Archangel's Viper

11

“How did you guess?” An edge of surprise in Holly’s question.

“Because that’s his job.” Venom turned down a dingy street with several broken-out streetlights just as the rain thundered down in truth, but though he saw everything despite the acutely low visibility, the alertness part of his nature, his mind was on Holly’s revelation. “That ability isn’t vampiric.”

“No. It’s closer to angelic.”

“No, kitty. You know as well as I do that it’s closer to archangelic.” The idea of that much power in her fragile body . . . “How are you still alive?” It was a serious question. Archangels were built to handle the violence of the power that lived in them. Even Illium, the strongest angel among the Seven, had nearly died when the Cascade forced extraordinary power into his flesh.

Holly continued to stare out the window. “It’s only a droplet of power,” she said in an eerily toneless voice. “It builds, then releases in sudden violence or . . .”

“Or?” Venom should’ve already had a briefing about her, but other events had overtaken the normal order of things when one of the Seven returned to the city after a long absence.

“Want to see a cool trick?”

Venom glanced over to see Holly holding out a hand . . . before it faded out of view only to flicker back in. He sucked in a breath as he turned his attention forward again. Glamour, the ability to walk unseen among the populace, was a strictly archangelic ability. “How long can you be unseen?”

Holly laughed as the rain transitioned from downpour to steady drizzle. “You mean how long can my hand be unseen? Because that’s the only body part with which I can do my parlor trick.”

A droplet of power.

Suddenly her words made more sense. “But you can summon the power on cue?”

“Depends on the day of the week. It comes and goes.” She shifted slightly forward, pointing to their left. “That’s the address of the idiots who think I’d cower. That three-story building with the graffiti of a flying dinosaur. Creative.”

Venom double-parked his vehicle knowing no one would touch it. If they did—well, they might just get stung by a viper’s bite. Getting out into the damp dark, he looked up at skies of heavy gray. “Have you been told of the Cascade?” Rain kissed his cheekbones.

“No. What is it?” Holly asked, trying not to watch the rain whisper across Venom’s skin. “I won’t share the information. I know not to talk out of turn about Tower business.” That way lay certain death—after hideous torture.

She’d already had her fill of both.

Venom didn’t answer until they’d crossed the street, his body moving with liquid grace. Holly couldn’t help it; she watched him. There was something deadly about Venom. Not just power, but him. She wondered if he’d been like this as a human, too, dangerous and beautiful.

She blinked, shook her head. Obviously, if she was starting to think Venom beautiful, it was time to break her self-imposed celibacy and go get laid. She had the primal rage inside her under control now, wouldn’t terrify the poor men she picked up in the bars.

Her mind flashed to that . . . thing with Venom last night, when she’d gone full weirdo crazy on him—and he’d laughed. Because he was nuts, too.

“The Cascade,” he said, once they stood in the rain-protected shadow of the building next to their target location, “is a once-in-an-eon event that causes massive power fluctuations and other changes among those who are Cadre.”

Holly’s fingers rose to her right temple. “Raphael’s mark?”

“Yes, that’s part of it. As are your new friends in the Legion.” Venom scanned the otherwise empty street with lethal focus. “The Cascade also has unknown effects on the weather. Today’s rain darkness could be a natural phenomenon, or it could be Cascade-linked.”

Holly had the sense of glimpsing a vast world of earth-shattering power far beyond her understanding—and perhaps that was as it should be. For an immortal, she was still only an infant. She wasn’t meant to consort with archangels . . . or with vampires as deadly as Venom. “Why are you telling me this?”

Taking off his sunglasses, he gripped her chin, held her gaze. “Because the Cascade most strongly impacts those with archangelic blood.”

And Holly had been force-fed so much archangelic blood that it had changed her on a cellular level. “My parlor trick with the hand, breaking Janvier’s arm,” she said without severing the eye contact, “they might be connected to this Cascade?”

A nod. “No way to know for certain, but it would explain why you’re developing abilities no one outside the Cadre should possess.” He ran his thumb over her chin, slow and deliberate. “Be careful who you trust, kitty. Many would pay far more than five million for a woman who possesses even a single droplet of archangelic power.”

Closing her hand over his wrist, his skin warm under her touch and his power curling around her so tightly that she felt it as a stroke across her skin, she tugged off his grip. “I appreciate the information—and the warning.” He’d given her a tool to understand a little of the craziness around her, and she was grateful, but she couldn’t have him touching her.

Not when her entire body seemed primed to respond.

His lips curved in a smile she couldn’t read. Then, sliding the sunglasses back on, he slipped out of the shadows and up the steps of their target building. Holly followed, the two of them pausing by the front door.

Venom’s body went inhumanly motionless. “It’s too quiet.”

Looking around, Holly saw no obvious signs of trouble. “They might just be crashed out after drugging themselves with honey feeds.”

“You sound very sure.”

“When you’re in a situation like this”—she indicated the dirty, graffitied environment, a blunt illustration that these vamps weren’t exactly living the dream—“escape, even illusionary escape, has a powerful draw.”

Venom pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, the slitted green of his eyes smashing into hers. “Have you fed from a drug addict?”

“No,” Holly said flatly, not adding that, in the darkest depths of pain and despair, she’d thought about it, about the sweet oblivion of just letting go. It was the idea of the state she’d be in afterward—weak and vulnerable and unable to protect herself—that had stopped her.

Then there was the whole sucking-blood-from-a-living-being thing, which continued to turn her stomach.

So yeah, no thanks—but not for the best reasons.

“We going in or what?” she said when Venom continued to look at her with disturbing intensity, as if he saw her most terrible secrets.

Slipping his sunglasses back down over his eyes, he put his hand on the doorknob and turned. It offered no resistance and they slipped inside, shutting the door behind themselves.

The air that hung heavy inside the hallway leading to the chipped paint of the internal staircase was foul with the smell of unwashed bodies, urine . . . and more. “Old blood,” Holly whispered in a harsh undertone, her gut twisting and lurching as images of mutilated and decapitated bodies piled in a red-streaked pyramid, while a mad archangel drank from a wineglass filled with the blood he’d drained from a living victim, shoved into her brain.

Fingers touching her neck, gripping painfully tight when she would’ve slashed out in a panic. “Focus, kitty.”

The two words acted like a bucket of cold water thrown into her face. She froze, found her center as Honor had taught her, then breathed shallowly through her mouth. “Sorry.” Heat flooded her cheeks.

Releasing her, Venom said, “The smell would turn anyone’s stomach, much less that of a woman who was found coated in her own dried blood.”

Holly scowled, though his matter-of-fact judgment made her feel a little less like a child confronted by a nightmare come to life. But, because she had reacted like that child, she moved on ahead of him.

Do not act stupid because you’re scared and want to hide it. Do that and I’ll kick your ass black and blue for a week running.

Ashwini’s voice in her head.

And if you ever act like a horror movie dumb chick, I’ll personally lobotomize you.

Holly’s lips tugged up a fraction, her hunched shoulders straightening. She made sure she was cautious and alert, and not in any way driven by fear as she moved on down the hallway. Reaching the bottom of the steps that led up to the second floor, she stopped and glanced back at Venom, fighting an inexplicable urge from within that told her to climb, go higher.

“Up or down?” His sense of smell was more acute than hers; it made sense to ask rather than relying on her own strange compulsion.

He looked up along the line of the stairs, the damp, dark strands of his hair sliding back. “The old-blood smell is strongest up there.” Scanning the lower floor and taking in the multiple doors on either side of the hallway, he said, “We clear these together.”

Holly didn’t argue. Ash and Janvier had taught her that you never left your partner alone in an unknown situation. “We should lock the front door.” It’d make it harder for anyone to sneak in behind them and launch a stealth attack.

Removing the old-fashioned key from the lock afterward, she put it in her jeans pocket just as the bare lightbulb dangling from a wire in the ceiling flickered for a second. It had been on when they entered, and while its light was anemic, it was better than the storm gray gloom.

As it settled again, throwing shadows into the corners, she watched Venom’s back while he opened the first door. No sign of life, the room beyond empty of anything but a broken-down sofa with cigarette burns on the arms, the foam stuffing visible where the dirty fabric was torn.

Holly took the next door; she was half expecting Venom to attempt to hijack the search, but he remained at her back, an alert, watchful presence while she looked inside and pronounced the room free of threats. He took the door after that, Holly the next, until they’d completed the entire first floor.

All the internal walls were painted a teal blue shade that had been discolored by time and cigarette smoke to have a sickly yellowish edge. Several boasted holes probably caused by punches, while one had a large black stain. As if someone had thrown a jar full of ink at the wall.

The majority of the rooms were furnished with either a ragged foldout couch or a dirty mattress. Clothes were scattered about on both couches and mattresses. Bedrooms of a sort, she realized. The last room proved to be a living area set up with three large couches that all sagged in the middle and faced a curved television screen that took up most of one wall.

Unlike every other item in the place, the TV was clean and cutting-edge.

A second later, she spotted the box that had held the TV. The lack of stains or cobwebs on it seemed to indicate the television was a recent purchase.

Holly gripped Venom’s arm when he would’ve stepped inside to examine the items on the glass-topped coffee table that sat between the sofas and the TV. “Needles,” she said, pointing down.

His lip curled. Taking off his sunglasses, he hooked them in the front of his shirt. “Someone’s mother didn’t teach them to keep a clean house.”

Holly blinked. Though she’d asked him about his family, she’d never really thought of Venom as a man who’d had a mother. And definitely not one who’d taught him how to maintain the cleanliness of a home.

“Just be careful.” Vampires weren’t vulnerable to disease, but being stuck was still disgusting—and ever since the Falling, no one could be certain a needle hadn’t been adulterated with some kind of virus or infection that could affect immortals.

Holly probably shouldn’t know that it was the Archangel Charisemnon who’d created the disease that had struck vampires and dropped angels from the sky, but it was hard to work in the Tower with high-level vamps and not pick up information. After what Venom had told her outside, she figured Charisemnon had gained a disease-causing gene in the Cascade.

Not a gift she’d want, but she wasn’t an archangel bent on power.

“I’m guessing there’re a lot of syringes lying around,” she said. “The vamps shoot up the junkies right before a honey feed, so that the high is stronger, lasts longer. No one’s in a state to care about the syringes afterward.”

Nodding, Venom walked to his original destination. He picked up something rectangular with squared edges, opened his hand to let it fall.

“Whoa.” Holly stared at the hundred-dollar bills floating from his hand, then took in the new TV again. “Vampires who live in this area don’t have access to that kind of cash.” Most were out of Contract and had used up the money they’d been given when that Contract was complete—but not found well-paying jobs in the aftermath.

Venom rubbed a white powder between his fingers, brought it to his lips for a small taste. “Cocaine. From the amount of dust on this table, it’s likely the source of the cash.” Dusting off his hands, he said, “Let’s go up. There’s no threat here.”

Holly headed up the steps in front of him, his presence a coldly silken danger at her back. She knew he could kill her as fast as a cobra strike—Venom might wear three-piece suits and look like he’d stepped out of a high-fashion magazine shoot, but he was a predator under the skin.

Rotting blood. Old urine. Other, more noxious body fluids.

Holly pressed a hand against her stomach as she tried not to breathe in the increasingly fetid odor. “They’re up here . . . and they’re probably dead, right?” The idea made her stomach lurch, the response primal.

“Not necessarily. Our targets aren’t human.”

Exhaling, Holly nodded. Vampires could survive significantly more blood loss than humans. They could even survive multiple-limb amputation in traumatic circumstances. She’d heard the limbs would eventually grow back—but for most vampires, that would take a long, long, long time. It wasn’t as if they were angels, after all.

For vampires like Dmitri and Venom, however, she had a feeling the timeline was shorter—a lot shorter. “Have you ever lost a limb?” she asked in an effort to distract herself from the smell.

“Once,” Venom answered easily as they took in the layout of this floor. “It was in battle—my left arm.”

“How long for it to regenerate?”

“Three quarters of a year. I was a lot younger then.”

Three quarters of a year was still nothing in comparison to the vast majority of vampires. Holly knew a century-old vamp who’d lost his pinky in a bar fight when another brawler bit it off. A month after the incident and it was still a ragged stump.

“I’ll go first into these rooms,” Venom said, his eyes glinting at her.

Holly straightened her spine. “I don’t need to be protected.”

“I’m stronger. If these vampires are drug maddened, I’d rather put them down quickly than watch you flail about.”

Holly gave him the finger. Asshole.

Smile becoming deep, taking him from handsome to fucking handsome, the beautiful asshole turned and walked to the first doorway. Holly watched his back instead of giving in to her bizarre compulsion to enter that room. He didn’t say anything about the room, though he spent thirty seconds standing in the doorway.

He then quickly checked the other rooms.

“Let’s clear the third level,” he said after he was done. “Then we can deal with the mess in the first room.” He turned on a light in the hallway, as if there was no longer any reason for stealth.

The hairs rose on the back of Holly’s neck.