Archangel's Viper

10

Venom was standing high up on a railingless Tower balcony, so high up that she couldn’t see anything of his features, especially with the misty rain blurring her vision—but she knew it was him. The way he stood, the way his suit so impeccably fit his body, it was pure Venom. And she knew he had his eyes on her; the rainbow hair was pretty and it made her happy, but it wasn’t exactly good for blending in.

Holly thought about waking up on his stone floor, of the honey in her veins after their insane sparring session, and knew that way led trouble. Dangerous, deadly trouble washed in sin. She made herself look away, forced her mind back to the problem of how to get into the Legion building.

Her free hand tingled at that instant.

She looked down . . . and saw her skin fading in and out. “No,” she whispered, curling her fingers into her palm to hide what was happening as she deliberately continued to eat her pretzel.

Nothing strange here, people, just a woman staring at the Legion building while stuffing her face as tiny droplets of rain dotted her hair and skin. Perfectly normal. Lots of people stared at the Legion building. The tourist buses didn’t dare cross the Tower’s territorial boundaries, but the non-Tower buildings lucky enough to have a direct view of part of the Legion building made good money renting out their roofs so the tourists could gawp at the beauty of a building bursting with greenery in the center of one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the planet.

Pretzel eaten and her misbehaving hand fully visible again, she put the scrunched-up wrapper in her pocket, then walked over to the thickest-looking vine and, taking a strong grip on greenery turned slick by the rain, began to climb. Her bones went liquid, her instincts sharpened, and her breath changed. She climbed like this was what she’d been born to do—and it wasn’t the human part of her that was in charge.

Exhilarated by how easy it was to scale the building, she didn’t care.

I’m not strong because I leash my impulses. I’m strong because I use those impulses.

Maybe Venom was right when it came to certain aspects of who she’d become . . . but Holly knew there were also things inside her that should never be set free.

When she reached the balcony in front of the opening on the fourth floor that functioned as both an exit and an entrance—a large section with transparent hanging flaps of thick, heavy plastic that she figured must help maintain the temperature within—she straightened up and said, “Hello? Can I come in?” It wasn’t polite to just invite yourself into someone’s house.

If no one answered, she’d climb back down and try again another day.

But one of the Legion landed beside her in deathly silence. Her heart thumped. “Good afternoon.”

Rising up from his crouch, he looked at her with eyes translucent but for an outer ring of blue, his hair the same midnight as Raphael’s, and his face too flawless. He appeared . . . unfinished in some strange way. As if life hadn’t yet put a mark on him. And yet, paradoxically, the sense of age that clung to him made her bones ache.

Angling his head slightly to the left in a way that simply wasn’t human, he said, “What are you?”

Holly fought the urge to touch his face, discover if he was warm or cold. “That’s the million-dollar question.” Suddenly remembering that the Legion were meant to be thousands upon thousands of years old, she said, “Do you know the answer?”

A slow shake of his head, his utter calm unnerving. “We are losing memories as we exist in this time and this place, but it isn’t only memory that makes us. We have knowledge woven into our bones.”

“And what does that knowledge tell you?”

“That you are new.” He cocked his head deeper to the side—she was almost afraid he was going to do that thing owls did and turn his head upside down. “But you are old, too, though not yet fully awake.”

Holly swallowed hard. “The otherness inside me, what is it?”

“You and not you.” With that cryptic statement that made her want to shake him, the Legion being turned away, folding his wings neatly to his back. “You are new. You can come inside. My brethren will wish to see you.”

Though she suddenly felt like a science exhibit, Holly’s curiosity nonetheless compelled her to move forward. A wash of humid air hit her face the instant she walked through the flaps behind him. That made sense, if— “Holy crap.” She felt her mouth drop open, her eyes widen.

The entire building had been hollowed out except for levels that jutted out here and there. Thick vines twisted up the sides, ferns grew from impossible angles, flowers bloomed in giant clumps, and below her feet was the thickest moss she’d ever felt. When she looked down to the ground floor, she saw trees heavy with pink and orange fruit. There was no sense of rot, of fallen leaves or fruit ever left forgotten. The scent in the air was a fresh amalgam of green and light and growth.

Holly stared and stared, wonder filling her heart to overflowing.

“This is so beautiful.” So much a thing of pure, unadulterated life.

Whispers surrounded her, coming from so many throats that she couldn’t separate one from the other. It was creepy, but this was the Legion after all. Creepy was their normal modus operandi. But then they started landing around her on wings of silence and she thought, Oh shit.

“You are new,” said the Legion being who’d brought her inside. “They have never seen you.”

It was a strange way to put it. Not something like you, but you. “You’ve seen Venom,” she said. “He’s like me.”

“He is a one being, too,” her guide said, as the others continued to whisper . . . without moving their mouths. “Like you but not you. Different.”

Since the Legion was staring full-out at her, Holly decided to stare back. She’d heard it said that when they’d arrived during the climactic battle of the fight between Raphael and Lijuan, they’d all looked exactly the same. Dusty gray hair without color, eyes utterly translucent, no sense of sunlight to their skin, wings as devoid of pigment as their hair.

These beings, however, while as similar as brothers, weren’t identical. Hair colors varied in subtle shades, skin tones were beginning to diverge in minute increments, and their otherwise still-translucent eyes bore rings of pale blue and pale green and pale brown and pale hazel. Only the one she’d first met had a more vivid ring, the color closer to Raphael’s intense blue.

“Why are your eyes so freaky pale?”

“We are becoming, too,” said a hundred voices, maybe more. “You are an echo who is not an echo. You are new.”

Holly was starting to understand why Elena looked as if she wanted to pull out her hair after she’d been talking to the Legion. “What does that even mean?”

But the Legion had gone quiet. A motionless, silent second later, they flew off on their batlike wings to settle all over the inside of the building—or to fly straight up to the roof exit that sat open to the misty rain and portentous clouds of darkest gray.

Only one was left, and it was the one who’d led her inside.

“Tell me what that means?” Holly asked softly. “Please?”

“That you are an echo who is not an echo. You are new.” He flared out his wings and was gone before she could reply.

“You guys are like the worst possible version of some inscrutable guru!” Holly shouted up.

They kept looking at her with that strange and oddly innocent curiosity. “Come back,” a hundred voices said. “We will be new together. After you are not an echo.”

Throwing up her hands, Holly stomped out—to slam into Venom’s chest. He caught her by the upper arms. She broke the hold and scowled, her face reflected back by the lenses of his sunglasses. “Do you know how to speak Legion?”

A slow smile. “Did our friends turn cryptic on you?”

“I asked a question.” She just barely stopped herself from tearing off the sunglasses and stomping on them.

“No one speaks Legion except the Legion,” Venom said, his dark hair glittering with tiny jewel-like drops of rain. “The sire and Elena are still attempting to work out the meaning of something the Legion said to them when the Legion first landed in New York.”

Holly looked over her shoulder, where the plastic flaps disturbed by her passage had already gone still. “Do you think they get off on messing with people’s heads?”

“No.” A pause. “The Legion aren’t anything human or understandable. Try to imagine having an eon of knowledge inside you, of knowing so much that explanations are redundant. I think, in their own minds, they’re being perfectly clear.”

You are an echo who is not an echo.

Holly didn’t want to think about that word: echo. She was scared she knew exactly what it meant. “Are you stalking me?”

“No need. I just followed the blinding glare of your hair.”

“A man who wears the same outfit over and over has no room to criticize my fashion choices.” Never would she tell him that he looked beautifully dangerous in the gray suit and white shirt that had survived the rain unscathed but for the odd droplet here and there.

Protected by the partial overhang above this railingless landing area, he’d soon dry off. Holly had done so inside the warmth of the Legion building.

“Look at this,” Venom said now that the exchange of insults was over. “It’s a faked photo of you.”

She frowned, took his phone. It was a shock to see herself looking so beaten. “I’d never look like that,” she said, ice crackling her words. “Even if they beat me to a pulp.”

“The individuals behind it clearly didn’t research their target.” Venom took the phone back. “This one’s the best manipulated image but there were two others. Vivek was able to track down physical addresses for all the fraudsters—I thought we should pay them a visit, see if any of them got a bite back via a channel we can’t monitor.”

“Let’s go.” Holly felt like kicking some ass.

Not waiting for Venom, she began to make her way down the vine. She heard him laugh, and then he was moving beside her. They landed at the same time, tiny droplets of rain glittering on their skin and clothing. “You don’t climb like me,” she said, curious despite herself. He was fluid like her, but his bones didn’t move in the same way.

“We can compare techniques later.” Striding across to where he’d parked his distinctive Bugatti, he got in, waited for her to take her seat. “I’ve sent you the files on the ones who said they’d caught you. See if you recognize any names. All are vampires.”

Holly took out her phone, brought up the list he’d sent her. She didn’t really expect to see any names she knew, but— “Son of a bitch. That asshole.”

“Which one?” He turned away from the Tower, the world beyond washed in gray.

“Marlin Tucker. Low-level scumbag who deals in information when he can’t deal in honey feeds. Vampire. Hundred and seventy years old.”

“Perhaps your relationship will make him cooperative.”

“We don’t have a relationship. He’s one of Ash’s contacts—she thinks he’s an asshole, too, but he’s an asshole who belongs in the gray and people talk to him.” She went through the other names. “I don’t know anyone else and these addresses aren’t likely to be real if they’re the official ones on their driver’s licenses or whatever.”

“Vivek dug deeper.” A sideways glance out of eyes she couldn’t see. “Nice outfit. Taking fashion advice from Dmitri?”

Holly narrowed her eyes at him. She’d chosen skinny black jeans today, paired them with a three-quarter-sleeved and fitted black shirt that she’d tucked into the jeans; the outfit was completed by boots that laced up to midcalf. Not spike boots. Work boots. “I haven’t seen Dmitri wear daisies anytime lately.” Those daisies decorated her boots.

Venom’s grin was a wicked, wild thing. Real. “Definitely not Sorrow anymore.”

Holly wasn’t so sure. She’d changed her name back to Holly because of the sadness on her family’s faces each time they called her Sorrow, but the girl she’d once been was gone forever . . . and deep in the night, when she was alone and the world was distant and no one could see her vulnerability, Holly mourned for her. For that hopeful, color-drenched girl who’d loved fashion and who’d had a crush on one of her lecturers.

With his sandy blond hair, a smile that creased his cheeks, light blue eyes, and a habit of wearing cardigans over his shirts, he’d made her heart flutter. Shelley and Maxie had dared Holly to make a move on him after they graduated and she’d laughingly taken the bet. Because back then, her life had been like that. A bubble of joy and possibility. A weightless, gossamer thing.

“Do you ever miss who you were?” The words were out of her mouth before she could think about what they might betray.

Venom didn’t ask her what she was talking about. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “Another few decades and it will be four centuries since I was Made.”

“Janvier isn’t that much younger than you and he still talks about his sisters, still goes to see their descendants.” He and Ashwini had ridden to New Orleans a month earlier for a fais do-do, which Holly had worked out meant a party; the two had come back with joy written on their skin and colorful beads hanging off the handlebars of Janvier’s motorcycle.

“People make different choices.” Venom’s voice was cold in a way she’d never heard from him—he might have the eyes of a viper, but for the most part, Venom was mockingly amused at the world. “What do you plan to do? Stay in touch with the next generation and the next, or fade away?”

Holly frowned and looked out at the gathering darkness, the clouds so heavy at this point that the world looked closer to six P.M. than just after one. This wasn’t about her. But an inherent sense of fairness made her answer his question because she’d pushed him to answer hers. “I lost my family once,” she said. “I’m never going to do it again.” Turning back to face him, she saw the tightness in his jaw.

Venom never acted like this. This mattered. It wasn’t to be taken lightly.

“I want to be like Janvier,” she said. “I want to have those ties, have that sense of being rooted in humanity. He’s the most . . . human vampire I know aside from Honor and Ash—and they just got Made, so it doesn’t count. I think it’s because he’s maintained strong ties to his family through the centuries.” A year ago, his great-great-multiplied-by-who-knows-how-many-greats-grandnephew had stayed with him and Ashwini for six months while the boy attended a theater workshop in Manhattan.

Venom shot her a look made unreadable by the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. “Fighting the inevitable, kitty?” It was a murmur, the last word almost affectionate.

Her eyes burned, her throat suddenly thick. Turning to stare out the window again, she watched the passing traffic. Streetlights began to flicker on, their systems triggered by the lack of light. “I know I’m not human,” she said when she could speak again, her voice caustic because otherwise, she might cry. “Bit hard to miss with the glowing green eyes and the ability to break people’s bones without touching them.”

“What?” Venom’s tone was hard.

“It’s a new development,” Holly said, her voice as colorless as the landscape around them. “I was sparring with Janvier and he was showing me how to move and I was thinking that if I could get the angle exactly right, I’d probably break his forearm.”

Bile burned her throat. “I wasn’t planning to do that—I was just thinking of how it might be helpful in a real fight if I could take my attacker out of commission.” She swallowed, the sickening sound of the bone cracking loud in her head. “And then his arm was broken.”

“He’d have healed quickly,” Venom said. “He’s old and strong enough.”

That didn’t change that Holly had harmed someone who’d only ever been good to her. Janvier had even invited her along on the most recent visit to his family. She’d said no only because she’d wanted to spend the time with Mia before her sister’s move to Boston.

Venom’s power slid around her, a sinuously graceful thing. “Did he ask you to do it again?”