Archangel's Viper

Holly stared and stared, wonder filling her heart to overflowing.

“This is so beautiful.” So much a thing of pure, unadulterated life.

Whispers surrounded her, coming from so many throats that she couldn’t separate one from the other. It was creepy, but this was the Legion after all. Creepy was their normal modus operandi. But then they started landing around her on wings of silence and she thought, Oh shit.

“You are new,” said the Legion being who’d brought her inside. “They have never seen you.”

It was a strange way to put it. Not something like you, but you. “You’ve seen Venom,” she said. “He’s like me.”

“He is a one being, too,” her guide said, as the others continued to whisper . . . without moving their mouths. “Like you but not you. Different.”

Since the Legion was staring full-out at her, Holly decided to stare back. She’d heard it said that when they’d arrived during the climactic battle of the fight between Raphael and Lijuan, they’d all looked exactly the same. Dusty gray hair without color, eyes utterly translucent, no sense of sunlight to their skin, wings as devoid of pigment as their hair.

These beings, however, while as similar as brothers, weren’t identical. Hair colors varied in subtle shades, skin tones were beginning to diverge in minute increments, and their otherwise still-translucent eyes bore rings of pale blue and pale green and pale brown and pale hazel. Only the one she’d first met had a more vivid ring, the color closer to Raphael’s intense blue.

“Why are your eyes so freaky pale?”

“We are becoming, too,” said a hundred voices, maybe more. “You are an echo who is not an echo. You are new.”

Holly was starting to understand why Elena looked as if she wanted to pull out her hair after she’d been talking to the Legion. “What does that even mean?”

But the Legion had gone quiet. A motionless, silent second later, they flew off on their batlike wings to settle all over the inside of the building—or to fly straight up to the roof exit that sat open to the misty rain and portentous clouds of darkest gray.

Only one was left, and it was the one who’d led her inside.

“Tell me what that means?” Holly asked softly. “Please?”

“That you are an echo who is not an echo. You are new.” He flared out his wings and was gone before she could reply.

“You guys are like the worst possible version of some inscrutable guru!” Holly shouted up.

They kept looking at her with that strange and oddly innocent curiosity. “Come back,” a hundred voices said. “We will be new together. After you are not an echo.”

Throwing up her hands, Holly stomped out—to slam into Venom’s chest. He caught her by the upper arms. She broke the hold and scowled, her face reflected back by the lenses of his sunglasses. “Do you know how to speak Legion?”

A slow smile. “Did our friends turn cryptic on you?”

“I asked a question.” She just barely stopped herself from tearing off the sunglasses and stomping on them.

“No one speaks Legion except the Legion,” Venom said, his dark hair glittering with tiny jewel-like drops of rain. “The sire and Elena are still attempting to work out the meaning of something the Legion said to them when the Legion first landed in New York.”

Holly looked over her shoulder, where the plastic flaps disturbed by her passage had already gone still. “Do you think they get off on messing with people’s heads?”

“No.” A pause. “The Legion aren’t anything human or understandable. Try to imagine having an eon of knowledge inside you, of knowing so much that explanations are redundant. I think, in their own minds, they’re being perfectly clear.”

You are an echo who is not an echo.

Holly didn’t want to think about that word: echo. She was scared she knew exactly what it meant. “Are you stalking me?”

“No need. I just followed the blinding glare of your hair.”

“A man who wears the same outfit over and over has no room to criticize my fashion choices.” Never would she tell him that he looked beautifully dangerous in the gray suit and white shirt that had survived the rain unscathed but for the odd droplet here and there.

Protected by the partial overhang above this railingless landing area, he’d soon dry off. Holly had done so inside the warmth of the Legion building.

“Look at this,” Venom said now that the exchange of insults was over. “It’s a faked photo of you.”

She frowned, took his phone. It was a shock to see herself looking so beaten. “I’d never look like that,” she said, ice crackling her words. “Even if they beat me to a pulp.”

“The individuals behind it clearly didn’t research their target.” Venom took the phone back. “This one’s the best manipulated image but there were two others. Vivek was able to track down physical addresses for all the fraudsters—I thought we should pay them a visit, see if any of them got a bite back via a channel we can’t monitor.”

“Let’s go.” Holly felt like kicking some ass.

Not waiting for Venom, she began to make her way down the vine. She heard him laugh, and then he was moving beside her. They landed at the same time, tiny droplets of rain glittering on their skin and clothing. “You don’t climb like me,” she said, curious despite herself. He was fluid like her, but his bones didn’t move in the same way.

“We can compare techniques later.” Striding across to where he’d parked his distinctive Bugatti, he got in, waited for her to take her seat. “I’ve sent you the files on the ones who said they’d caught you. See if you recognize any names. All are vampires.”

Holly took out her phone, brought up the list he’d sent her. She didn’t really expect to see any names she knew, but— “Son of a bitch. That asshole.”

“Which one?” He turned away from the Tower, the world beyond washed in gray.

“Marlin Tucker. Low-level scumbag who deals in information when he can’t deal in honey feeds. Vampire. Hundred and seventy years old.”

“Perhaps your relationship will make him cooperative.”

“We don’t have a relationship. He’s one of Ash’s contacts—she thinks he’s an asshole, too, but he’s an asshole who belongs in the gray and people talk to him.” She went through the other names. “I don’t know anyone else and these addresses aren’t likely to be real if they’re the official ones on their driver’s licenses or whatever.”

“Vivek dug deeper.” A sideways glance out of eyes she couldn’t see. “Nice outfit. Taking fashion advice from Dmitri?”

Holly narrowed her eyes at him. She’d chosen skinny black jeans today, paired them with a three-quarter-sleeved and fitted black shirt that she’d tucked into the jeans; the outfit was completed by boots that laced up to midcalf. Not spike boots. Work boots. “I haven’t seen Dmitri wear daisies anytime lately.” Those daisies decorated her boots.

Venom’s grin was a wicked, wild thing. Real. “Definitely not Sorrow anymore.”

Holly wasn’t so sure. She’d changed her name back to Holly because of the sadness on her family’s faces each time they called her Sorrow, but the girl she’d once been was gone forever . . . and deep in the night, when she was alone and the world was distant and no one could see her vulnerability, Holly mourned for her. For that hopeful, color-drenched girl who’d loved fashion and who’d had a crush on one of her lecturers.

With his sandy blond hair, a smile that creased his cheeks, light blue eyes, and a habit of wearing cardigans over his shirts, he’d made her heart flutter. Shelley and Maxie had dared Holly to make a move on him after they graduated and she’d laughingly taken the bet. Because back then, her life had been like that. A bubble of joy and possibility. A weightless, gossamer thing.

“Do you ever miss who you were?” The words were out of her mouth before she could think about what they might betray.

Venom didn’t ask her what she was talking about. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “Another few decades and it will be four centuries since I was Made.”