Archangel's Viper

3

Venom’s musing statement snapped her out of the loop of grief and loss and horror and rage. “Come closer and I’ll show you exactly how helpless those baby teeth are.” Her fangs dispensed an acidic green substance the Tower scientists had tested and declared a deadly poison.

“Sorry, kitty. Biting me will do you no good . . . though I have been told my blood is the best women have ever tasted.”

Holly made gagging motions with the hand not on the steering wheel, incredibly glad right then for his aggravating and distracting presence—though she’d cut off her own head before she admitted it. “Some women will do anything to get into the Tower.”

“You play mean, Hollyberry. Like poison.”

Coming from anyone else, the latter words would’ve been an ugly insult. From Venom . . . “Did you just compliment me?” she asked, her mouth falling open. “Take it back!” She couldn’t deal with Venom being nice to her in any way, shape, or form.

“Of course,” he said, “your poison is nowhere near as venomous as mine.”

She went to snap back a retort about men always thinking their package was bigger, when the import of his words penetrated. “Did the Tower compare the two?”

“We’re the only two venomous members of the Tower. The sire needs to know our exact strengths.”

“How much stronger are you?” she asked through gritted teeth, though his potency wasn’t a surprise. Venom might look like he was maybe twenty-seven, but he’d lived a lot more life than she could imagine.

And he’d look that way forever, a sexual creature no one would ever dare call a “boy.” Holly, in contrast, was stuck with the face of a twenty-three-year-old who’d still had a youthful softness to her when Uram altered the shape of her existence. The softness would’ve disappeared in another year; she knew because she’d watched Mia’s transformation.

But Holly never got that extra year to grow into her skin and her womanhood.

Vampirism—or whatever it was that ran in her blood—would probably refine her features to something more adultlike in the future, but she’d never look anything but young. Not even if she lived to be five hundred years old. Of course, a long, near-immortal life was the best-case scenario.

“I’ve grown strong enough to take down a large number of the angels in the city,” Venom said lazily. “It’s a secret the Tower will execute you for speaking, so never share it—but I can shock the youngest ones into an intense involuntary sleep that the healers believe could lead to death, incapacitate the older with severe pain.”

Holly scowled and said, “Bull,” wincing inwardly at using language for which her mother would threaten to wash out her mouth with soap. Daphne Chang didn’t care what Holly was; she did care that her daughter comport herself like the lady she’d been raised to be. Holly tried, she really did. But only when her mother was in the vicinity to bear witness.

Never again would Holly willingly cause pain to the mom who’d never, not once, looked at her as anything but her child. Her dad was less demonstrative, but he was the one who kept aside certain pieces of clothing for her in his dress shop, pieces that were always colorful and quirky and Holly.

Love came in many different forms.

“It’s all true.” Venom’s hair lifted up in the wind coming through his open window, his profile so astonishingly perfect that her breath caught for a second. “I’m deadlier than the deadliest snake in the world, with the ability to impact strong immortals. But you’re not too far behind.”

“Try being used as a chew toy by an insane archangel,” Holly said with a grim smile. “It does wonders for your poison, I hear.”

No one knew exactly what Uram had done to her beyond making her drink his blood—that sickening memory, she’d finally recovered. But much of the time he’d spent with her after murdering her friends remained a blank. Either she’d been unconscious or he’d made sure she wouldn’t remember, and it was just great to know that a bloodborn archangel might have been digging around in her mind.

Who knew what he’d left behind.

What Holly did have was a lot more information about angelic biology than even the majority of older vampires—she’d needed that information to understand what was happening to her.

“But,” Venom continued, “as I was saying. I’m immune to your poisonous bite.”

Holly scowled. She’d bitten him once or twice, back during her psycho-PTSD phase, and he’d shrugged it off, but those bites had been mere scratches—and her toxic kiss hadn’t yet settled into its final form. “The scientists tested our venom against each other?”

Reaching over, Venom played with strands of her hair, which she’d scraped neatly back the instant after he’d taken the photograph. “You look like that pony toy with a unicorn tail.”

She slammed up an arm to knock him off. “Answer the question. And unicorn hair was the point, Mr. Designer Cut and Dry.” Every so often, Holly had to fight the urge to jump on Venom and mess him up.

“Complete neutralization.” Venom turned slightly in his seat to face her profile—and the prickling over her skin turned into a swarm of stinging bees. “My venom cancels out yours and vice versa.”

Holly stared straight ahead. “Is my venom the same as yours?” It was a question she didn’t want to ask. “Like a viper’s or a cobra’s or another snake’s?”

“No.” His answer made her heart slam into her rib cage. “Mine tracks that way—though it’s a unique mixture, but yours is unlike anything on the planet and it’s growing in virulence.”

Holly felt her muscles lock. The thing inside her, the psychic tumor she couldn’t outrace, was getting stronger. She knew it, had felt it. Where would it end? In death? In psychotic madness like the archangel who’d been her blood sire? Worse?

“We could test it,” Venom said in that languidly sensuous tone she’d heard him use on the women who panted after him. “Share our venom.”

Holly found her feet again. “Oh, gosh, let me think about it,” she said with a flutter of her eyelashes. “The answer is . . . A Big. Fat. No.” She knew he was jerking her chain. He thought she was a spitting baby. She thought he was a conceited ass. That was the extent of their relationship.

“Why does someone want you enough to put a bounty on your head?” His tone was serious this time. “It was very definitely you they were after. Holly Chang, also known as Sorrow. That was the brief and it included a photo of you.”

Holly nodded. “I saw.” The photo had been stored on the chief goon’s phone. It had been of her striding out of a café where she’d taken her mother for a cup of tea and cake. Daphne Chang had a weakness for cake that Holly fully exploited as she weaseled her way back into her mother’s good graces.

“The instigator must know how you were Made,” Venom continued, his power a sinuous wave that wrapped around her before sliding away. “Or they suspect.”

Holly fought to keep her breathing even. Venom hadn’t been messing with her just then—he played games, but not like that. Not in ways where they weren’t on equal ground. She was sensing his power so vividly either because her own sensitivity had increased as a result of the ongoing changes in her body—or because Venom had grown stronger in the two years since she’d last seen him in person.

Or both.

“Your blood is valuable currency,” he added.

“Unfortunately.” Holly didn’t carry the deadly toxin that had resulted in Uram’s murderous insanity, but she carried something that wasn’t standard issue in either the mortal or immortal world.

No one had quite figured out what yet. They just knew Holly was a “strangeness unseen in nature”—words spoken by a healer working on her case.

“There’s another possibility,” Venom said. “You’re unique and such things rarely come along in an immortal life. As Zhou Lijuan collects the most extraordinary wings in angelkind, so another collector may seek to acquire you.”

Holly shivered inwardly at the mention of the seriously creepy Archangel of China. “How can she collect angelic wings? Does she cut them off?” she asked, horrified.

Venom’s answer was chilling. “No, she prefers the whole body. Like pinning a dead butterfly to a wall.”

“Fuck, immortals are twisted.” And theirs was her world now. “Did they react to you that way? Like a curiosity or a collector’s item?”

“I wasn’t as much of a shock. Not given the identity of my Maker.”

The Archangel Neha, the Queen of Snakes, of Poisons.

“But,” he continued, his voice a little distant, as if he was looking hundreds of years back, “I’m the only vampire she has ever Made who inherited so much of what makes her who she is. There were many who tried to lure me from her court at the conclusion of my Contract.”

Holly was intrigued despite herself. “Was Raphael one of those people?”

His laughter was incongruously warm for a man with the eyes of a viper. “The sire has never had to lure anyone, kitty.”

Hissing at him before she could stop herself, she braked to a hard stop in front of the gleaming spike that was the cloud-piercing form of Manhattan’s Archangel Tower. “You can slither away now,” she said when he didn’t move.

“You’ll be coming with me.” His tone was unbending. “Dmitri will want to know about the kidnapping attempt.”

Holly’s gut tensed. She’d been afraid of that. And while she cheerfully defied Venom for no reason except that he was aggravating, defying Dmitri was a whole another matter. It wasn’t that she was scared of him—though Dmitri could be terrifying. It was that she didn’t want to disappoint him.

Spinning the car left and down into the underground Tower garage, she parked in silence and got out. Venom grabbed his hold-all from the trunk, then prowled beside her with a liquid smoothness she’d thought an affectation until she’d seen him fight and realized his eyes didn’t lie—Venom had been changed down to his very cells during his conversion to vampirism.

She wondered why he’d made the choice and if it had been worth it to lose not just his freedom for a hundred years in payment, but also his humanity in ways even most vampires didn’t have to consider.

Stepping into the elevator, she kept her curiosity under wraps and her eyes resolutely trained frontward even as the sinuous slide of his power filled the small space. But she was conscious of him taking off his sunglasses and hooking them into the neck of his shirt. He rarely did that except with Raphael and others of the Seven.

The elevator doors opened smoothly on the floor of the Tower that held Dmitri’s office. Holly hadn’t been up there for a while, though Honor had told her about the renovation. The walls were a smooth gray, the carpet a richer shade of the same elegant color.

It had all been black beforehand, pure Dmitri.

Now, it reflected both the most powerful vampire in the city—and his hunter wife.

“What are those dents?” Honor had to be dismayed at the damage to her newly painted walls. At least the pretty artwork she’d picked out appeared to have survived unscathed.

“Looks like knives punching into the walls,” Venom said after a quick glance, his lips curved in what looked like genuine amusement. “My guess is Elena and Dmitri.”

Then there was no more time to prepare for what was to come; they’d reached Dmitri’s office. Raphael’s deadly second wasn’t standing behind his desk—Holly had never seen him actually sitting in his office chair—but was out on the railingless balcony beyond. He didn’t look a thousand years old, maybe in his early thirties at most. A dangerous man with black hair and dark brown eyes and sun-bronzed skin who “exuded sex,” according to the media.

Dropping his hold-all in a corner, Venom strode straight out.

Holly followed with more care—she’d been warned over and over that while she was like a vampire, she wasn’t quite one. And even a vampire would die if he fell from this height and his head separated from his body. That Dmitri and Venom were so cavalier about it spoke to the amount of power that ran in their veins.

Dmitri had been on the phone but hung up the instant he spotted Venom.

A smile breaking out over his face, he hugged the other man in a way that said they were friends rather than simply compatriots or brother warriors. More than six hundred and fifty years separated Dmitri and Venom, the oldest and the youngest in the Seven, but there was no distance in that moment.

As she watched, Dmitri slapped Venom on the back before the two men stepped apart.

“Holly.”

Holly walked to meet Dmitri halfway and, when he drew her into the warm strength of his arms, she didn’t resist. Where other women looked at him and saw a hard-bodied vampire who oozed sex appeal, Holly saw the man who’d found her at her lowest, full of self-loathing and guilt that she’d survived when her friends were all dead. He’d been so angry that awful night, had told her brutal truths about what would happen to her if she continued on her self-destructive path, but he hadn’t abandoned her when she admitted her fear of what she was becoming.

He’d stroked her hair as they sat on a cliff with a glittering view of Manhattan, and he’d let her cry until she had no more tears left in her. Until she was ready to claw out some kind of a life for herself from the ashes of who she’d once been. In the time since, he’d watched over her development and made sure she didn’t drown under the black waves of her nightmares.

Running his palm over her ponytail before he released her, he shifted so that he had his back to the precipitous drop behind him, while she and Venom stood in front of him. The wind whipped at his black T-shirt, the color the same as his jeans and his boots.

“Can we go inside?” Holly blurted out. She was loath to betray any weakness in front of Venom, but she hated seeing Dmitri so close to the edge.

To her surprise, Venom didn’t comment at all as they slipped inside Dmitri’s office. At which point he told Dmitri what had happened. Dmitri’s dark eyes sharpened, the lethal predator in him suddenly evident—this was the man spoken of as being merciless, Raphael’s “Blade” who made bloody mincemeat of his enemies.

“The bounty hunters specifically wanted Holly?”

“No doubts.” Venom pulled out the phone they’d confiscated. “I’ll have Vivek see what he can do with the e-mail address.”

Dmitri nodded before turning to Holly, the violence of his power making her teeth ache. “Were you hurt?”

“No.” She pointed at the torn shoulder of her top. “My father gave me this top just last week. The stupid goons ripped it.”

Dmitri’s smile was lethal. “If there’s a significant enough bounty, this will only be the first attempt.” He folded his arms. “The bigger threats will be the old ones so bored with life that risking death by attacking one of the Tower’s people will be a dangerous thrill. They won’t be as incompetent as this trio.”

Holly got a prickling at the back of her neck. “I can take care of myself,” she reminded him. “You made sure of that.” He was the one who’d thrown her into training designed to increase her control over her abilities.

Pinning her to the spot with the darkness of his gaze, Dmitri raised an eyebrow. “Could you have taken all three vampires today?”

Holly opened her mouth . . . and couldn’t lie. Not to Dmitri. “No,” she finally grated out. Mike and his fellow idiot goons had been big bastards, and while Holly could fight, she wasn’t an experienced hunter or warrior.

“You don’t go anywhere alone until we figure out who it is that wants you and why.” The words were an order. “I’ll speak to Janvier and Ashwini, see who best to assign you.”

“I can babysit,” said the aggravating vampire beside her, the one whose power kept sliding around her, the feel of it warm, living snakeskin across her body.