Guild Hunter 04 - Archangel's Blade

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