Free Guild Hunter 04 - Archangel's Blade by authors_sort

body, or perhaps because he’d been determined never to become a slave to anyone or anything—but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. “She’s stronger than she appears.”
    “Are you certain?”
    “Why the sudden concern about a hunter?” Jason saw everything, but preferred to keep his distance from those he watched.
    Jason didn’t answer. “I’ve had some news from Neha’s territory.”
    The Archangel of India was powerful and, ever since the execution of her daughter, walking the edges of sanity. “Is it something we need to worry about?”
    “No. It doesn’t seem connected to anything else.” He tracked a chopper coming in to land on a roof outside Tower territory. “An angel appears to have gone missing. A bare two years from the Refuge.”
    Dmitri frowned. “She can’t know anything about it.” Angels that young were habitually put under the command of a senior vampire or angel.
    “No. The vampire—Kallistos—who did have a care of the angel, says he assumed the young one went back to the Refuge.”
    That wasn’t suspicious in and of itself. A senior vampire in an archangel’s court had a lot on his plate, and it wasn’t unusual for young angels to bolt to the security of the hidden angelic stronghold after their first taste of the wider world. “You’ve alerted the Refuge?”
    “Aodhan and Galen are making inquiries,” the black-winged angel said, naming two of the Seven.
    Dmitri nodded. Territorial borders aside, the young ones were always looked after. “I’ll speak to the other seconds in the Cadre, see if they can shed any light on the matter.”
    “Angels do not just disappear.”
    “No, but I’ve known the occasional youth to go a little wild after first leaving the Refuge.” Jason dealt mostly with the oldest of the angels, archangels included, but Dmitri continued to have contact with the younger angels because he liked to take a look at everyone coming into Raphael’s territory. “I once tracked a young male to a ‘party island’ in the Mediterranean.” He shook his head at the memory. “The boy was sitting there in a tree, watching the revelers—he’d never imagined that level of hedonism.”
    “Such innocence.” Jason stepped to the very edge of the balcony. “Astaad,” he said, “there’s something there. Maya hasn’t been able to get any details but she’s working on it.”
    Astaad was the Archangel of the Pacific Isles and one who did not appear to play political games. “I thought his behavior was connected to Caliane’s awakening.” There were always side effects when an archangel rose to consciousness, and Raphael’s mother was one of the most ancient of Ancients.
    “It may be nothing, rumors begun by another source.” Eyes on the city, dazzling under the sunshine, he said, “You’re older than me, Dmitri.”
    “Only by three hundred years.” A joke between two men who had lived longer than most could hope to imagine.
    “I asked Elena what it was like to be mortal. She said time is precious in a way an immortal will simply never know.”
    “She’s right.” Dmitri had been both, and if he could go back in time, destroy Isis before she ever came near him and his own, he would do so in a heartbeat, though it would mean he would die in a few short decades. “I felt more as a mortal than I have in the centuries since.”
    “Will you love me when I’m fat and unwieldy with our babe?”
    He put his hand on the curve of her belly, touched his lips to her eyelids, the tip of her nose, her lips. “I will love you even when I am dust on the wind.”
     
     
    Honor watched Dmitri walk to stand beside the black winged angel and hissed out a breath at how close he was to the unprotected edge. Unlike the angel, he had no wings should he fall, and yet he stood there with a confidence that said he wasn’t the least worried about the eventuality.
    A change in the air at her back.
    Swiveling, she discovered the vampire with the wraparound shades in