When Illium produced a black garbage bag, he raised an eyebrow. “I’d have thought Elena would have taught you something by now.”
The angel gave him an unexpectedly solemn look out of those golden eyes tipped with black lashes dipped in blue, an echo of his hair. “Do you think I will fall again, Dmitri?” Memory in his voice, whispers of pain. “Lose my wings?”
Dmitri was unsurprised at the question. Illium wasn’t one of Raphael’s Seven, the angels and vampires who had pledged their lives to the archangel, because he was anything less than piercingly intelligent. Now he met that extraordinary gaze. “You look at her in a way no man should look at a woman who belongs to an archangel.” Illium had a weakness for mortals, and while Elena was now an angel, she had a vulnerable human heart, was mortal in her thinking.
The blue-winged angel said nothing as Dmitri put the head inside the plastic bag. There was no other evidence here for anyone to collect—the head had floated up on the Hudson, been spotted and retrieved by Illium as he flew over the river a mere fraction of a moment before the last rays of the sun were consumed by the night, could’ve come from anywhere.
“She compels me,” the other male admitted at last. “But she is the Sire’s, and I would guard that relationship with my life.” Quiet, passionate, absolute.
Dmitri could have let it go at that, but there was more at stake here than a dangerous attraction. “It’s not betrayal I’m worried about. It’s you.”
Illium’s hair swept across his face in a capricious wind before settling. “In Amanat,” he said, speaking of the lost city newly arisen, “Elena said she needed me to protect her against you.” A faint smile. “It was a tease, but it does her no harm to have someone in her corner.”
Dmitri didn’t dispute Illium’s implied assessment of his own feelings toward the Guild Hunter who was Raphael’s chosen consort. “You’re convinced she saved his life when Lijuan attacked?” Illium’s report seemed implausible, and yet Raphael himself had confirmed some of it when the archangel contacted Dmitri soon after Caliane’s reawakening.
“Only Raphael knows the truth, but I know what I saw,” Illium said, his face strained with remembrance. “He was dying, and then he lived—and the flame in his hands was colored in shades of dawn.”
The same soft colors that lingered on part of Elena’s wings.
Dmitri remained leery. Elena was the weakest of angels, her mortal heart nowhere near strong enough to survive the world of the archangels. “She’s become a permanent chink in his armor.” As Raphael’s second, Dmitri was never going to accept that, though he had vowed to protect her and would carry that vow through to the very end, no matter what the cost.
“Have you never had a woman create such a chink in your armor?” One of Illium’s feathers fell toward the ground but was whipped away and over the water before it could touch the unforgiving concrete. “In all the years I’ve known you, never have you had a lover on whom you placed a true claim.”
“I will watch the roads for you, Dmitri.”
Illium was just over five hundred years old to Dmitri’s near thousand. He didn’t know anything of what had gone on before—Raphael alone knew. “No,” Dmitri said and it was a lie he told with centuries of expertise. “Weakness gets a man killed.”
Illium blew out a breath as they reached the flame red Ferrari the angel coveted but couldn’t drive because of his wings, and said, “Do not lose your humanity, Dmitri. It’s what makes you.” He flared out those wings of impossible beauty and rose into the air with a grace and strength that foretold what he might one day become.
Watching the angel fly up into the star-studded skies above a Manhattan stretching awake for the dark beat of night, until he was a sweeping shadow against the glittering black, Dmitri’s lips curved into a grim smile. “I lost my humanity a long time ago, Bluebell.”
Honor was in the subterranean depths of Guild Academy’s main building, peering at an illuminated fourteenth-century text to do with one Amadeus Berg, legendary hunter and explorer, when her cell phone rang. Jumping up at the abrupt burst of sound, she grabbed it from where she’d placed it on the table beside her keys. “Sara?” she said, having recognized the number flashing on the screen as that of the Guild Director’s personal cell phone.
“Honor.” Crisp. No nonsense. Sara. “Where are you?”
“Rare books section of the Academy library.” Dimly lit in deference to the age of the books stored here, and kept at a precise ambient temperature, it had become a refuge, a place few ventured.
“Good. You’re not too far.” The sound of papers rustling. “Tower needs a consult and you’re particularly well qualified. When you—”
Honor didn’t hear the rest of the director’s words because her ears crashed with a thundering rush of blood, her face heating until it felt as if her skin would peel off from the burn, leaving her flesh exposed to the cruel air. “Sara,” she blurted out, fingers clenching on the edge of the desk, the bone showing white against skin that had once been a light brown touched by sunshine but was now dull, pasty, “you know I can’t.” Her terror was greater than any pitiful surviving shred of pride.
“Yes, you can.” Sara’s tone was gentle but firm. “I won’t allow you to bury yourself at the Academy forever.”
Her hand squeezed the phone, her heart racing so fast and jagged it hurt. “And if I want to be buried?” she asked, finding the will to fight in the same bone-crushing fear that had sweat beading along her spine.
“Then I’d have to get tough and remind you that you are still under contract as an active hunter.”
Honor’s knees collapsed, crumpling her into a chair. The Guild was the only home she knew, her fellow hunters her family. “I’m an instructor.” It was a last-ditch attempt to claw her way out of this.
“No, you’re not.” A denunciation no less ruthless for being soft voiced. “You haven’t taught a single class in the months you’ve been there.”
“I’ll—”
“Honor.” A single, final word.
She fisted her hand on the desk, staring unseeing at the haunting blues and passionate reds of the illuminated manuscript she’d dropped with a shocking lack of care on the polished wood. “Tell me the details.”
Sara blew out a breath. “Part of me wants to wrap you in cotton wool and keep you safe and warm where nothing can hurt you,” she said with a fierceness that betrayed the generous heart beneath that tough exterior, “but the other part of me knows I’d be helping to cripple you and I refuse to do that.”
Honor flinched. Not because the words were harsh, but because they were true. She wasn’t whole, hadn’t been whole for the past ten months. “I don’t know if there’s enough of me left to scrape up, Sara.” Sometimes, she wasn’t sure she wasn’t still in that filthy pit stained with blood, sweat, and . . . other bodily fluids, that her current life wasn’t an illusion created by a fragmented mind.
Then Sara spoke and the very razor of her words was a welcome reinforcement that this was the truth. Because surely if she’d dreamed herself into a fantasy to escape the brutal reality, she wouldn’t have made the Guild Director so unyielding?
“Ransom and Ashwini didn’t risk their lives to pull you out just so you could turn around and give up.” A reminder of the hands that had undone her bonds, the arms that had helped haul her up into the painful light. “Find the pieces and stitch yourself back together.”
Honor’s stomach was a churning mess by now, her free hand clenching and unclenching compulsively. “Is this where I salute and say, yes, sir?” Her words held no bite, because she remembered waking time and time again in the hospital to see Sara sitting beside her, a ferocious, protective force.
“No,” the director replied, “you say you’re heading up to get your ass into a cab. It’s only half past eight so you shouldn’t have any problems flagging one down.”