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.
Kicking out at Kallistos’s knees, he grazed him with the blade as Kallistos twisted out of the way and ran not 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.