Archangel's Blade

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?”