Nalini Singh: Archangel's Blade

“Dmitri.” A rough kind of a voice, raspy yet deep.

“Your throat never recovered.”

“I shouldn’t have displeased her as I did.” A sound that might have been a sigh.

“Your mistress wasn’t known for her patience—or the care with which she handled her toys.”

The civility of the conversation made the hairs rise on the back of Honor’s neck. She knew full well she was listening to two predators circling each other. Only one of them would survive the night.

Kallistos had lost none of his beauty in the interveningyears. He had, in fact, grown further into that delicate bone structure that showcased eyes of brilliant copper, and lips so soft and well-shaped, more than one angel had been seduced by their perfection. His body, too, was a thing of beauty. Slender, but with incredible muscle tone—the air barely stirred when he moved, his tread that of a dancer.

“An exquisite creature,” Isis had called him the day she took Dmitri to her bed—and forced Kallistos to watch.

“I have been an ill host.” Kallistos waved his hand toward a tray set with a crystal decanter filled with bloodred liquid that shimmered in the candlelight. “We are two sophisticated men, are we not?”

Dmitri took in the flush high on Kallistos’s cheekbones, the glitter in those copper eyes, asked, “How long since you slept?”

The other man leaned back against the wall beside a massive fireplace. Sliding his hands into the pockets of suit pants of a deep brown that appeared almost black in the candlelight, he angled his face to its best advantage. It was, Dmitri knew, an automatic act, but not an unconscious one—because as Dmitri had learned to use the scent lure as an offensive weapon, Kallistos had learned to use his face and body.

Now, he parted those perfect lips the slightest fraction. “There is a large bed upstairs . . . quite ready for use.” Sensual invitation in every word, the confidence of a man who had been able to bend both male and female to his advantage for centuries.

Even Isis, Dmitri thought, had cosseted him when she wasn’t torturing him. It was no wonder the young human men the vampire had lured to his lair had come so sweetly to their deaths, surrendering their bodies for him to do with as he wished. “You failed in your attempt to Make vampires.”

“I thought to build an army.” A smile designed to make his audience smile with him, to see him as a pretty adornment, no threat at all. “A silly premise, I soon came to realize, but why not use the slaves I already had? It was fun leaving presents on your doorstep.”

Pushing off the wall with a look full of delight, he circled around the sofa until they stood only a few feet apart, his gait elegant. “Then it struck me—I didn’t need to have an army to destroy you.” He spread his hands. “All I had to do was take someone you loved and make you watch while I slaughtered her.”

Memories, painful and brutal, threatened to roar to the surface, but Dmitri had had almost a thousand years to learn to think past the pain. “You were lying in a pool of your own blood when we discovered you.” It was a quiet reminder, a final chance. “She’d whipped you until she’d shredded the skin off your back, then ridden your cock while you screamed.”

A jagged anger marred the flawless lines of Kallistos’s face. “You didn’t understand her, peasant that you were.”

“And you were naught to her but a pretty toy,” Dmitri said with cruel honesty, “something she would have perhaps regretted breaking, but only for as long as it took her to find a new bauble.”

Copper burned hot, but Kallistos didn’t strike, didn’t react. “She broke your bauble, didn’t she?” A vicious smile. “They said your wife squealed like a stuck pig while they rutted on her.”

Rage seared his bloodstream, but he would never give Kallistos the satisfaction of seeing what it did to him to think of his gentle, loving Ingrede’s final moments on the earth. “Do you still love her, Kallistos?”

A dark silence, followed by a simple, “Yes.”

“Then there is nothing more to say.” He struck out with the scimitar, aiming to decapitate.

But Kallistos was no longer there, having moved with feline grace to shield himself behind a sofa. “Careful,” the vampire said, pulling a gleaming sword from its hiding place by the heavy piece of furniture, “or you’ll never find out where she is.”

Dmitri breathed deep, caught Honor’s scent near the doorway. “You have nothing.”

A mocking smile. “It wasn’t difficult to take her. All I had to do was make a phone call threatening her younger brothers.” A smug satisfaction that was as chilling as it was impossible. “She slipped out past your guard and right into my arms, the delicious little thing.”

Honor didn’t have younger brothers. But Sorrow did.

Ice steeled his blood. “Surrender to me now,” he said, catching tendrils of unexpected scent that told him Kallistos still had living protovampires at his command, “and I’ll make your death an easy one.” Honor was out there alone, but the instant Dmitri went to her, he would give Kallistos another target.

Kallistos laughed again, a rough, broken, painful sound. “It amuses me to know you’ll live the rest of your life knowing she died a slow, painful death—after servicing me until I tired of her. It’s a pity you didn’t arrive an hour earlier.” A smile that aimed to draw heart’s blood. “She screamed your name at the end.”

Dmitri went after Kallistos without warning, shoving the raw fury of his emotions to the back of his mind. That would come later. After Kallistos was dead.

Avoiding the lethal strike, the other vampire twisted and almost flew over the sofa to land on his feet on the other side. “Neha,” Kallistos said as Dmitri circled around to face him, “is many things. One of which is a master blade fighter.”

“Her skills didn’t help her daughter,” Dmitri taunted, aware of sounds in the hallway, bodies starting to stream into the room behind him, blocking the exit.

“Anoushka was arrogant.” Kallistos came at him in a blur that sliced a line across Dmitri’s T-shirt, soaking the black material the dark red of his blood. “I, however, don’t care about showing off. Only causing you pain.”

Dmitri swept out again, slid the wrong way on a thick rug. Kallistos used the opportunity to cut a deep gash on his back, the blade skating agonizingly off his spine. “How does it feel to be the weaker one, Dmitri?” A hissing question. “She begged you to spare her life, begged you!”

Ten of the young, weak protovampires with guns. No more sounds in the hallway.

“She was a bitch who deserved to die.” With those cold words, he began to move in earnest. But rather than heading toward Kallistos, he spun out toward the edges of the room, cutting down the protovampires who thought to gun him down. But he was too fast, his blade sweet fire through the air, spurting blood onto the walls as Kallistos screamed and lunged after him.

So, Isis’s former lover bore some kind of a twisted love for his creations after all.

Using his feet to push off a wall splattered with red, he flipped over Kallistos and down into a crouch below the barrage of bullets. But one caught him in the arm nonetheless. Shaking off the pain, he sliced out with the scimitar again, amputating his attacker’s legs at the knees. The vampire was too young, too badly Made to survive it, his screaming high-pitched, endless.

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.