Archangel's Viper

23

Holly trusted few people. And could see none of them betraying her. “Who?”

“David Shen.”

Holly curled her lip. “That weenie? I should’ve guessed.” He’d been a mistake during a period when she’d been fighting brutally hard to cling to normality. Of course, David hadn’t known the truth of her transition at Uram’s blood-soaked hands. His life would’ve been forfeit had she told him; she’d given him the same story she’d given her family.

David had been suave and sophisticated and onboard with dating a vampire. It gave him a certain cachet in his friend circle—composed of fellow financial advisors and other smug bastards. He didn’t, however, have the balls to handle waking up five times in a row with his girlfriend staring at his jugular.

It wasn’t as if she’d bitten him.

“What did this ‘weenie’ tell you about Holly?” Venom’s tone hadn’t warmed up, his form that of a predator who was keeping an eye on his prey but wasn’t yet ready to strike.

Even Holly had to admit he was doing a good job of being coldly terrifying.

“Mr. Shen informed me that Holly was a failed attempt at a Making, and that she was only under Tower supervision because of the need to make certain she wasn’t at risk of falling into bloodlust.” Walter took a careful sip of the blood once more in his hand. “You haven’t tasted your liqueur, my dear.”

Holly tilted up the glass, looked at the astonishingly dark pink color that swirled within the crystal. It was pretty, no doubt about it. As for the taste . . . the first sip made her sigh quietly. “Definitely a drink you could use to seduce your lady friends.” Holly had grown up in a cosmopolitan city filled with mortals and immortals both; she’d seen that love had facets as complex as the crystal of her liqueur glass—it couldn’t be assumed that a man would always prefer a woman, or that a stable and committed relationship could only feature two people.

However, one of the black-and-white images on the wall was of Walter with his arm around a woman, his hold openly proprietary. Given the way he chose to dress and furnish his home in the fashion of another place and time, the broker struck her as a man who was very firm in his inclinations and desires. It’d be women for Walter Battersby.

Now, his eyes filled with a joy that was at odds with the fear that cloaked him. “That is good to know.” Another sip of his own drink of choice. “The perfidious David also led me to believe that the Tower wouldn’t care too much if you simply disappeared—you took up ‘a lot more bandwidth’—his words of choice—than justified.”

“Ass,” Holly muttered, unsurprised . . . but hurt all the same. She’d thought she’d loved David once, enough to excuse his overweening ego and obsession with wealth and status. It was only after their relationship went down in flames that she’d realized the entire thing had been built on her desperate desire to be “normal.”

She hadn’t loved David; she’d loved the idea of him: normal, mortal, human.

So no, theirs hadn’t been a grand romance, but to talk of her as disposable? What kind of person did that?

“I thought the same,” Walter murmured. “I’m afraid your abnormally small fangs did lend weight to his words.”

“You, of course,” Venom said, “didn’t rely only on the words of a weak and faithless man.”

“No, indeed,” Walter said as Holly caught the sharp edge of disgust in Venom’s frigid statement. “I spoke to those who haunt the shadows where Holly works, and all were of the opinion that she wasn’t a vampire Made by choice.” Anger lit his expression as he returned his attention to Holly. “People said the circumstances of your Making had caused you to be angry and difficult to control, especially as those circumstances put you outside the Contract structure. You were an annoyance to the Tower.”

If only this man knew how much she’d give to be on a standard Contract.

Venom’s phone vibrated at that instant. Walter Battersby went motionless.

Taking out the phone, Venom scanned the message, then slid it back into an inner pocket of his suit jacket.

“So.” Walter put down his glass. “Are my years of life over?”

“It appears you are to have a stay of execution.” Finishing off the glass of blood Walter had given him, Venom rose to his feet and held out a hand for Holly.

She took it because . . . because, after hearing what David had said about her, she needed not to feel like a monster, and Venom did that for her. Warm and strong, his fingers closed over her palm.

“However,” he continued without glancing at her, “you now work for the Tower in the matter of the bounty on Holly.”

“Of course.” Walter got to his feet and bowed with old-world courtliness. “I will pass on any information that comes to me, though it’s unlikely the client will contact me now that my part in this is over.”

“It’s a long game, Walter. Play it well.” The warning was clear.

Venom didn’t speak again until they were in the elevator. “You are unique, kitty. The Tower considers you many things, but the one thing you are not is disposable.”

She squeezed his hand hard as her throat thickened. She couldn’t speak, not until they were in the car. And then she didn’t talk on the subject of David and his view of her worth. “You liked Walter Battersby, didn’t you?”

“I’ve always had a soft spot for the hustlers of this world.” He floored the pedal, zooming them out of the tony street and startling the drivers of the gleaming black town cars that prowled this part of the city.

Holly laughed, exhilaration in her blood.

Grinning, Venom threw his sunglasses into her lap . . . without slowing. His speed was deathly fast, his reflexes insane. As he displayed when he brought the car to a sudden halt in front of a crosswalk where a homeless man was pushing across his cart. Holly’s seat belt had jerked her safely in place, but her heart thumped a bass beat. “How did you even see him?”

“Do you think I would drive this way if I couldn’t?” He took off as soon as the man was safely past.

Holly screamed and it was a sound of sheer excitement. The roads were quieter at this time of night, but with New York a city loved by night-owl immortals and mortals both, they definitely weren’t empty. Yet Venom made his car flow like liquid around all possible obstacles until she thought that if anyone was watching from above, his car would look like a lightning streak against the black of the tarmac.

They’d just hit a stretch of road that was miraculously empty when Venom came to a total stop. She went to ask him why . . . and glimpsed vivid flame red out of the corner of her eye. Dmitri’s Ferrari, a low-slung crouching tiger of a car, sat on the other side of the passenger window. Dmitri’s hair was windblown and he was laughing, a grinning Honor waving to Holly from the passenger seat. Holly waved back, astonished at this side of Dmitri.

He looked . . . young.

Without warning, Venom gunned the engine and they were off, Dmitri streaking along beside them. Holly whooped as the two vehicles built for speed powered down the straight at insane speed. The waters of the East River rushed up at them.

Venom swung left and onto the road that paralleled the water.

There was more traffic here, but that didn’t stop either Venom or Dmitri. They wove through the traffic as if it didn’t exist. She glimpsed a flash of hot red in her peripheral vision before Venom pulled ahead and the other vehicle disappeared. “You’re winning!”

“Dmitri’s fast, but he’s not a viper.” Grin wild, and his own hair flying back in the breeze after he lowered his window, he pointed up without losing control of the vehicle. “Look right and up.”

That was when she saw there was a third player in the game. Wings of brilliant blue edged with silver raced over the water alongside them, Illium’s speed in the air a thing of beauty. “How can he keep up?”

“He’s the fastest angel in the city, probably one of the fastest in the world.” Venom swung past a lumbering people mover, slid in front of a sedan, then moved back into the other lane so quickly that she wasn’t sure the other drivers had even seen him.

Dmitri’s red Ferrari appeared behind them a second later. The leader of the Seven went to overtake, but Venom blocked his every move. Illium, meanwhile, kept pace as the two vehicles screeched into another turn that threatened to spin the Bugatti.

But the torque forces didn’t win against Venom’s handling and they rocketed away. All the way back home, where he brought his vehicle to a stop in front of the Tower itself. Dmitri pulled up two heartbeats later, looking over through the open window of his car. His grin was as untamed as Venom’s, and when Illium landed in between the two cars, he completed the trifecta of beautiful, dangerous men.

Venom’s fingers touched the back of Holly’s neck, his arm stretched out and braced on the back of her seat as he leaned across to speak to the others. A sudden, sharp sexual awareness rippled through her body, the tiny hairs on her arms rising. She thought she’d caught it in time, but Venom’s hand curled around her nape.

He rubbed his fingers gently over her hypersensitive skin.

She couldn’t look at him, her heart beating so hard in her chest that she could barely hear the conversation the others were having. She heard Illium laugh, saw Honor’s hand on Dmitri’s cheek as she turned his face toward hers for a kiss, watched Illium and Venom bump fists. And felt Venom’s fingers brushing her skin in a slow, rhythmic motion that went straight to her core.

“. . . tomorrow.”

She caught the last word before Dmitri pulled away to drive his vehicle around and down into the Tower garage. Illium lifted off a second later in a wash of wind that blew her hair back from her face.

“Kitty.” It was a liquid enticement. “It’s the adrenaline. Your blood is pumping.”

Forcing herself to look at him, Holly sucked in a breath. His eyes glittered with the same atavistic sexual heat that burned in her. “Why not?” she whispered. “Have you ever been with a woman even a little like you?”

“You are a kitten,” he said, but he didn’t take his hand from the back of her neck. “I don’t fuck babies.”

“And I don’t fuck anyone anymore.” She stared into those wild eyes without fear. “I’m too scared I’ll kill mortals and I’m terrified I’ll plunge vampires into horrific pain.” All it would take was a single brush from her fangs.

“You’re safe,” she said, twisting in her seat and moving with instinctive speed to fist a hand in his hair. “You want me.” He was doing nothing to hide his reaction.

“You’ll regret it in the morning.” He tugged her hand out of his hair, his grip on her nape tightening as he hauled her halfway across the center console. “I don’t do relationships, either. You’re a relationship type of kitten.”

Holly wanted to spit back a sarcastic comeback, but he’d muzzled her with the truth. Despite the horrific madness growing bigger and bigger inside her, she still craved a normal life. She was the girl who’d grown up planning her wedding, the girl who’d played house with her dolls. Uram had altered the path of her life, but he hadn’t changed the fundamental heart of her.

“That,” she said, running her finger over his lips, “doesn’t mean I want to build a relationship with you.” Venom was too dangerous for her peace of mind; he saw too deep, understood her in ways she didn’t understand herself. “I just want to scratch a bad physical itch.”

“That, I can do.” Dropping her back into her seat, he swung the vehicle around and raced away from the Tower. She didn’t ask him where they were going—it was clearly not to a bed where she could satisfy the craving low in her body, tumescent and hot and ready.

He brought the car to a halt near Central Park just as she’d finished taking off her hoodie in a vain effort to cool down. Getting out, he removed his suit jacket and threw it inside, then unbuttoned his shirt sleeves and rolled them up. After which he removed his shoes and socks and put them in the car.

Then he leaned close to her and whispered, “Run, kitty.”

Holly’s blood rushed to the surface of her skin. She was moving before she’d consciously decided to do so, the most primal part of her taking over. He’d give her a head start, she knew that. It’d make the chase more interesting.

She ran into the park with all of her preternatural speed, and she did things she hadn’t believed herself capable of until that instant—flowing up trees and down others to confuse her trail, moving through the darkness as if it was her world. When she saw the glittering windows of the buildings that overlooked the park, she bared her teeth and wondered if the people within had any idea of the lethal predators that prowled below.

At last she went motionless and quiet, curling up as immobile as the snake that lived in Venom’s eyes.

He found her, but she’d expected that. Having positioned herself up in a tree, she jumped onto his back, taking him to the ground and pumping her venom into his shoulder through his shirt. She was gone before he could flip over, but she was close enough to hear him laugh. An inhuman response.

But neither one of them was exactly normal.

Surrendering to the otherness inside her, she ran as if the trees weren’t there, moving around and through the trunks in ways that weren’t possible with human anatomy. The serrated wings inside her, they shoved and shoved at her skin, the pain constant. She couldn’t fly like the otherness wanted, but she could run, and running . . . racing, it pumped her body full of adrenaline once more.

The madness was sated. For now.

Going flat to the ground three minutes later, her body stretched out on the dark grass, she went motionless again . . . and Venom passed right by her. Her lips curved, a deep happiness in her gut that she couldn’t explain. She waited unmoving for at least ten minutes, not the least uncomfortable, before flowing up and back in the opposite direction.

They played in the night-dark park as if it was a playground. Whenever Holly happened near groups of vampires who were also using the park—or the odd, brave human—she veered away. This was a private game. She’d been running full tilt for at least five minutes when Venom appeared out of nowhere in front of her.

She had no chance of stopping.

Arms coming around her, he took her to the ground in a single move.