Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter 4)

And still she wanted to touch him, until she could almost feel the cool silk of his hair sliding through her fingers.

“Have you seen anything like this before?” she asked, giving herself a hard mental slap to snap the seductive thread of compulsion.

“Dismemberment isn’t new,” he said with the cool pragmatism of a man who had lived through the dark ages of both mortal and immortal. “But this isn’t about how the body was torn apart—that, I think, was a practical exercise.”

Easier to transport, to leave in such a public place. “So it’s about the spectacle.”

Dmitri’s nod sent strands of hair sliding across his forehead. “That and a challenge. Why else go to the trouble of dumping the body here, in the heart of Raphael’s territory?”

She saw it then, akin to pieces of an ancient language coming together in her mind to form a perfect sentence. “But Raphael is famously not here right now, Dmitri. You are.”

He went motionless, in a way a human being simply couldn’t. It was as if every part of him went quiet. He didn’t breathe, didn’t so much as blink. “Very good, Honor. Seems like it was a good idea to keep you around.”

Perhaps it was a taunt. Or perhaps it was nothing but the arrogance of an almost-immortal who had lived centuries, seen empires rise and fall, fought on blood-soaked fields of battle, and seen a million, billion human lives extinguished under the inexorable march of time. It was a thought both fascinating and disconcerting. Unsure why she was so . . . disturbed by the idea, she rose to examine the other body parts as well as she could—she was no pathologist, but she’d had the basic training all hunters received.

The flesh had begun to decompose, maggots crawling in several of the pieces. “Not refrigerated, even though it appears as if the body was dismembered soon after death,” she said. “If this dump was planned—and it had to have been, for so many pieces to have been left here at one time—I’d have expected the murderer or murderers to have taken better care of the body.”

“Why?” Rising to his feet, Dmitri stripped off and disposed of the gloves he’d grabbed from one of the cops. “The whole point was to create a show. I’m fairly certain hunks of human meat crawling with maggots had the right impact.”

He was right. It wasn’t hard to guess that the scent of decomposition had been critical to the early discovery of the remains—and that spoke not of rampant madness but of a sly kind of intelligence. “I’d like to know if the pathologist finds any other markings.” The more text she had to work with, the easier the decoding process.

“I’ll arrange it.” He took out a cell phone. “Do you want the skin or will photographs do?”

Such a beautiful male. Such a pitiless question.

“Photographs will do for now,” she said, wondering if he was capable of the raw depths of human emotion any longer, this creature formed for seduction and honed in blood, “but they should preserve the skin if possible.”

“It’ll be done.”

Not long afterward, he drove her to the Academy. “Your quarters are here?”

She shook her head. “I moved out this morning.” Another step out of the pit, another “fuck you” to the bastards who had hurt her.

Dmitri’s smile was slow, dangerous. “Good.”

Her hindbrain screamed a warning even as her abdomen clenched in visceral sensual awareness. “The building has security.”

He raised an eyebrow.

Yeah, she didn’t think that would stop him either.

Getting out, she took in the picture he made in that car, a gorgeous, sexy creature, his skin kissed to warm perfection by the sun, the stunning blue of his shirt an exotic contrast. “You look like some rich playboy.” If said playboys were sharks.

“And?”

“And playboys prefer the glossy model type, in bed and out. It’s a rule.”

“While you’re in the library, look up a painting titled Asleep by Gadriel,” he said, slipping on a pair of sunglasses. “That’s my idea of the perfect woman.”

Of course it was the first thing she did—and felt an electric current of wicked heat singe her blood when the computer screen filled with the nude image of a couple asleep in bed, the man on his back, the woman lying on top of him, his hand fisted in her abundant ebony hair. There were tangled sheets aplenty, but none covered the woman’s honey-colored skin. Her heavy br**sts were crushed against the man’s chest, his free hand lying proprietarily on her lush bottom, her body all curves and softness.

But for the lack of muscle that underlay every hunter’s form, it could’ve been a painting of Honor.

Returning to the Tower with his mind full of images of what Honor would look like in place of Gadriel’s model, Dmitri headed up to his office. “What have you got?” he asked Venom when the vampire returned from his duties overseeing the removal and transportation of the body parts. His question, however, had nothing to do with the morning’s find.

“The vampires who took Honor were clever,” Venom answered, removing his sunglasses to reveal eyes no human would ever, ever possess. “They used weaker, younger vamps to do the dirty work, and it was those vamps the hunters cornered when they went in.”

Dmitri knew the two survivors had been shot and sliced all to hell but left alive. However, according to the vampire who’d had charge of the case till now, neither had provided any information of value. The mastermind behind the kidnapping had kept them scrupulously out of the loop.

Dmitri decided he needed to pay them a personal visit. This was his hunt now. “Keep on it.”

His private line rang just as Venom left. Answering, he found himself talking to Dahariel, Astaad’s second. “What news of Caliane?” the angel asked.

The query wasn’t unusual, given the fact that the oldest of the archangels was allowing only Raphael and those he called his own through the shield around the newly risen city of Amanat. “Concerned with helping her people make the transition from sleep to wakefulness.” Those people, mortals and—it had been discovered—a number of immortals, had slept more than a millennium beside their goddess in a city of stone gray now sparkling under the light of a foreign sun.

From what Raphael had told him in their last conversation, the residents of Amanat were content to re-create and live in the time in which they had gone to sleep, filling the gardens with blooms, the fountains with water. They would not hear of modern things, had no curiosity to explore a mountainous new homeland far from the place where they had last walked.