina even more. But her silence couldn't protect her child, and she screamed in horror--"No! Please!--as the vampire lowered his head to Caterina's tiny neck and began to shred it like a dog. Her baby's terrified cry pierced the air, pierced the silence, pierced her until she bled.
Jamming her elbow into the nose of one of the vampires who held her, she stabbed the other with the kitchen knife she'd hidden in her skirts when they came into her home with such evil in their eyes. "Let her go!" Escaping because they hadn't expected defiance, she wrenched Caterina from the feeding vampire's arms. "No, no. Oh, no." Her poor baby was dead, her throat so much meat, her little body already cooling.
"No!" It was the keening cry of a mother as the monsters tore at her again, but she would not release Caterina. Not even when they broke her ribs, shoved her to the ground, and pushed up her skirts. She didn't care what they did to her, not as long as they didn't touch Caterina . . . and didn't discover Misha.
"Stay quiet, Misha," she pleaded in her mind. "Stay quiet, so quiet." He'd been playing in the little space below the roof that was his "secret" place, and she'd yelled for him to hide when she'd first seen the vampires. There had been no time to get to Caterina, but she had hoped they would not be so vicious as to harm a babe.
She felt no pain when they hurt her, felt nothing, every ounce of her being concentrated on listening for her son, on holding her daughter close. "I couldn't protect her, Dmitri," she whispered in a soundless voice as the vampires used her. "I'm sorry." She would die here, she knew that. And whatever else, he would not forgive that. He was so stubborn, would carry the wound in his heart till the day he took his last breath, her beautiful, loyal husband who had loved her even when an angel came to woo him.
A whisper of sound.
Looking up, she saw Misha peering over the edge of the roof space. With her eyes, she told him to be quiet, to be still. But he was his father's son. Screaming in rage, he jumped on the back of one of her attackers, sinking strong little teeth into the vampire's neck. The vampire went to rip off her son and throw him to the floor as she fought to escape, to protect him.
"No!" One of the others caught Misha's screaming, twisting form in his arms. "She wants the older child alive!" He squeezed her sweet boy tight as she begged him not to hurt her child. But the monster only laughed, continuing to crush Misha until his tiny, fierce body went limp.
Then, finished with her, they
broke her spine so she couldn't escape as the house filled with smoke, with flame. She died with her baby in her arms, holding on to the end. But there was no peace for her soul, her mind filled with the echo of Misha's screams, the sight of Caterina's ravaged neck, and Dmitri's haunting words when Isis's men came for him. "Will you forgive me, Ingrede? For what I must do?"
Such a proud man, her husband. So very, very proud. "You fight a battle," she'd whispered, touching her hand to his cheek. "You do this to protect us. There is nothing to forgive."
So he had gone, her Dmitri, gone to the bed of a being who saw him only as a thing to be used. And he had promised to come back, no matter what it took. But now, she wouldn't be waiting for him.
His heart would break.
"Honor!" Dmitri shook the woman who had slept so warm beside him through the night, trying to wake her as she cried great, hiccuping tears.
Then she turned, burying her face into his chest, and he knew she was already awake. Her tears, they were those of a woman who had lost everything. Utter devastation in every hot, wet drop as she cried and cried and cried, her body shaking so hard, he worried she would shatter.
She wouldn't hear his words, wouldn't be gentled, so he simply held her, tighter than he ever had before. She didn't fight him, didn't do anything but cry--until his chest was wet with her desolation and he wanted to tear something apart. But he didn't tell her to stop. Amos's death, he thought, had been the catalyst for this, and if she needed it to complete her healing, so be it.
So he held this hunter whose midnight green eyes said she saw him, shadows and all, who touched him as Ingrede used to do, who made him imagine an impossible truth, held her so close that she was a part of his very soul.
37
Honor sat with her legs dangling over the side of the railingless balcony outside Dmitri's office. It would be a terrifying plunge if she fell, but she figured one of the angels below would catch her. Of course, she wasn't about to take the chance--there was no way in hell she planned to die anytime soon.
Not after it had taken her so long to come back from the last time.