Archangel's Storm (Guild Hunter 5)

Added to that was a sophisticated security system that would alert Dmitri to anyone in the forest or in the sky.

It was the safe place Jason had promised, a place where Dmitri’s wife embraced her new existence as a near immortal. The toxin that would turn her into a vampire had been introduced into her system three hours earlier, with Raphael having left New York under cover of night to fly here to perform the task—a task the archangel would do twice more several weeks apart.

Dmitri would’ve trusted no one else with Honor’s Making, and Raphael had kept his faith, treating Honor with utmost courtesy. Now, only two neat fang marks on her wrist remained as a memento of a choice that would alter her existence, but Dmitri knew the toxin had already begun to reshape her cells, though she wouldn’t feel the burn of the process for another few minutes.

He intended her to be under by then. Everything was ready. From one honey golden arm ran a saline drip he’d set up using medical knowledge he’d accumulated out of curiosity, staving off the boredom of an immortality that had been forced on him. There was another line, one that led to a carefully calculated drip of morphine, intended to offset the pain of the transformation.

“Sleep,” he whispered as the haunting midnight green of her eyes began to blur. “I’ll be here when you wake.” It would take roughly three months for the process to complete this way, but it would be a gentle change, not the agony that had turned him into an animal bound in chains that rubbed his skin raw, his flesh exposed to the filth of the room where he’d been kept. “Dream of me.”

“As if,” she whispered with a sleepy smile, “I would dream of anyone else.” Her lashes fluttered shut, her breathing falling into the even rhythm of deepest sleep.

Caressing fine strands of hair off her cheek, he checked to make sure her vital signs were as they should be. Now came the hardest part—the waiting. Honor would need no nutrients for the first few days, and her body had stopped producing waste the instant the toxin hit her bloodstream, everything burning up in the massive surge of energy needed to begin the transformation.

After those first three or four days, depending on how fast the change progressed, he’d bring her to a hazy wakefulness so she could drink just a few drops from him. The blood kiss was a step he’d repeat, until her final feeding would be a true one. For most Candidates, it was a clinical process, the blood introduced via a feeding tube, but for Honor, it would be an intimate journey.

His wife would always wake in his arms, safe and loved.

“Come back to me,” he whispered in the language of their long-ago homeland, part of him deathly afraid now that he couldn’t hear her voice, the husky intimacy of her laughter silent.

He didn’t know how he would bear the quiet, but he’d find a way, because she would hurt if he initiated a premature waking. And Honor was never, ever to be hurt. Not so long as Dmitri lived.

33

Two and a half hours after discovering the mutilated bodies of Neha’s pets, Jason called Raphael from a mountaintop touched with the dawn. “One of my people just sent through a report that indicates the possibility of Lijuan making the reborn again is now in the near-certain range.”

Jason’s man was situated not in Lijuan’s home fortress, but at another of the archangel’s strongholds. The distance from the origin made every piece of information suspect, but this particular rumor had been gaining momentum for weeks, until the highly intelligent vampire was sure it had been born in truth. The most recent whispers had been dangerously explicit in their detail.

“I cannot believe her a fool.” Ice in Raphael’s voice. “It was one of her reborn who first attacked her in Beijing.”

“It’s being whispered that she’s no longer choosing candidates from within her court, but from the peasants, those who look upon her as a demigoddess.” Lijuan was a good empress in many ways—her people always had enough to eat, and she meted out justice with a fair hand. However, she preferred to keep the majority of her people in a cultural and technological state that had remained unchanged for centuries.

“Why should I create discontent by permitting them to know of things beyond their reach? It is not as if they live long enough for it to matter.”

Words she’d spoken to Raphael four hundred years ago while Jason had been in the room, her decision that of an archangel who’d been alive millennia and who considered mortals little more than a disposable workforce. Yet age alone couldn’t account for her choice. Caliane was far, far older, and from all the reports Jason had had from Naasir, her people were well-learned and within her city lay a sprawling library open to all.

No, the desire Lijuan had to keep so many of her people in ignorance came from within her, as did her power to reanimate the dead to shambling, horrifying life. And it was this archangel who might well be teaching Neha how to handle her destructive new abilities. Jason had to find out the content of those lessons.

If Lijuan had groomed herself an ally to assist her in her malignant games, the earth might yet become a place of endless horror. A place where fire fell from the sky and the dead hunted the living for flesh, warm and blood drenched.

* * *

Mahiya was sitting on a bench in the pavilion in the courtyard in front of her palace, her magnificent wings spread on the marble behind her when he returned from speaking to Raphael. She said nothing until he came to stand beside her. “I keep thinking of her.”

Jason didn’t need her to tell him who she meant. “It’s a natural thing. Nivriti was your mother.”

Her head lifted, a slight hesitation to her as she said. “Your mother, Aurelani, is she alive?”

“No.”

“Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

Hidden from prying eyes by the spread of her wing and the columns of the pavilion, she reached a hand up to close it around his. “I’m sorry. I’ve made you sad.”

“No,” he said. “You didn’t. It happened an eon ago.” His emotions had aged, taken on a hue he couldn’t describe.

“Will you tell me about her?” Tawny eyes looked up at him, her lashes casting lacey shadows on her cheeks.

Until Mahiya, he hadn’t ever spoken of his mother to anyone, and even then, it had been in the guise of a romantic tale. He didn’t know if he could speak of her, of the mother the famed Aurelani had been to him, the scar tissue inside him a jagged barrier. “Ask me again another day.”

“All right.” With that gentle agreement, Mahiya leaned her head against his side. “I asked Vanhi to tell me stories about my mother this morning.” Her fingers squeezed his. “She told me many things, including about the lake palace that was her favorite place in all of this land. It’s not so very far from here. An hour’s flight.”