A woman’s husky laugh.
It wasn’t Ingrede’s.
Pushing off his desk, he stalked to the plate-glass window that faced out into the hush of a Manhattan caught between night and day, the steel buildings soft gray shadows rather than glittering bulwarks. It was perhaps the only time the city was quiet, a mere two hours between the end of the nightlife and the beginning of the daylight rush.
He’d lived here for hundreds of years, seen it grow from nothing to a city whose heartbeat spoke to millions far and wide. He’d considered leaving it at times, had done so during his sojourn in Neha’s court, young and still filled with an anger that had had no outlet. And then, of course, there had been Favashi. Lovely, gracious Favashi who had been a queen in the making, her home filled with music and art and warmth—the perfect trap for a man who had sought solace for centuries and found none.
Why have you never asked me more about Favashi? he asked the angel he could see coming toward the Tower, his wingspan distinctive, the gold filaments bright even in the dull light.
Raphael’s reply was brutally honest. It didn’t seem a subject you cared to discuss.
You could at least have called me a fool, he said as Raphael landed on the balcony outside, beaten some sense into me.
“There was,” Raphael said, walking into the room even as he folded his wings to his back, “no need. Favashi was a good choice of mate for someone of your strength.”
Favashi had never wanted a mate. “If I wanted to be turned into her personal menace.”
“You are mine after all.” A slight curve of his lips.
“That’s just a bonus.” As he spoke, he realized more had changed in Raphael than simply his wings. The archangel had been his friend for centuries, but he’d become a remote, distant being over the past two hundred years.
Dmitri hadn’t really paid attention to the transformation because he’d been on the same path. But now the blue of Raphael’s eyes was touched with humor and he spoke to Dmitri as they once had on a field far from civilization, two very different men who’d found common ground. “She came here while you were away,” he said, wondering what it said about him that he’d not just noted the difference in Raphael, but responded to it.
“As she is not injured or dead, I take it you controlled yourself.”
“Without difficulty.” The truth was, while his pride had been pricked by the way Favashi had played him, his anger toward her had always been a cold thing. If Honor did anything similar, he realized, told him lies of love with such a sweet face, there would be no cold, only the most deadly of blood fury.
A rustle of wings. “If we are asking questions,” Raphael said, “then I have one of my own. Why have you never blamed me for Isis’s interest in you?”
“Because,” Dmitri said, “Isis’s madness was her own. And if there was any penance to be paid, you paid it in that room beneath her keep.” Chained to the wall opposite Dmitri, Raphael had been forced to watch Dmitri’s violent, forced conversion, to witness Isis’s other atrocities, to listen to Dmitri’s shattering scream as Isis whispered of what she had done to Ingrede and Caterina.
And he’d been there at the end, a silent guard, when Dmitri had held his son’s tiny body in his arms and cried until he had no tears left inside him, his self that of a hollow man. “I thought I died in that room,” he said, his hands fisting with the memory of how very fragile Misha’s bones had been, how effortless it had been to snap them.
The archangel said nothing for a long time. When he did speak, it was nothing expected. “I thought you had, too.”
Dmitri met those eyes of pitiless blue. “Why keep a dead man walking, then?”
“Perhaps I knew what you would one day become.” The cold answer of an archangel. Or perhaps it was because you weren’t the only one who made a vow in that place of horror.
Dmitri shoved a hand through his hair. “You should laugh at me, Raphael. I warned you against becoming involved with a hunter, and yet I find myself in much the same position.” Honor was becoming too important, a compulsion that wasn’t only sexual, wasn’t only physical.
“It is no hardship,” Raphael said. “To have a hunter by your side.”
But she wasn’t simply a hunter. She was the woman who awakened memories of a life he’d lost an eon ago. Ingrede’s laughter . . . it had been so very, very long since he’d heard it, but when Honor laughed, he felt as if he could almost reach out and touch his wife. A strange madness and one he had no will to fight—his heart ached with a need that had survived immortality, survived his every depravity, survived his own will.
“Have you had her blood tested?” Raphael’s question was pragmatic. “A sample should be simple to acquire, given that the Guild keeps units of stored blood for all its hunters.”
Ignoring the pain in his chest, Dmitri glanced at the archangel. “So certain?”
Raphael didn’t answer, because no answer was needed. They wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation if Honor wasn’t important. “I would not,” he said instead, “have you lose another mortal.”
“Sometimes there are no choices.” He thought of Illium, who continued to be drawn to mortals, though he’d lost the human woman he loved, seen her marry another man. The blue-winged angel had watched over her family until she passed, and then he had watched over her children and her children’s children . . . until they spread out across the world, and the small mountain village where his love had been born ceased to exist.
There are always choices.
“No, Raphael,” Dmitri said in response to that ice-cold tone in his mind. “I’ve stood by you for centuries, but if you touch her, it will cost you my loyalty.” And I will do my best to kill you.
A hint of some unnameable emotion in the inhuman depths of those eyes that had seen a millennium and more pass. “So, she is not only important. She is yours.”
Stalking closer to the glass, he stared out at a city beginning to shine silver bright in the dawn light. “I don’t know what she is.” But she is compatible. He’d obtained her blood, had the test done days ago, driven by unknowable need. The toxin that turned mortal to immortal would not drive her insane; it would not leave her a broken shell of the fascinating, compelling woman she was today.
You know you have but to ask. There will be no Contract for your chosen.
I know. He and Raphael had fought over the centuries, had fallen out, but they were tied by bonds so deep that the bindings had held even as they became ever older, ever more inhuman. The problem is, I think the last thing Honor would ever want to become is a vampire.
Another silence between two men who had known each other long enough not to fear it. Dmitri was the one who broke it. “What did Naasir say?” The vampire, one of the Seven, was currently posted in the newly risen city of Amanat, once a jewel in the archangel Caliane’s crown, now her home.
“That my mother treats him as a beloved pet.” Raphael’s tone held a dark amusement threaded through with something more dangerous. “It appears likely she has realized what he is.”
“It’s no secret.” Though Naasir’s origins and abilities were not widely known beyond a small, tight circle. “At least she’s accepted him.” Giving them a constant flow of information from Amanat without Raphael having to be there. “And the angel Jason left in his stead?”