The awakening was as rude as the sleep had been pleasurable.
“Amos has been spotted,” Dmitri told her after reaching out to answer his cell just before a misty gray dawn.
The vampire wasn’t on the grounds of Jiana’s Stamford estate when they arrived, but he’d left pieces behind—several of his organs sat in a glistening pile on the grass, covered with droplets of the fine, fine rain that beaded on their hair, dampened their clothing. Heavy steel spikes encrusted with blood betrayed where he’d been pinned to the earth, purple zinnias and sunny chrysanthemums crushed and splattered with blood congealed to black in pockets where the rain couldn’t reach.
“Whatever I might have dreamed of doing to him,” Honor murmured to Dmitri as they stood on the small rise overlooking Jiana’s home, the moisture-laden early morning wind lifting their hair off their faces, “this is worse.”
“He had to have been otherwise compromised or he’d have escaped those steel pegs before he was gutted, his intestines removed,” Dmitri said, eyes on the flesh and blood ropes that looked obscene surrounded by flowers struggling to reach for sunlight that wasn’t there.
“Or maybe,” Honor said, looking at the blood-soaked woman who sat rocking not far from the site of the carnage, runnels of red dripping from her arms and legs into the earth, “he didn’t want to escape . . . not until he realized she wasn’t planning to stop.” And still he’d been unable to end the life of his attacker, this woman he both loved and hated.
Dmitri’s gaze followed her own, but there was a cold consideration in it that didn’t seem to fit the circumstances. Jiana had, after all, attempted to execute her son in the most brutal fashion. The only reason Amos wasn’t dead was because he’d apparently managed to rip out one of the spikes and hit Jiana so hard across the face with it she’d ended up unconscious with a broken cheekbone, a deep gash marring that mocha skin. He was long gone by the time she alerted the guards.
“Payment for his crimes,” the female vampire had whispered when Honor and Dmitri arrived on the scene.
Honor wouldn’t have believed the woman’s violent change of heart if not for the fact that quite aside from the damage done by Amos during his escape, Jiana’s face was horribly bruised, the elegant silk and lace of her nightgown all but torn off her, her ribs cracked.
“He looked at me,” Jiana had added, eyes dull, “in a way no man should look at his mother.”
That, Honor thought, was what had pushed her over the edge—it seemed there were some things even the most devoted of mothers couldn’t accept. However, it was clear Dmitri had a different view of matters. Waiting until he shifted his attention back to her, she said, “What do you see?”
“It’s not what I see. It’s what I smell.”
Rather than asking him to elaborate, she considered all the facts, hazarded a guess. “Some kind of a sedative or tranquilizer in his blood.” There was more than enough of the latter splashed around, thinned though it was by the rain, to make a determination.
A clipped nod. “This was no act done in unthinking rage. It was calm, cold, calculated.” His eyes lingered on Jiana. “Consider the fact that in spite of her ‘cooperation’ earlier, she made no mention of the culvert that allows covert access to this property.”
“A mother’s instinct to protect trumping her rational mind,” she said, playing devil’s advocate. “As for the drugs, could be she’s lying and he didn’t only say or do something she couldn’t accept, but actually succeeded in assaulting her.
“Traumatized, she put something in his drink, waited for him to get disoriented, weak, and then she did this.” Amos could’ve easily stumbled to this part of the estate, even drugged and less than lucid. It was less than a hundred yards from the house, and with the guard at the front door having been knocked unconscious, while the others were situated around the perimeter, no one could refute that version of events.
“Plausible.” Dmitri’s eyes lingered on the pile of organs that were still pink with health, evidence of the vampirism that meant Amos would recover as long as he had a steady supply of fresh blood and a place to hide.
“Except,” Dmitri continued, interrupting her thoughts about how a man came back from being gutted by his own mother, “whatever happened here, it wasn’t simply about execution, was it?”
She looked at the scene again, consciously putting aside her impression of Jiana as a loving mother pushed to the brink, and focused only on the facts. One of which was that this had taken time. A lot of time. Because the organs . . . they’d been removed with neat precision, sat in a tidy pile.
Heart chilling at the realization, she was about to turn toward Dmitri when she glimpsed the torn and bloody piece of cloth flung a couple of feet away. “He was gagged.” And from the near-black quality of the blood caught in the wrinkles the rain hadn’t penetrated, he’d bitten through his tongue, likely shredded his lips. The ground where he’d been pinned was drenched in so much of that same blood it appeared wetter than the surrounding area, pale pink dew gleaming on some of the chrysanthemums hanging from broken stems.
The conclusion wasn’t an easy one, but it had to be said. “She enjoyed this.”
“There is every indication.” Turning, Dmitri walked to Jiana, a sleek shadow in the black jeans, boots, and black T-shirt he’d pulled on during a quick stop at the Tower.
Honor forced herself to follow, though it tormented her to think of a mother taking pleasure in the murder of her child, no matter the evil done by that child. It was something she simply had trouble comprehending, the maternal instinct within her a staggering force . . . though she had no children of her own.