Archangel's Viper

37

“No!” The shout left Venom’s throat as Holly’s back bowed violently, acid green light pouring out of her in a brutal surge.

Uncaring of the two—perhaps three—archangels in the room, he ran across to catch her body as it collapsed to the floor. He was too fast to allow that to happen. He caught her bloody, broken body in his arms, stopped her head from cracking onto the hard polished wood.

She weighed too little, his Holly.

And the power was still screaming out of her in a burn of acidic green.

When it did finally cut off, her head lolled to the side, blood trickling out of the corner of her mouth . . . and her face riddled with hundreds of tiny cracks. Blood filled those cracks, iron-rich wet against every part of her that he was touching. As if her entire body had fractured.

Venom’s heart was pounding too hard for him to sense her pulse.

He kept on trying.

Nothing.

No, kitty, no.

Raphael watched the energy erupt out of Holly, saw Venom catch her as she fell. And he saw unvarnished terror on Venom’s face for the first time in all the years he’d known the vampire.

But Raphael could do nothing for Venom’s love at that moment. “Michaela,” he said in warning.

She wasn’t listening, her eyes wide with hope. “My love,” she whispered . . . just as the ball of power smashed into her, covering her body in a slick of acid green fire.

Raphael could’ve stopped it. He didn’t. The instant he stepped in, he ignited a catastrophic war. The choice had to be Michaela’s.

Her eyes glowed the same distinctive acid green for a single piercing instant before she shoved the power out with a roar. “Get out!”

The green glow coalesced in the air again, crackling with veins of red. Blood red. Raphael wasn’t Michaela. He’d accepted long ago that the man he’d once called a friend no longer existed. When the malignant energy went to smash into him, he held up a hand ringed with angelfire. The energy drew back . . . and headed toward Venom. The other man moved with viper speed to evade it, Holly in his arms.

Raphael moved at the same time to put himself in front of Venom and the fallen girl he loved. This was a war between archangels. Venom and Holly had done their part. They’d done far more than could be expected of a vampire of only a few centuries and a mortal who’d been Made too young.

It was time for Raphael and Michaela to end this. “Michaela.”

Tears ran down her cheeks as she raised her own hand, her power glittering bronze around her fingertips. She couldn’t form angelfire, but the bronze lightning she could create felt stronger than it had the last time he’d been close enough to witness it.

The Cascade in effect.

Her lack of angelfire mattered little. She had other ways to kill a fellow archangel. That was one of the markers of ascension: the ability to kill your peers. “I loved him,” she whispered, the sick energy held frozen between his power and hers. “He truly saw me. The darkness, the light, the glory, the rot.”

It was the most honest appraisal he’d ever heard Michaela make about herself. “Is he who he was?” Raphael asked, because they had to be sure. “You felt him just now. Can he come back?”

“He is . . . a ghost. A fragment. Of the worst part of him.” The tears continued to fall. “We must end him, Raphael. He is worth so much more than this mad existence driven by blood.”

Raphael thought one last time of the friend who’d raced with him through the canyons of the Refuge, of the man who’d laughed as they sat around a bonfire, his wings spread out on the grass. That Uram had been lost to time and to his own arrogance well before the insanity, but he had existed. And their long relationship demanded this act, for a sane Uram would’ve never wanted to exist as this mad phantom.

“Good-bye, old friend,” he whispered. “This time, it will be forever.”

Sobbing openly, Michaela released a crackling bolt of her power. It encircled the energy, began to crush it to death. Raphael added his angelfire. The echo stood no chance. It wasn’t Uram. It wasn’t even a part of Uram. It was only a faint shadow left behind by a powerful man lost to blood.

And then it ceased to be, burned out of existence.

Michaela collapsed to her knees, her wings spread out behind her in a splendor of delicate bronze. “I wanted more, more power, more everything. And I lost him to that greed.”

Turning, Raphael focused on his own people without discounting Michaela. As she’d just admitted, even her love had a price—and she might yet blame him for Uram’s death. “Venom.”

This member of his Seven who had always been so self-contained and coolly sophisticated, his humor often so dry it was cutting, raised eyes wet with tears. “She’s dying, sire.” It was a broken statement, Holly clutched tight to his chest.

The girl’s face was a smear of blood and broken skin, her pulse near impossible to detect. Blood trickled out of her nose and pasted her black top to her body. Wiping away the blood from her nose with a gentle touch, Venom pressed a kiss to her wrecked face. “She refused to let evil win. She fought.”

Raphael held out his arms. “Entrust her to me, Venom.” He didn’t want to be here, in this place with an archangel he’d never fully trusted.

Venom’s responding glance was shattered, but he nodded; he was one of the Seven and even nearly broken, he understood the reason behind Raphael’s request. “I will meet you there.”

As soon as he had Holly in his arms, Raphael rose into the sky without saying good-bye to Michaela. Lost in her guilt and horror, she wouldn’t have noticed if he had. He’d wrapped glamour around himself and Holly while still inside the turret, ensuring no one could follow him to the cabin of Jason’s informant.

He wasn’t worried about Venom. The youngest of the Seven was resourceful; he’d make it out of Michaela’s stronghold and if he needed assistance, he’d call out to Raphael.

As it was, Venom outdid himself, arriving at the cabin only minutes after Raphael.

Sweat drenched his body.

Going to his knees beside the sofa where Raphael had placed Holly, Venom stroked back her hair, then looked at Raphael. “Can you do anything?”

Raphael already had his hand on the girl’s bloody chest, his palm glowing blue as he called on his Cascade-born ability to heal. He could feel the energy penetrating her skin, but it had no discernible effect. She was unique, this girl who had found the will power to defy the ghost of an archangel. “She has courage, your Holly.”

“Yes. Too much.” He hissed at Holly, the sound dangerous. “You made me fall in love with you. You don’t get to go now!”

Raphael had never seen Venom like this. He poured more power into Holly’s motionless body, but her faint heartbeat didn’t strengthen, her breath didn’t become less shallow. And his Cascade-born power was young yet. It flickered and died without warning, while Holly lay bloody and motionless.

“Would a mortal hospital be able to help her?” Venom asked.

Raphael shook his head. “Her wounds are immortal in nature.” Created by the remnants of archangelic force. “Do you wish to stay here?”

“No. I want Holly safe. Will you fly her home?” Torment lived in the distinctive eyes that were all many people saw of Venom. “If she dies on the journey . . . hold her safe for me.”

Raphael shook his head, for he would not steal this time from the other man. “Carry her. I’ll fly you both to the plane.” It was parked in a part of Michaela’s territory that hosted a large international airport. As of this morning, secrecy was no longer necessary—the former Queen of Constantinople knew they were here and she knew why they’d come.

Though Venom had never before accepted being carried by any angel, he scooped Holly’s small body carefully into his arms and nodded. For love, Raphael thought, a man would do anything, bear anything. Raphael would’ve made the same choice had their positions been reversed.

Holly survived the journey to the plane.

Venom placed her on the bed. “She’s still fighting.”

Raphael was far more impressed by this slip of a girl than he’d expected to be. Elena and Dmitri had updated him about her on and off through the years since Uram’s attack, but he hadn’t expected a woman with this kind of grit. “She’s survived Uram twice.” Raphael looked at the girl with new eyes. “I wouldn’t bet against her.”

An hour after Raphael had left the plane to fly home on the wing, Holly still breathed as the jet soared above the clouds, but her pulse was no stronger, her breath as shallow. Venom hissed at her again. “Wake up!” He knew he was being unreasonable and erratic, but his heart was in a vise, being crushed to nothing.

Holly remained motionless under the clean, crisp sheet he’d just pulled over her, a sheet that was already spotted with blood. She was naked beneath; he’d stripped off her bloody clothes and wiped the blood from her ravaged flesh, then left it in the hope she would heal. Maybe he should’ve left her body open to the air, but he couldn’t bear to see her so vulnerable.

Three hours later, the North Atlantic Ocean glittered below and Holly’s fractured skin was no longer bleeding. Venom tried to see that as a sign that her body was mending itself, rather than a sign that her overstretched heart was growing sluggish. Her ravaged skin was cool to his touch, her pulse still so faint that he had to press his ear to her chest to be sure she remained alive. Her breath was nearly impossible to detect. But it was present.

Venom had long ago tucked her into his chest, holding her warm against his body as they lay in the private cabin of the plane.

The pilots hadn’t interrupted after their initial greeting.

Cocooned in the silence, Venom began to talk in the language in which he’d spoken his first words. He told Holly of his childhood in that bustling inn on the Silk Road, of how he’d learned to cook at his father’s knee, and of how he’d been considered an adult at eight years or so of age. He wasn’t sure. Records hadn’t been kept so well at that time.

“I didn’t consider that strange,” he told her. “I had five brothers and sisters by then. It was normal for the eldest son to take on the mantle of protecting and providing for the family, together with his father.”

Venom’s mind drifted back to those long-ago times. “My father had a good heart. He just lost his way a little because he couldn’t say no to my mother.” His lips curved. “That is a fault that runs in my line. My brothers were the same with their wives.”

He didn’t know about their descendants. “It was hardest to put Mohan to rest. I remembered him as a baby, all swaddled up in my arms.” Eyes red hot, he swallowed. “I can’t bury someone I love again. Not ever.” He pressed his lips to hers. “Please don’t make me, Holly.”

A whisper of breath against him, fingers uncurling on his chest.

His heart thumping hard, he looked down, but Holly’s lashes still shadowed her cheeks, dark fans against the cream of her skin. She’d lost weight during the silent battle in the turret. Her cheekbones were prominent, her fingers impossibly thin. But . . . he could hear her heartbeat without having to press his ear to her chest.

And, as he watched, a fine crack across her cheekbone began to seal itself.

Venom shuddered.

He wanted to give her his blood, but Raphael had warned him that Holly was showing signs of blood toxicity. “Uram caused her to ingest too much archangelic blood. Feed her only when she is hungry. Her body needs to get rid of it. If she bleeds, let her.”

She’d sweated blood for the first two hours, her body desperately rejecting the power it had no way to handle. He’d wiped her clean, kept her warm.

Fighting his need to do more, he kept on talking.

He told her about his first days in Neha’s court, and of the time he’d spent in the tunnels below, and of how he’d come to a slow consciousness. He’d been clothed in rags and filthy with dirt the day he woke and realized he was a man, and not a viper like the ones with whom he’d bedded.

“They were draped over me, twined around my neck, my arms.” He should’ve been horrified, but he’d changed in the months after his Making, his threshold of horror a high one. “Even when I moved, they didn’t bite, just slid off.”

It had taken him another week to make his way out of the labyrinth under Archangel Fort. “Neha hadn’t given up on me,” he told Holly. “But she had lost me. It turned out I was faster than any of her trackers—and though I was a viper, I didn’t react to her connection to snakes. I never have.”

For that, he could only be grateful. “It would’ve been a leash she could tug on anytime I was in the vicinity. I like to think I made that happen with my defiance.” He released a breath. “I’ve never hated Neha, though. She was just being an archangel. It was my family who made the choice to turn their face from me.” To see only a monster and not the brother and son who’d done everything he could—given up his entire human existence—so that they’d have lives free of deprivation and shame.

“Venom.”

It was less than a whisper, but he heard.

Heart thundering, he rose to look down into Holly’s face. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes closed. “Kitty.” His voice shook.

“Umm.” It was a lazy, sleepy sound . . . right before she curled into him in a way that said she had no plans to wake.

He pressed a kiss to the rainbow shine of her hair, his entire body trembling. “Sleep. We’ll talk later.” All of what he’d said while she was asleep, he’d tell her when she was awake. She had every right to his secrets and stories. Naasir was right about having someone to share secrets with—it was a gift beyond price.