Guild Hunter 04 - Archangel's Blade

or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
     
    ARCHANGEL’S BLADE
     
    A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author
     
    PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / September 2011
     
Copyright © 2011 by Nalini Singh.
     
    All rights reserved.
    No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
    For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
     
    ISBN : 978-1-101-54388-7
     
    BERKLEY SENSATION ®
Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY SENSATION ® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
     

     

     
    http://us.penguingroup.com

Writing this book was a wonderful journey,
made more so by the amazing people around me.
Thank you, to each and every one of you.

Before Isis
     
    “Papa! Papa!”
    “Oomph, Misha.” Catching his son’s excited form as the little boy came running down the rough country drive, he settled Misha on his arm—browned, scarred, and muscled from working the fields—and said, “What has your mama been feeding you?”
    A giggling laugh, his son secure in the knowledge that his father wouldn’t drop him. “Did you bring me a sweet?”
    “I was hungry on the way home,” he teased. “I’m afraid I ate it.”
    Misha’s brow furrowed, his dark eyes intent . . . and then he laughed again, a huge and deep laugh for such a small boy. “Papa!” He began to look in his father’s shirt pocket, gave a triumphant cry when he found the small wrapped package.
    Smiling at his son’s joy, he looked up and saw her in the doorway. His wife. With their new daughter in her arms. His heart twisted into a knot that was almost painful. Sometimes, he thought he should be ashamed to love his wife and children so much, until the days when he went away to the markets were a rare anguish . . . but he could not bring himself to believe it.
    When other men complained about their wives, he simply smiled f yhought of the woman with the slanting eyes and wide mouth who waited for him. Ingrede hated her mouth, wanted a little bow like the wife of their neighbor across the plain, but he loved her smile, loved the crooked tooth in the front, and the way she began to lisp when he talked her into too much of the white fire brewed by the same neighbor’s son.
    Now, setting down his bag on the doorstep, he cupped her cheek with his hand. “Hello, wife.”
    “I missed you, Dmitri.”

1
     
    Crouching on the concrete pier lit only by the dull yellow glow of a flickering streetlight several feet away, Dmitri tilted the severed head toward him with a grip in the dead male’s damp hair, not bothering with gloves. Elena, he thought, would not have approved of the breach in proper forensic protocol, but the hunter was currently in Japan and wouldn’t return to the city for three more days.
    The victim’s head had been separated from his—as yet undiscovered—body with hacking slices, the weapon possibly some kind of a small ax. Not a neat job, but it had gotten things done. The skin, which appeared to have been either pink or white in life, was bloated and soft with water, but the river hadn’t had time to degrade it into slime.
    “I was hoping,” he said to the blue-winged angel who stood on the other side of the grisly find, “for a quiet few weeks.” The reappearance of the archangel Caliane, thought dead for over a millennium, had rocked both the angels and the vampire population. The mortals, too, felt something, but they had no true knowledge of the staggering change in the power structure of the Cadre of Ten, the archangels who ruled the world.
    Because Caliane wasn’t simply old, she was an Ancient.
    “Quiet would bore you,” Illium said, playing a thin silver blade in and around his fingers. Having preceded Raphael and