Archangel's Viper

Holly stuck out her tongue at her phone before she hung up. A little boy wearing a tiny blue and yellow backpack saw her, stuck out his own tongue with a giggle. Holly winked. Looking over his shoulder, he waved at her.

She waved back.

That sweet kid, he didn’t know that she was the creation of a murderous psychopath, that she had horrific urges inside her that caused her to break out in a cold sweat. He saw only a small-boned Chinese American woman in skinny black jeans decorated with appliquéd black roses on the left calf and thigh, her top a floaty orange silk, and her ankle boots a shining black with small gold buckles.

That ordinary woman’s rainbow-streaked black hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail, her face framed by blunt black bangs, and her nails painted in a wild mix of colors.

The only thing that made her stand out in a city overrun with the stylistically adventurous was the acid green that had taken over the light brown of her irises. The shade had been darker before, nearer to the vivid green of the archangel who’d used her as a human toy, but the acidic lightness had come in firmly over the past year and settled.

When strangers spotted Holly’s eyes, they automatically assumed she was wearing contacts. It fit their impression of a woman who looked as if she’d been dropped in a vat of color.

Maybe a touch quirky or peculiar, but human. Normal.

Holly ached to be that normal human woman every single day. But in the four years since she’d been stripped naked and forced to watch her friends be dismembered alive, her throat torn and raw from her screams, she’d gotten over the first four stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression.

Acceptance . . . well, that was going to take a hell of a lot more time, she thought as she slid into the Tower vehicle she’d been assigned. When Janvier had first told her she’d get a vehicle as part of her job as his and Ash’s apprentice, she’d glumly expected a sedate sedan, but she should’ve remembered the kind of people who worked for the Archangel Raphael.

None were the sedan type.

Holly’s car was a sleek black thing that looked like an arrow in flight. It wasn’t new by any stretch of the imagination and had more than a few dents and scratches—all the better to fit the environs she prowled in the shadowy corners of the city. The tires were good, but not so good anyone would bother to steal them, and the radio only got about five stations.

Holly loved her ride with the passion of a thousand suns.

Inside this car, she could be free, could fly.

No leash. No blood that craved the monstrous. No flashfire memories of a rust red hand stroking her hair as he told her to “Drink, girl,” in a gentle voice that belied the carnage in which she knelt broken and beaten.

Today, she raced in and out of traffic with bare inches to spare as she made her way to the airfield that handled the Tower’s private fleet. It wasn’t the safest way to drive, but Holly was very careful not to put anyone else in danger. Only herself.

Yes, she needed therapy.

But Holly wasn’t suicidal. Not any longer. Her head was plenty messed up, but never would she hurt her family by making that irrevocable choice. Her mom and dad, Mia, her younger brothers, had suffered more than enough in the immediate days and weeks after the slaughter, and in her months of confused, angry, scared silence.

It was Janvier who’d made her understand what she was throwing away.

“I will miss my sisters my entire vampiric existence,” he’d said to her as they sat on the grass after a sparring session that had left Holly’s body a screaming ache. “I have a big family that loves me so, but to grow up with another, ah, ’tite Holly, that is a different bond.” A sheen in eyes the shade of bayou moss that her deadly boss made no effort to hide. “Amelie and Jöelle . . . they live here.” His fist on his heart. “Always they will stay safe within.”

His gaze had gone to his wife, who was practicing a martial arts kata with cool hunter dedication. “And my dangerous cher, my Ashblade, she yet grieves for her brother and sister.” As he’d risen to go tease Ash into a kiss, the Guild Hunter’s fingers sinking into the chestnut brown of his hair, the copper strands within it glinting in the sunlight, Holly had felt understanding kick her. Hard.

Mia would be gone forever one day.

Alvin and Wesley would be gone.

Her parents would be gone.

She would never get back that time.

Holly had caught the subway home an hour later—to be greeted with tears and hugs and her favorite meal—followed by a grilling so intense it had threatened to set her hair on fire.

It was a memory she hoarded against the unknown future.

Zipping into a parking spot outside the airfield building located at the end of a long and deserted private road, she got out and showed her Tower ID to the guard. He gave her the hard eye regardless and pressed his finger to the receiver in his ear after muttering her name into the microphone on his collar.

Whatever he heard back had him nodding. “You’re cleared.” A faint curve to his lips. “Nice outfit. I didn’t know the Tower let five-year-olds drive.”

Eyes narrowed, Holly pulled out her best sincere tone. “Did you get your suit at Slick Vampires Are Us? Asking for a friend.”

Smile wiped off, the vampire just looked at her, unblinking. Holly stared back, not about to be intimidated, even if he was at least five hundred years old according to the internal chronometer she’d developed over the past year.

A tingle ran behind her eyes.

Shit.

Though backing down was against her personal religion, Holly lowered her eyelids and took a deep breath. When she lifted them back up, the vampire was smirking. Gritting her teeth and refraining from pointing out that she’d been a second away from mesmerizing him into clucking like a chicken, she carried on inside. It was a relatively small area with a glass wall that looked out onto the airfield.

Air traffic control was high above in their own little aerie.

That had always struck Holly as funny: angels flew wherever they wished, but if they traveled in an airplane, they needed to obey the rules of airspace. Not that the man she was here to pick up had wings. Venom was a vampire. One of the Seven, Raphael’s private guard. That, unfortunately, also meant he was far, far stronger than he should’ve been for his three hundred and fifty or so years of age.

All of the Seven were violent powers.

“Tower Airways Flight Three on final approach.”

Holly looked up at the speaker system with a startled grin. “Very funny, Trace,” she said, having recognized the voice at once.

Male laughter came through those same speakers. “I thought, my fellow adventurer into the wonders of worlds unseen, you might need a little entertainment,” the vampire said in his warm tenor. “Would you like to come up?”

She caught sight of the plane heading in to land. Her heart began to beat faster. In preparation. Because with her and Venom, it was always a war. “No, but thanks. And since when are you an air traffic controller?”

“I’m keeping Andreja company.”

Trace signed off with a line of poetry that made her heart soar.

Her and Trace’s friendship was based in words, in the poetry in which they found wonder and comfort.

Then there was the man about to get out of the plane that had come to a smooth stop on the tarmac. He’d been part of her life almost since the hellish day when she’d watched helplessly, her body paralyzed by poisoned blood, as an insane archangel tore a screaming Shelley’s arms from her body as if he was pulling the wings off a butterfly, then paused to kiss Holly with his red-rimmed mouth.

“Shh.”

Hands curling at her sides as the hairs on her nape rose, she shoved away the past to focus on the man she was here to pick up, a man who’d irritated and angered her from their first meeting.

When the Tower had reassigned him away from New York just over two years earlier, she’d said good riddance. Only to realize that with Venom gone, no one in the city truly saw the part of her that was cold and deadly and eerily inhuman. The immortals who surrounded her were powerful and deadly, but no one else was so strangely other.

Venom was both immune to her capacity to mesmerize prey and the only person who could teach her how to deal with the ability. Which meant she’d had to have his annoying voice in her ear once a week over the time that he’d been away—in a place no one would mention by name to her. He’d been meant to return to work physically with her, but a strange, taut tension had gripped the immortal world in the interim, and Venom had made no visits to New York.