Guild Hunter 04 - Archangel's Blade

of wildflowers hit him hard as he got into the driver’s seat of the Ferrari, scraping against the raw wound that was the memory of Misha’s funeral pyre.
    “She’s a victim.” Honor slammed her own door shut.
    Feeling vicious, he didn’t bother to sugarcoat his opinion as he guided the car away from the curb. “She’s weak, a parasite. A year, maybe not even that, and she’ll have found another Evert to bleed.”
    “You’re talking about a woman with all the hallmarks of abuse,” Honor argued, stubborn in her belief, so like another woman who had once fought with him, wild passion in her voice. “It’ll take her time to break the cycle.”
    He heard what she didn’t say—that it had taken her months to crawl up out of that dark pit into which she’d been thrown. “Shae,” he said, punching the car into higher gear, “has had the span of a mortal life to find her spine. She hasn’t, and she never will.”
    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 er 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