Honor waited until he hung up to say, “Kallistos was Isis’s lover?”
“Yes, though he had a different name then. A youth, only decades into his Contract. He was bleeding from her attentions when we found him.” Letting him live had been an easy decision. “We believed him another victim.” But Kallistos, it seemed, had loved his mistress regardless of her cruelty.
“A young angel,” he said, choosing his words with care so as not to put Honor at risk of having her memory wiped, as had happened to Illium’s mortal lover, “has gone missing from Neha’s court. No one is quite certain when he disappeared.” Especially given this next fact. “Ask me the name of the senior vampire who was in charge of him.”
“Kallistos,” Honor said, blowing out a breath. “It’s how he’s making those protovampires.” A question in her eyes. “I know you won’t tell me the process, since even Candidates are put to sleep during the initial stages, but everyone knows it’s the angels who Make the vamps. I always thought it was the older ones.”
While the angels did nothing to negate that view, it was in fact the younger adults who built up the toxin more quickly in their bodies. The older the angel, the higher his level of tolerance—though even archangels weren’t immune, as Uram had proved. “Jason just told me that the angel was last seen by someone other than Kallistos a year ago,” he said, not answering her implied question. “If we assume he was abducted soon afterward, and taking his age into account, he would’ve been able to successfully Make one vampire.”
“Kallistos tried to Make more,” Honor said, walking to the plate glass of his window, the rain that had begun to fall forty minutes ago turning the city into a mist-shrouded mirage, “and it diluted the effect.” Brow furrowed, she recrossed the carpet.
“Quite likely.” Not only that, Kallistos hadn’t followed the correct procedures, the reason for the mutation in the dead males’ blood cells. “It should be far easier to run him to ground now that we have a name and a face.”
Having come to stand beside him, Honor leaned back against his desk, nodded. However, her expression was troubled. “I can’t stop thinking about Jiana. She seemed so loving, maternal.”
“There’s nothing as yet to say that she isn’t—Amos’s madness may be his own.” But Dmitri had deep doubts about that, because from what he’d seen over the years, this depth of hatred mingled with warped love had its roots in something that should never have been, an ugliness that seeded a twisted kernel deep within the soul.
Midnight green eyes met his, haunting and promising him an impossible dream. “You don’t believe that.”
Closing the distance between them, he stroked his fingers over her jaw, the softness of her skin an irresistible enticement. “Do you think you can read me?”
“I think”—her hand closing over his wrist—“I know you far better than I should.”
Yes. Too often, he saw knowledge in her eyes that shouldn’t have been there, felt a familiarity in her kiss, her laughter that made him ache, and he wondered if he wasn’t giving in to a subtle insanity of his own. And yet he couldn’t pull away, pull back. “There’s nothing more to do tonight.” The phone call to Jason had set the search for Kallistos in motion, and as for Jiana’s son, Dmitri had already put the entire region on alert.
And sometimes a man had to seize the moment, regardless of the consequences. To allow it to pass might mean it would never again come.
“Dmitri, come dance with me.”
“My feet ache from the fields, Ingrede. After I return from the markets?”
A smile that lit up the room, though fear lurked a silent intruder in her eyes. “After you return.”
Except Isis’s men had taken him when he returned. His last memory of his wife was of her holding their children and trying not to betray the terror that had turned her warm brown eyes an impossible ebony.
He could never go back, never dance with his wife while Misha laughed and the baby kicked her legs in the air, but he could kiss this woman who had somehow become a part of him, her gaze holding mysteries he was driven to solve. “It’s time, Honor.”
He saw the skin pull tight over her cheekbones, knew she wasn’t certain she wouldn’t panic, slash out at him in self-defensive violence, but her answer was a simple, powerful, “Yes.”