Archangel's Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(19)

7


The police had left the majority of the body parts in the large sports bags in which they’d been found, but even a cursory glance at the top half of the torso—which appeared to have fallen out of a bag, likely when someone got curious—showed that the vampire had been dismembered with the same hacking slices she’d noted along the neck. “Either someone was really angry or they just didn’t give a damn.”

Dmitri crouched down by the torso. “Don’t ascribe human motives to this, Honor.”

Memories of slaps that had split her lip as a child, carefully aimed punches where teachers and social workers wouldn’t see the bruises, the slice of her knife into fatty flesh as the bedroom door opened late one night. “Humans can be as vicious.” She wasn’t sorry for what she’d done to protect herself and others as a child—she’d decided the first time a foster “father” looked at her in a way no man should look at a child that she’d never be a defenseless victim.

And she hadn’t been . . . until the basement and the softly mocking laughter as elegant, manicured hands roamed her naked body.

Fuck them, she thought, the anger that had awoken inside her the previous night blazing ever brighter. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t give the bastards the satisfaction of seeing her curl up and die.

“Yes,” Dmitri said as she let that vow settle into her very bones, “but this has the touch of an immortal.” His hair gleamed blue-black under the sunshine, a sensual invitation. Her fingers were halfway to it before she realized what she was doing.

Face burning, she retracted her hand, clenching it into a fist. What was wrong with her? Forget the fact that they were about as much in public as it was possible to get; she was certain he was capable of doing things to her that would make the basement seem like child’s play.

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 “f*ck 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.”