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?”
“Yes.” He passed the phone to Honor, needing a minute to rebuild the emotional shields that had somehow crashed at the sound of Sorrow’s voice.
It wasn’t until evening the next day that they returned to New York, having stayed behind to ensure everything was processed and cleaned up, until no one would ever know what had taken place in that quiet spot surrounded by the bright green of hundreds of sugar maples. However, he didn’t pilot the chopper to Manhattan and the Tower, but to a derelict condemned building not far from the New York–Connecticut border. “Are you sure?” he asked the woman with eyes full of mysteries he wanted to explore as she lay tumbled, pleasured, and smiling in his bed.
“Yes,” Honor said. Amos, she’d realized, wasn’t the monster who haunted her.
It was the cage he’d put her in.
Getting out of the gleaming machine, she waited for Dmitri to join her and then she led them into the bowels of hell. The building was stickered with Do Not Enter signs, but she strode forward and through to an internal door that led to a cement-floored basement.
“He told me,” she whispered, nausea churning in her stomach, “that he planned to do up the place, turn it into an old-fashioned salon where only the privileged would gather, but first he had to make sure all his guests had the right appetites.” Appetites that meant Honor had almost died before Amos ever got the walls painted, much less replaced the mildewed carpet and broken floorboards.
A male hand closing over the doorknob. “I’ll go first.”
“I need to—”
“Face your demons.” Dmitri brushed her hair off her face with unexpected tenderness. “That doesn’t mean you have to do it alone and unshielded.”
Looking into that face that still bore remnants of the brutal gouges from the fight, she realized that he needed to do this, too, to protect her. She couldn’t pretend his protectiveness, his care, was unwelcome. Not here. Not when it was Dmitri. But—“Together.” She touched her hand to his. “I won’t hide from any part of this, not even behind your broad shoulders.”
A long, taut pause before he nodded and opened the door that led down into her own personal hellhole. But as she navigated the steps, Dmitri by her side, her nausea was wiped out by anger, cutting and bright . . . and then, as she stepped into the pitch-black room where she’d been held and tortured for two long months, by pride.