Archangel's Viper

12

Holly had to consciously will herself away from the room on the second floor.

The third floor was heavily graffitied and littered with spent bottles of liquor and more syringes, as well as—randomly—several bottles of milk that had gone off. But it was devoid of life—or bodies. “They lived like pigs,” Holly said, walking around a pair of underpants crumpled on the floor. “Even my homeless friends live more tidily than this.”

“Some vampires find life outside a Contract challenging,” Venom said. “They’re indoctrinated to follow orders by their angels—having to make their own decisions leaves them floundering.”

Holly was startled. “You feel sorry for them?”

“No,” he said flatly. “I have no sympathy for those who’d rather be in gilded cages than scrabbling to make a living in freedom.”

“There are some who can’t,” Holly said softly, thinking of Zeph and his pockmarked face. “They’re too broken by what was done to them.”

Venom’s eyes remained unforgiving. “Unless it was a forced Making, those vampires chose to enter into a Contract in exchange for near-immortality. Choices have consequences.”

Much as Holly pitied the broken vampire, she couldn’t argue with the truth of Venom’s words. That truth was the same reason Guild Hunters could, without guilt, do their jobs in retrieving vamps fleeing their Contracts. Because every mortal in the world had witnessed over and over how cruel immortals could be. Any choice made to enter into that world as an adult with full use of your faculties was made with eyes wide open.

“At least with a proper Contract,” she muttered, “there’s an end date. My sentence is open-ended.”

“Life is what you make it, kitty.” Venom ran his fingers through and over the long tail of her hair. “Prove yourself to Dmitri and Raphael and you’ll never have to worry about your freedom.”

Holly twisted her lips as she moved away from his touch. “You really think Raphael will allow a threat to live and thrive in his territory?”

Fangs flashing as he smiled. “Do you really believe Dmitri isn’t a threat?”

“He wasn’t tainted by Uram.”

“I was Made by Neha.”

When Holly just looked at him blankly, he said, “I forget, you aren’t aware of the political currents in the archangelic world. Let’s just say that Neha and Raphael are no longer friends as they once were. If she could, Neha would separate Raphael’s head from his body and laugh while doing it.”

Yet Venom, who bore Neha’s imprint in a way no one could miss, walked by Raphael’s side.

“Come,” Venom said before she could respond, “we have business to attend to.”

Holly had to enter that room that reeked of old blood and other ugly things, had to see what lay within, but she had one more question to ask. “I know Raphael’s too powerful to worry about you being a threat to him personally, but Dmitri and the others . . . Don’t they worry that you might have a lingering loyalty to Neha?”

“You call me a viper. Some believe I am one, a snake in the nest.” Venom’s voice became flat, his eyes cold. “But Dmitri and the others in the Seven? Janvier? Trace? No. The bonds between us—and with Raphael—were forged long ago and made unbreakable by countless acts of trust and fidelity.”

“I call you a viper because of your eyes and your general snakeyness, not because I think you’re some kind of a great betrayer,” Holly said with a scowl. “Stop calling me kitty and Hollyberry and I’ll stop calling you Viper Face and Poison.”

His chuckle sent ripples down her spine, made her breath catch in a way that shocked. “But, kitty,” he said, the ice no longer in evidence, “I don’t think that’s a bargain I want to make.”

Fascinated by how his eyes sparkled when he laughed, Holly had to grit her teeth to control her inexplicable reaction. A purely sexual response, she would’ve understood: Venom was darkly handsome and had a body even she couldn’t deny was the stuff of female fantasies. But wanting to see him laugh, feeling that laugh wrap around her like a full-body kiss? It was just weird.

With a stern reminder to herself that he’d kill her should she show the least indication of being a danger to the Tower, she headed down the stairs to the second floor, and, shoulders squared, turned to the room of old blood that drew her so strongly. Venom didn’t stop her, but his prowling presence was suddenly very close. And she thought—He’ll catch me if I fall.

God, she really was losing it.

Then there she was, in the doorway. At first, she had trouble figuring out what she was seeing in the darkness created by the drawn curtains, the only illumination coming from the hallway light at her back . . . and the small light over the pool table.

The horror burned into her brain in Polaroid flashes.

An arm, attached to nothing, bloody tendons trailing from it.

Three heads lined up neatly on the pool table.

A being without a head or legs propped up on its bloody torso by the fireplace, as if just waiting to lean forward and welcome them.

Two left hands lying side by side on the dirty carpet.

“Where are the rest of the pieces?” she said through the buzzing in her skull that wiped out all else.

“Look right.”

She did, saw the pile in the shadows. Torsos. Arms. Legs. All piled up neatly, as if someone hadn’t wanted to make a mess.

Venom spoke, his voice soft. “This is your nightmare, isn’t it, Hollyberry?”

“Yes.”

Which was why she stepped inside the room of horrors and, swallowing her gorge, walked carefully to that pile. There were no hiding places in this room furnished only with old chairs and armchairs and that spotlit pool table turned into a macabre display, but she’d seen too much horror to lower her guard.

She knew some monsters could walk right up to you and you’d never see them. Uram had been in full glamour when he’d taken Holly and her friends.

They hadn’t stood a chance.

The only reason she didn’t watch her back was that Venom was there. He’d execute her should she lose her mind to the vicious thing that lived in her, but until then, he’d protect her the same as he would any other partner.

The closer she got to the pile of body parts, the more real it became and the more her mind wanted to scream.

Bones poked out, shattered and gleaming white.

A rope of intestines was looped neatly around a torso.

Two right hands lay palm to palm, their fingers interwoven.

“You sure Uram hasn’t come back to life?” The question came out near soundless.

“One of these heads,” Venom said from where he stood by the pool table, “matches the ID photo Vivek was able to locate of the bounty hunter who sent that very well-doctored image of you. The other two match photos of known members of his crew.”

Deciding she’d faced her fear long enough, Holly stepped back from the pile of meat that had once been living beings and turned to Venom. “Cocaine, drug-dealer-type cash lying around, used syringes everywhere—it looks like the three weren’t exactly upstanding citizens. All kinds of things could’ve come back to bite them on the ass.” There was no way to know if this massacre was connected to the bounty on Holly’s head. “A psychotic vamp, or even a hopped-up human junkie, could’ve done this if the three were blazed out of their minds on honey feeds.”

“Possible. We’ll have a better idea when we track down the others who sent in false reports.” Venom slipped his hands into the pockets of his suit pants. “I suppose I’d better call in a cleanup crew.”

“Tower rule is we have to call the cops unless it’s an issue that requires Tower handling.” Or one that dealt with angelic secrets. “I think general bad guys being chopped up is probably a cop call.”

“I’ll bow to your greater knowledge on the topic,” Venom said with no sign of mockery.

It was as Holly was pulling out her phone to make the call that a faint gasp whispered into the air. Venom’s eyes nictitated, his head jerking toward that pile of cold body parts. Holly’s hearing wasn’t sharp enough to have pinpointed the origin of the sound, but there was literally nowhere else in the entire room where someone—or something—could hide.

“Jesus.” Sliding away her phone, she moved to the pile with Venom.

She had a very dangerous knife hidden down the side of her boot, the weapon one in which she’d had extensive training. Working in the shadows required that she learn to handle weapons, but she had difficulties with guns; they just didn’t feel right in her hands. And, given her speed, a knife worked as well—even better when it came to situations that required silence.

But today, she decided not to reach for the blade. “Keep watch,” she said to Venom.

He was stronger, could react faster to the possible threat.

Then, though her stomach twisted and churned, bile burning the back of her throat, she forced herself to move the body parts to one side, trying to think of the pieces not as butchered people but as inanimate objects. It was hard when the skin was sickeningly pliable under her fingers and when the smell of putrefying blood and other, nastier—

“No, no.” Horror chilling her skin, she knelt in front of the thin naked woman covered in blood who was cringing into the wall. Knees and arms tucked into her chest and her eyes stark, she breathed in short, shallow gasps.

It was a wonder she could breathe at all—her throat had been slit.

Vampire.

Holly slammed her hand over the woman’s wound. “Venom. Feed her.” She’d do it herself but her blood was tainted, could well do more harm than good.

“Tilt up her head and hold her mouth open,” Venom ordered. “I don’t want to have to tear her off if she starts to gorge. I could kill her.”

Heart pounding like a racehorse’s, Holly used her free hand to squeeze the woman’s jaw until her mouth fell open to reveal fangs not much bigger than Holly’s, managed to tilt back her head. Blood dripped into the brown-haired vampire’s mouth, Venom having cut himself using a pocketknife she’d somehow never expected him to be carrying.

He’d tipped his wrist over the woman’s mouth.

When—because the woman’s fangs weren’t buried in his skin—the wound began to heal, he reopened it.

The skinny woman with pale white skin didn’t react for at least five seconds—a near-impossible period for a starving vampire being given an infusion of powerful blood, and then she jerked so hard toward Venom that had Holly not been holding her, she’d have clamped on to his wrist. Venom pulled away his wrist at the same time, cutting off the flow of blood and making the vampire whimper piteously.

“Venom.”

“She can’t handle any more. I’m not a baby vampire, kitty—my blood’s old. And if I were you, I’d watch my throat.”

Holly jerked back just in time.

The woman had lurched up surprisingly fast to end up on her hands and knees on the worn carpet. Limp and dirty hair hanging around the sides of her face, her eyes rimmed with red, she hissed at Holly. And Holly traveled back in time. She’d been too scared to hiss at Elena when the hunter had found her, but she’d been as broken. “We’re here to help you,” she said gently.

The woman screeched and clawed out at Holly, moving with scrabbling speed across the carpet on all fours. Holly scrambled back, unwilling to hurt a traumatized victim.

The vampire crumpled onto the carpet like a doll with her strings cut.

Holly glared up at Venom. “What did you do that for?” He’d taken the brunette down with a simple hit to the back of the neck.

“I really don’t have time for you to play chase with a feral vampire,” he said lightly. “And this is no longer cop business.”

“Why?” She went to check that the vampire was alive, found a jerky pulse. “She looks like a junkie. Probably freaked out after witnessing the massacre.”

“Vampires don’t hold drugs that long inside themselves,” Venom reminded her. “She had to be under that pile of body parts long enough for the parts to go cold and the blood to coagulate on the floor. And I fed her my blood—that should’ve shocked her back to full consciousness. She was acting . . . Not like a vampire in bloodlust, but close.”

Holly shook her head. “She was acting terrified and psychotic.” Driven by the primal impulse to survive. “That’s how you act when you’ve been abused, then nearly murdered.”

Venom put away his phone after making a call to the Tower. “She is not you.” It was an oddly gentle comment.

“Maybe she is.” Holly brushed the woman’s dirty brown hair back from her face after turning her onto her back. “She’s really thin.” Thinner than the haunting vampiric slenderness flaunted by the older vampires who’d been so refined by their vampirism that they were ethereal in their beauty.

“Why doesn’t Dmitri look like the old vamps? The ones who are all preternatural slenderness and translucent skin?” she asked, the thought one she’d never before contemplated. “He’s all hard edges even after a thousand years.”

“He’s a warrior and he’s stayed a warrior through time,” Venom said, coming to crouch by the woman. “Vampirism shapes us as we choose it to shape us. For Dmitri, that’s meant his muscles are stronger, more difficult to injure.”

The woman coughed, her eyelids beginning to flutter.

Venom’s blood.

She wouldn’t have recovered this quickly otherwise. But she wasn’t quite there yet, and since she might go feral again when she woke fully, Holly took this opportunity to scan the rest of her. “Bruises,” she said, pointing out the ones visible even through the rust red of dried blood. “Probably from being thrown at the wall.” There was a noticeable dent in the wall against which the vampire had been cringing.

“Whoever killed the other three likely slit her throat and threw her at the wall and thought the job was done,” Venom murmured. “She’s young enough that she should have died—but the throat slit must’ve been just careless enough to give her a shot at survival.”

He angled the woman’s head slightly to the side to look at the wound. “It appears the killer didn’t cut through her spinal cord. And she would’ve had blood dripping onto her face from the body parts for a period. Some would’ve gone into her mouth.”

Sometimes, the worst times, Holly wondered if she had blanks in her memory because Uram had made her feed on the blood of her dead friends. Remembering something like that could drive an already half-crazy survivor all the way insane, so maybe she’d chosen to forget.

“These bruises, however,” Venom said before the horror could dig into her brain, “they were made by a hand gripping hard and the color makes it clear they’re older.” He was pointing to marks on the woman’s thigh.

“She must be really young if she’s healing this slowly.”

“It isn’t always a matter of age. Some vampires of ten thousand will always be weak. Others will be powers at two hundred.”

Holly nodded. At around two and a half centuries of age, Janvier was a walking example of the latter. “It looks like her leg was broken recently, too.” There was a jagged scar on her right shin, as if bone had poked through.

Rising, Venom circled the thin brunette. “The bottoms of her feet are burned. Scarred.” His voice was cold. “That’s torture.”

The woman’s watery blue eyes, eyes ringed in pulsing blood red, flicked open. And this time, they focused on Venom. Her fear was a vicious curling up of her body, a tiny creature cringing in dread. “Please.” A rasped whisper. “No more.”

Sliding on his sunglasses, Venom hunkered down beside the fallen woman. Then, to Holly’s surprise, the most well-dressed vampire she knew slipped his arm behind the filthy woman’s back and helped her up into a seated position with gentle care. The woman shivered violently, her bones rattling. Taking off his jacket—which probably cost thousands—Venom put it around her shoulders.

The brunette clutched the lapels closed over her naked breasts, shooting Holly looks so hopeful that it was all she could do not to cry. Holly thought of what her mother would do if she found someone like this, and reached out to brush the woman’s matted and dirty hair off her face.

Sobbing, the vampire fell into Holly’s arms. And said, “I thought you were dead. I’m so sorry. I thought you were dead.”

The words made no sense . . . and they sent a chill up Holly’s spine.

“Holly.”

She glanced at Venom, startled at his use of her actual name.

He spoke quietly. “Watch her fangs. There’s something not normal about her.”