“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 park. “Every other man I’ve seen since the assault has winced after mentioning something that might be considered an innuendo, and you continually say things like that.”
“Some people,” Dmitri said, “survive. Others don’t. You did.” He knew because he knew what it was to stand in a place beyond desolation.
Wild blue flickered through the web of leaves in front of them at that moment and Dmitri’s priorities shifted. Stepping into the small clearing, he took in everything with a single glance. Illium, coming to land out of sight of Sorrow. The young woman herself sitting on an old tree stump with her arms locked tight around herself, her eyes diverted from the corpse on the grass in front of her.
The male’s fly was open, his genitals spilling out. His head rested at an angle that told Dmitri it had been broken with force, while his mouth was caught in an expression akin to that of a blowfish. “What happened?” he asked Sorrow, while Honor went to crouch beside the body.
“I was walking”—rapid, staccato, as if she’d been hoarding her words—“and the next thing I remember, I’m standing here, watching his body slam to the ground.” Her eyes, eyes that bespoke the man—the monster—who had Made her, met his. “I’m becoming like him. A butcher.” The tang of her fear was unmistakable, but she held his gaze, this woman who had become Sorrow. “You have to do it, Dmitri.” A whisper. “End me.”
15
“Not yet.” His eyes went to the man’s exposed penis, shriveled and wizened in death. A normal man didn’t walk around with his cock hanging out. But with Sorrow’s memory a blank, there was no way to know if she’d enticed or mesmerized the human to come close enough that she could murder him, or if she had reacted in self-defense.
That was when Honor rose to her feet, a grim smile on her face. “I thought I recognized him.” She passed over her smart-phone.
Taking it, Dmitri glanced at the newspaper article she’d pulled up about one Rick Hernandez, rapist out on parole. His mug shot had been printed as part of the paper’s policy of alerting neighborhoods about violent offenders in their midst. A further scan of the article showed that the two women he’d been convicted of assaulting had both been small boned and of Asian descent.
Handing Sorrow the phone, he watched as she began to shake. “I’ll handle this.” He put a hand on her hair and felt something fundamental in him break, reshape itself. “Venom will drive you home.”
“Venom isn’t here,” Honor said. “I am. Give me your car keys.”
“Sorrow isn’t human.”
“The fact that she snapped the neck of a man twice her size was my first clue.” Folded arms, but there was no aggression in those eyes full of mysteries. Instead, he saw a quiet strength and an inexplicable tenderness that twisted around his heart, barbed wire that made him bleed. “I’m armed and she’s young.”
“Stay with her until Venom arrives.” Dmitri threw her his keys.
Instead of skirting around the other side of Sorrow’s dead assailant, she walked close enough to him that the backs of their hands touched. It was the first time she’d made a conscious effort to touch him skin to skin.
His body burned.
The trip to Sorrow’s house didn’t take long. “Come on,” she said to the young woman, who sat quiet and shaken, a doll with its strings cut. Honor saw herself in her, as she’d been before Sara’s call . . . before Dmitri. The rough heat of his skin lingered on her own, and she wondered if he understood what it meant to her to know that her need to reach him was deeper than the scars left by her abduction. “Let’s go in and have some tea.”
“I don’t have any.” A pause, the dull, glazed look lifting a fraction, as if she was fighting to break free of the shock. “I have coffee.”
“That’ll do.”
Sorrow’s movements continued to be jerky and uncoordinated as they walked into the house, where the woman who wasn’t quite human began to make coffee with quick, jagged movements. “Uram,” she said without warning. “I was one of his victims.” Ground beans into the coffeemaker, water reservoir being filled. “He took us as we walked to the movies.”
According to the media, the archangel Uram had entered New York in an effort to take over Raphael’s territory. But, if Honor was remembering it right, there had been a low-level hum of speculation that he’d had something to do with the string of disappearances that had taken place in the city around the same time. However, that speculation had died down the instant a more viable suspect was found. No one wanted to believe such madness of an archangel. “You were the sole survivor,” she guessed.
“Yes.” A laugh as bitter as the coffee dripping into the glass pot on the counter. “Though I’m not sure you’d call this surviving. I wasn’t always Sorrow.” The coffeemaker switched off on that haunting comment. Pouring out a cup, she slid it across to Honor before pouring one for herself. “I’ve never killed a man before.”
Honor took a sip of the hot liquid before answering, feeling eons older than this girl, though the actual age gap between them was probably closer to six or seven years. “It takes something from you,” she said, because Sorrow didn’t need lies, “something you never get back.”
The first person Honor had stabbed hadn’t died, but the feel of her knife slicing into fat and flesh, the sharp scent of iron in the air, it was nothing she would ever forget. “But,” she continued, “some people need to be killed.” That man had intended to hurt her—she’d seen it in his yellowed smile the instant the social worker left.
He’d had the nerve to call the cops afterward, screaming at them to arrest her. Except the chain-smoking detective had zeroed in on the fact that the “victim” had been stabbed at three a.m. in a young girl’s bedroom. Sometimes, the system worked.
A perfunctory knock at the door, then firm footsteps walking into the house—the vampire she had never seen without his sunglasses, dressed in another sleek black suit, this time with a shirt of gunmetal gray.
“There you are, Sorrow.” An almost gentle comment, with the finest razor-sharp edge of mockery. “Looks like I’m going to have to keep a closer eye on you.”
Sliding her gun back into her shoulder holster, Honor watched as he slid off the shades. Slitted and bright green, his eyes were those of a viper. “Okay,” she said, not fighting the urge to stare, “that, I wasn’t expecting.” They had to be real, the reason for the sunglasses, but even knowing that, her brain had trouble processing the sight, it was so alien.
A slow smile, his cinnamon-dark skin holding a warmth at odds with the eyes of a creature whose blood ran ice-cold. However, the words he directed at Sorrow were merciless. “Next time you slip your guard, I’ll find you nice, comfortable accommodation in a cell somewhere. Or maybe a cage would work better.”